The planned film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun may have found its director. Deadline reports that Taika Waititi is in talks to direct the movie, citing unnamed sources.
Ishiguro’s novel, published in 2021 by Knopf, follows Klara, an “Artificial Friend” robot in a shop who hopes she’ll be purchased by a customer, despite the fact that she’s an older model. She is eventually bought by a teenage girl who is gravely ill. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.”
Waititi is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand directors. He is known for his films including What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, and Jojo Rabbit, an adaptation of Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies. His next film, Next Goal Wins, is scheduled for release in November.
Dahvi Waller (Mad Men, Mrs. America) wrote the first draft of the Klara and the Sun screenplay. Ishiguro is an executive producer of the film.
Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, has had his novels adapted for the screen before. His 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day, formed the basis for the Oscar-nominated 1993 film directed by James Ivory and starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, while his 2005 book, Never Let Me Go, was adapted into a movie directed by Mark Romanek and featuring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley.
Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, published in 2015, is currently being adapted as an animated film for Netflix by Guillermo del Toro.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
