{"id":637711,"date":"2026-10-22T05:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T05:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637711\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T05:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T05:50:08","slug":"id-consider-replacing-one-of-my-children-taika-waititi-on-robot-kids-his-cheese-o-meter-and-klara-and-the-sun-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637711\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019d consider replacing one of my children\u2019: Taika Waititi on robot kids, his cheese-o-meter and Klara and the Sun | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wings of the London film festival, a group of young influencers are discussing their personal highlights. Klara and the Sun, says one, and her colleagues agree. It\u2019s not just that the film is still so fresh in their memory, or that they have gathered today to meet its creators and stars. Klara is funny and moving; it\u2019s their festival favourite so far. I relay this exchange to Taika Waititi<\/a>, the film\u2019s director, who is sipping bottled water in a room down the hall. His gaze widens. He almost chokes. \u201cThank God!\u201d he exclaims with just a bit too much heat.<\/p>\n

Everybody has a perfect film, just as everybody has a perfect friend, and they vary because everybody is different. In the film, sick 14-year-old Josie loves her discontinued robot doll Klara, whereas most kids her age opt for brighter, shinier models. And the young influencers love Klara and the Sun \u2013 Waititi\u2019s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s acclaimed novel \u2013 while most older critics vehemently, violently disagree<\/a>. All of which shows that there\u2019s no accounting for taste, that people are confounding, and that our hearts and our brains are not always in sync. That keeps life interesting. It\u2019s partly what the film is about. \u201cThe emotions that we give very simple labels to are really complex,\u201d says Ishiguro, who is seated alongside the director. \u201cThe thing we call love, for example, is incredibly noisy and multifaceted. Nobody knows what the hell love is.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markI can’t make a Schindler’s List. That’s not in my wheelhouse<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, I loved Ishiguro\u2019s distinctively spare and poignant source novel<\/a> and am less convinced by Waititi\u2019s screen version, which is certainly noisy. Jenna Ortega stars as Klara, the perky solar-powered AI who plays soulmate to adolescent Josie (Mia Tharia), at a remote country house. She\u2019s a warm splash of sunshine in an otherwise frosty environment, a fish out of water in a tragicomic sci-fi caper. But there is a glitch in the matrix; the component parts don\u2019t align. Waititi adds sugar and caffeine, pratfalls and one-liners. Klara misreads social cues and steers the family car off the road. She fears she\u2019ll be shipped back to the factory and melted down for scrap.<\/p>\n

\u2018In another version of this movie, Klara could be a murder-bot\u2019 \u2026 Mia Tharia as Josie with Ortega as her artificial friend. Photograph: Matt Grace\/Sony Pictures Entertainment<\/p>\n

