Taika Waititi may be known for blending comedy with emotional storytelling, but the filmmaker was careful not to let his signature humour overshadow the source material when adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun.”
In a new interview with Variety Australia, the Oscar-winning filmmaker discussed the challenges of bringing Ishiguro’s 2021 novel to the screen, particularly its understated storytelling and exploration of love, humanity and artificial intelligence.
The film stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, an artificial friend who attempts to understand human behaviour and relationships while navigating a world that is both unfamiliar and deeply emotional.
Waititi, whose previous films include “Jojo Rabbit,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” and “Thor: Ragnarok,” said the challenge was finding space for his own filmmaking sensibilities without compromising the novel’s more understated qualities.
“The book is not funny. There’s some humorous moments in it, just the way that Klara sort of misinterprets things, or just certain ways she sees the world, which I think as a reader, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s sweet and innocent and funny,'” he explained.
“I wanted to make sure that I brought my own tone that I usually do to my films into this, but I didn’t want to mess too much with the actual sort of overall tone of how the book reads, because it is really beautiful, that book.
“It’s, you know, a slow burn and on the surface, not much happens. It’s just so much bubbling away underneath.”
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Rather than dramatically expanding the story for the screen, Waititi said he wanted to preserve the quieter elements that make Ishiguro’s novel so distinctive. “I wanted to try and retain that stuff and not just sort of launch into like full blown entertainment and spectacle,” he said.
The New Zealand director also acknowledged that the film’s central premise could easily have lent itself to a very different kind of science-fiction story, particularly given Hollywood’s long history of portraying artificial intelligence as a threat.
“It’s easy to do when you’re dealing with a robot in a movie,” he said. “I think in most other people’s hands that, you know, should end up killing the family and going on a rampage. I knew I was never going to be doing that.”
Klara and the Sun hits cinemas across Australia and New Zealand this Thursday, October 22nd.