Taika Waititi Builds ‘Klara and the Sun’ Around Indie Favorites

Taika Waititi is bringing his personal record collection into Klara and the Sun, using an indie-focused soundtrack to help translate Kazuo Ishiguro’s quiet science-fiction novel into a more sensory screen experience. The film stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, a solar-powered artificial friend chosen by an ill teenager named Josie, played by Mia Tharia.

An indie soundtrack with personal history

The music includes Television’s “Days,” Antony and the Johnsons’ “Fistful of Love” and Violent Femmes’ “Good Feeling.” Waititi identified the latter as one of his all-time favorite songs and connected the selection to the bands that accompanied his own life, including Pixies, Pavement and Nirvana.

That approach makes the soundtrack more than a collection of period-friendly cues. The songs bring warmth, abrasion and nostalgia to a story about a machine trying to understand devotion. They also fit Waititi’s familiar balance of comedy and melancholy, a combination that has shaped films including Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

A story about love, technology and grief

Ishiguro’s novel follows Klara as she observes the human world with intense attention, believing the sun has a restorative power. In the adaptation, Ortega’s character becomes both companion and outsider, offering a way to examine how people define care when technology can imitate loyalty and emotional presence.

Waititi and Ishiguro discussed the film around the London Film Festival, where younger viewers responded enthusiastically even as some older critics were less convinced. Ishiguro emphasized that emotions commonly given simple labels are far more complicated in practice. That tension is central to the material: Klara may be artificial, but the people around her are hardly straightforward.

The soundtrack sharpens that contrast. Familiar songs carry memories that a newly created machine cannot possess, while Klara’s perspective asks audiences to reconsider what makes an emotional response authentic. By choosing music tied closely to his own past, Waititi gives the adaptation a human pulse before the story even settles the question of where humanity begins.