Exclusive: Taika Waititi on Klara and the Sun, His Most Dramatic Movie Yet

“If he wanted me to run through fields like a madman, he’d do it first,” Ortega says of Waititi.Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

When Taika Waititi first read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, after picking it up at an airport, he thought he had a clear vision of how he could easily adapt it into a movie. The premise seems simple enough: In a not-too-distant future, a mother buys a solar-powered robot to be her daughter’s friend. “I thought that this would be maybe the easiest film I’d ever make, because when I first read the book, I was like, I can make this film. It’s going to be easy—nothing happens,” Waititi tells Vanity Fair.

With his signature deadpan humor, Waititi is referencing the book’s beautifully meditative quality. Told from the perspective of an android, Ishiguro’s novel explores loneliness, love, humanity, and spirituality—which, as Waititi soon discovered, made the adaptation endeavor much more challenging than expected. In the end, he says, it was one of the hardest things to adapt. “The more you read the book and the more you’re trying to delve into the relationships, the more you unlock and the more complicated it gets,” he says.

Waititi and cowriter Dahvi Waller were able to weave together an uplifting, warm story starring Jenna Ortega as Klara, the Artificial Friend who is adopted by a woman (Amy Adams) as a companion for her daughter Josie (Mia Tharia). Klara soon becomes focused on getting the sun to help the struggling family.

When the Columbia Pictures project hits theaters on October 23, audiences will get to see a different side of Waititi as a filmmaker and Ortega as an actor. For Waititi, the film has lots of comedic parts while retaining the pensive beauty of the original text. “This one probably may even be my most dramatic film,” Waititi says. “At first, when I was writing, I was like, ‘Make this a Taika film and full of dumb fucking robot humor.’ And that didn’t really work when I was writing it. It took away from the book, and I’m like, ‘Why am I adapting this really amazing book and then trying to break away from it?’”

“Klara and I are different in most ways, but I have a lot of admiration for the way she loves and looks after her people,” Ortega (with Tharia) says. “But we are both incredibly stubborn as well—that’s a strong tether.”

Matt Grace/Sony Pictures Entertainment

Klara and the Sun is set in the near future, which allowed Waititi to create a world that felt both familiar and foreign. The production design and costume design reveal a colorful world that feels ’60- inspired, where some children are genetically engineered for enhanced academic ability and the internet no longer exists for everyday human consumption. “I wanted to do something to subtly suggest that we somehow fucked everything up and they took the internet away from us,” Waititi says. “It’s like this idea that we went way back…and that, to me, is a more interesting version of the future, which I think, possibly, is actually a more realistic version of the future.”

Waititi says that when it was time to cast Klara, he was looking for “someone young and hip and cool.” After he met Ortega, whose star was already on the rise because of her role on the Netflix series Wednesday, he discovered that “she was young and hip and cool and weird. And that sort of appealed to me.”

“She’s incredibly advanced and intelligent and mature and quite intimidating when you talk to her,” he says. “She had sort of made me feel uncomfortable and a little bit out of my depth, and I thought, Oh, that’s a good challenge.”

“She’s just done so much work and she’s super experienced,” Waititi says of Adams (pictured with Ortega). “It’s great to have someone that just calms you down, makes you feel at ease.”

Matt Grace/Sony Pictures Entertainment

Klara stands in stark contrast to the gothy character Ortega plays on Wednesday. “She’s so bright in real life,” Waititi says of the Emmy-nominated actor. “She’s super charming and really fun and funny. I was really keen to see that version of her onscreen.” The android has a sunny outlook and a childlike wonder about the humans around her, with Ortega describing her as being on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Wednesday Addams. “I don’t think it was intentional at the moment,” she says, “but in hindsight, maybe I did want a break from the angsty teen/young adult category I felt a bit stuck in sometimes.”

Ortega and Waititi worked closely together in deciding what an Artificial Friend would look and act like. She spent time studying her nieces and nephews and the way they see the world in order to get into character. “It was really interesting, actually, how free and comfortable they were with being naive and how much kinder they were, or forgiving,” she says. Because Klara is supposed to seem similar to a human, they never wanted her to feel too alien. At one point they debated using visual effects to change her eyes in every shot, but they ultimately decided against that. “It just took us completely out of the film and you just had no connection to her,” the filmmaker says. “You just say someone’s a robot and then they just do their thing.”

Ortega calls Waititi “very spontaneous” and “undeniably himself.” She had never worked with a director who asked for so much improvisation, she says, noting that it was “disorienting at first. But it’s exciting for me to feel kind of refreshed by a new energy on set.”

Though he filmed the movie early in 2024 in his home country of New Zealand, Waititi says he always likes to take time with his edits, and it was in the edit that he found the right tone. It’s a departure from the more quirky humor in What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, and Jojo Rabbit. “Sometimes I think you get caught up in, like, Oh, people want the same tone as this other thing from eight years ago,” he says, “and it’s nice to not have to cater to that so much or cater to your own expectations of what you think you want to do.”

“There were just moments in that book which really hit you and you kind of get this sort of sinking feeling that something’s not right,” Waititi (on set with Ortega) says of the Ishiguro novel.

Matt Grace/Sony Pictures Entertainment

But let’s be clear: Though it’s more dramatic for Waititi, the film and its performances are still imbued with plenty of his charming wit. Amid the humor of any Waititi film is often a personal story about human relationships—this time it’s just told through a nonhuman being. Waititi, who lives “in perpetual fear of something bad happening to my children,” was fascinated by the idea that you could perhaps someday replace your child, if they were gone, with a robot and still feel love. The story feels eerily prescient as AI continues to infiltrate everyday life, with some humans beginning to form emotional bonds with the humanlike programs in their life. “I like questions like: Is love a program? Because if you’ve done enough therapy, they’ll tell you that you can program yourself to believe anything,” Waititi says. “It gives hope to a lot of people, but it’s also weird…. But I don’t have the answer—I don’t have the answer to what is right or wrong.”

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