Perhaps the perfect friend is independent, self-directed. Ishiguro has seen several of his Nobel prize-winning books \u2013 The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills \u2013 adapted for the screen. He feels that the best films break away and that the worst are too faithful. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s not just loyalty but laziness,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t just have the text there in front of you. You need to use your imagination to move it on. A film needs to step forward, out of my book on a journey to being something bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waititi agrees. \u201cWhy would you do a cover of a song with exactly the same instrumentation? You make the film because you love the book. But you at least want to bring some original ideas to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book and the film are so different, it follows that their creators would be too. Ishiguro is sober, soft-spoken and writes delicate dramas about the deep mystery of life. Waititi is voluble, peacockish and makes uproarious films such as Jojo Rabbit, What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople<\/a>. He tends to view the world through a comic lens. \u201cYeah, that\u2019s my instinct. I can\u2019t make a Schindler\u2019s List, that\u2019s not in my wheelhouse. I want to push everything towards comedy and then reel it back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tragicomic sci-fi caper \u2026 Waititi and Ortega shooting the film. Photograph: Matt Grace\/Sony Pictures Entertainment<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a defence mechanism, he admits, part of his cultural DNA. \u201cI\u2019m from New Zealand,\u201d he says. \u201cIn New Zealand, my friends and I always had a very sensitive cheese-o-meter. We thought the Americans loved cheese and saw sentimentality as a good thing. But of course that\u2019s also me being scared of it. Now I think there\u2019s a way of being more emotional and dramatic. Hopefully that\u2019s a sign of me maturing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waititi\u2019s work, though, has always carried a pleasing eddy of sadness. His 2010 feature Boy was a comedy about child abuse, while What We Do in the Shadows reframed the vampire as a lost, lonesome immigrant. Klara and the Sun is a love story but it\u2019s also about isolation: the gap between people; the limits of understanding. \u201cOh, I\u2019m definitely interested in loneliness,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Ishiguro chips in. \u201cYeah, I think you\u2019re right, there\u2019s a crossover between our preoccupations,\u201d he says. \u201cBut this isn\u2019t just everyday loneliness, it\u2019s something more fundamental. It\u2019s about the human experience. There is part of each of us that remains alone. There is stuff that we all have to face alone. Not least death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ishiguro \u2026 surprised to hear that Google Deepmind is a fan of his story. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the other big looming topic of Waititi\u2019s film: death. Klara works as an \u201cartificial friend\u201d while other robots serve as \u201cbereavement dolls\u201d, filling in for lost spouses, siblings and children. That\u2019s a sound business model, the director insists. \u201cAs a father with two kids, I always fear I\u2019ll lose one. The younger me would have thought, \u2018Oh, you can\u2019t replace someone special.\u2019 But the older I get, and the more in love with my kids I get, I think, \u2018Oh, eventually I\u2019d believe it was them.\u2019 The human brain is easily adaptable. A therapist will tell you that you can programme anyone to fall in love. Tell someone you love them 50 times a day and in a few months your brain will give up and believe it. So I\u2019d definitely consider replacing one of my children.\u201d He laughs. \u201cThey don\u2019t even have to be dead. I\u2019d just like a version that\u2019s nice to me and doesn\u2019t ask for money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ishiguro once joked that he essentially writes the same story in a variety of guises. He is drawn to flawed eyewitnesses and a partial view of events; groping narrators who try to make sense of their places in the world. The Remains of the Day\u2019s rigid butler doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s in love, nor that the stately home where he works contains Nazis. Never Let Me Go\u2019s hothoused schoolgirl finds out she is held captive and being used in terrible ways. Ishiguro\u2019s books are unique but each connects to the world, and sometimes in ways he could not have foreseen. Klara and the Sun, for instance, was recently cited as a potential handbook for the development of generative AI. Tom Lue, VP of global affairs at Google Deepmind, suggested it be used as an \u201cethical touchstone\u201d, the centrepiece of a \u201chuman-centred\u201d approach to the future of frontier AI.<\/p>\n

So the book has been co-opted. It has taken on another fresh life of its own. Waititi turns to the author. \u201cIt\u2019s all your fault,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s incredible,\u201d says Ishiguro. It\u2019s the first he\u2019s heard of it. \u201cI know a lot of people within the AI industry are worried about its impact on society. It\u2019s got to the point where they feel the need for a handbrake. So they are surprisingly keen to talk to creative people and road-test various ideas and scenarios.\u201d He frowns. \u201cBut here I do become protective of both the book and the film. Because our story really isn\u2019t about all that. If someone is trying to figure out the ethics of AI and where we should all be going, I\u2019m not sure they\u2019d be well-guided by this story. There are other, better places to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Waititi pipes up. \u201cThe Terminator\u2019s a good one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klara has been built with a sweet, simple purpose: to provide friendship and support. But the human world is hazardous, unstable, which means she has to update her files and adapt her approach. Waititi\u2019s film veers and darkens, riffing off its downbeat source novel, finally closing in towards death. \u201cThere\u2019s another version of this story where Klara would turn into a murder-bot,\u201d he points out.<\/p>\n

Robot dolls fill a need, plug a gap and ideally make life better. But artificial friends, by their nature, are replaceable too. In the press room next door, the influencers are still comparing notes, killing time between interviews. Klara and the Sun is receding; the conversation has already moved on. One says: \u201cYou have to see La Bola Negra. It\u2019s my film of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Klara and the Sun is in cinemas from 22 October in Australia, and 23 October in the UK and US<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wings of the London film festival, a group of young influencers are discussing their personal highlights.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-637711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}