Jenna Ortega hopes that her new film, the dystopian sci-fi “Klara and the Sun,” can remind people to live in the moment in the age of AI and all-consuming technology.
“I think we gotta put our focus on one another and put down the computers and phones,” the star told Variety on the red carpet at the movie’s world premiere at London Film Festival on Thursday night.
Ortega, wearing a stunning yellow lace dress and hair piece, added: “Remember to be present and to appreciate people while they’re standing right in front of you.”
Based on Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling 2021 novel of the same name, “Klara and the Sun” is set in a future where advances in genetic engineering have divided humans into strict social classes. Ortega plays Klara, an artificial android companion who is purchased for an ailing girl named Josie (Mia Tharia). “Klara and the Sun” is directed by “Thor” helmer Taika Waititi and also stars Amy Adams as Josie’s mother, Aran Murphy (son of Cillian Murphy), Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi and more.
Waititi, Adams, Murphy and Lyonne all walked the London Film Festival red carpet on Thursday night, alongside Waititi’s wife Rita Ora, author Ishiguro and a surprise appearance from Florence Pugh, who stunned in a blue floral gown with statement sleeves. Pugh enthusiastically greeted Ortega and Adams before they all posed for photos together alongside producer Rachel Forman.
Standing alongside Ortega, Adams added that everyone she’s spoken to has gotten “something different” out of the film. “That, to me, is a really successful film that communicates something different to each viewer. So I like hearing what people get out of it,” she said.
Ortega clarified that though Klara is an “artificial friend,” she doesn’t work like the AI that we know today.
“AI I guess pulls all this information from the internet and Klara gets all her information from the real world,” she said. “So that’s a little bit different. She’s kind of like a toddler in a sense. Playing her specifically in this film was really interesting because Taika wanted a more human approach, so he didn’t want to do movement that was too robotic, maybe more sort of clumsy and unknowing.”
Waititi echoed Ortega in saying that the film’s message is to “put the phone down.”
“I would just like people to remember what friendship is, connect with people and just be,” he said. “Just be in the moment.”
Ishiguro acknowledged that, since his novel came out in 2021, the world’s awareness and attitude about AI has changed greatly.
“This film doesn’t address a lot of the anxieties that you and I may have right now about where we’re going with the technology. I mean, I think quite rightly, it’s really come center stage,” he said. “I’m aware that this film is coming out into a very different world to the one that my novel came out in five years ago, and I don’t know how that will change people’s expectations or how people look at things. But I’ll say that this isn’t another film about how an AI machine seems to be nice and then becomes sinister and ends up killing all the nice people in the film. It’s not that sort of story.”
Ishiguro is wading more into film, confirming to Variety that he’s working on a new project with Tim Burton, for which he penned an original script. Though Burton and Ishiguro have a mutual friend in “Wednesday” star Ortega, he said she’s not the one who introduced them.
“I thought this was supposed to be a big secret!” Ishiguro said. “No, Jenna didn’t introduce us. Tim lives quite near where I live in North London, and I was dropping in on him in his very strange and wacky and beautiful house. I mean, it looks like a Tim Burton set. And we started to talk about a project and I wrote a script on spec. We decided to just do it privately between the two of us, and then take it to people.”
He added that it’s not a “war film,” saying: “Genre-wise, it’s very hard to pigeonhole. It’s a Tim Burton film!”
“Klara and the Sun” is set to hit theaters via Sony Pictures on Oct. 23.