Throughout his directing career, Taika Waititi has normally managed to find an acting part for himself in each of his films; whether that be playing an imaginary version of Hitler in the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit or a leading role as a 379-year-old vampire in hit comedy What We Do in the Shadows.
But in his latest effort – an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's superb 2021 dystopian novel Klara and the Sun – the New Zealand filmmaker is nowhere to be found in the cast list.
It turns out, however, this wasn't always going to be the case. Speaking exclusively to Radio Times at the London Film Festival ahead of the movie's release this weekend, Waititi revealed that a whole segment had been cut from the film in which he would have played a key role.
"I actually did write – and we shot some scenes – with a very different thing that wasn't in the book, where Klara meets this group of rogue robots who've all been rejected and formed their own society," he said.
"That wasn't in the book, but I ran that by Ish[iguro], and he said he had actually been writing a very similar thing in the book, and his wife had said, ‘Maybe don’t... not sure if that fits in the book.'
"But he had already thought of that, which was kind of cool!"
Later in the interview, Waititi confirmed that he had been one of the robots, essentially leading the pack of misfits.
"It was my little group of robots, and I was like, 'This is the Taika time. This is going to be so good!'" he recalled.
View Green Video on the source websiteBut it looks like his time writing and filming those scenes won't have been entirely wasted.
The filmmaker revealed that he has plans to turn the idea into a new project for television, so we could be seeing robot Taika on the small screen in the not too distant future.
"The silver lining of all this is that we're going to go and turn that into a show about these rogue robots who have formed their own society," he said. "So something good will come from that!"
As in the novel, the film is set in the near future and follows events from the perspective of Klara (Jenna Ortega), an 'Artificial Friend' who is purchased by a young girl to be her companion and confidant.
The novel contains plenty of musings about what it means to be human from the perspective of the robot protagonist, giving readers an outsider’s view of humanity in all its complexity and absurdity.
And Waititi admitted that when he first read the book, he wasn't sure he would have the capacity to adapt it for the screen.
"I was reading the book, and at first I was like... I think maybe this is too smart for me!" he said.
"I don't know what the hell's going on because it was all from Klara's point of view, and I was trying to decipher the way she was describing stuff in her own way.
"And then the more I sort of let myself go and let it wash over me, and sort of just let myself be in her world..." he continued.
"Once she was purchased by the family and brought back to the house things just started to get really interesting for me.
"And I started thinking, 'Wow, I've never thought about making a family drama in this way, exploring the world of disconnected people from the point of view of a machine.'"
Klara and the Sun is released in UK cinemas on Friday 23 October.
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