Jenna Ortega gets honest about AI as latest sci-fi movie nears release

Jenna Ortega believes it is people, not technology, that "make life and living so special."

The 24-year-old actress plays Klara, an artificial friend to a lonely, ailing teenage girl, in Klara and the Sun, the new sci-fi movie based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jenna has stressed that technology cannot replace human feelings.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jenna said, "Artificial intelligence doesn’t feel love; it doesn’t know anything about it. It can be curious. It can try, but at the end of the day, it’s the people that we’re surrounded by that make life and living so special."

Jenna stressed that Klara and the Sun is a human story, despite being a sci-fi movie. "What I love so much about this story, and why I wanted to do this story, is because yes, Klara is an artificial friend and she comes into this very broken, complicated family that really doesn’t communicate enough with one another.”

“But by the end of the story, she allows them to appreciate one another’s flaws, to talk it out,” she added.

Jenna further explained, "In this very isolated, dark, weird, dystopian world, she brings them back to knowing love. And what has been so true in all these different centuries of being human, and at the core of everything, is that it is always about love, and it’s always going to be about love."

The new movie is directed by Taika Waititi, who worked with Ishiguro on the project

Taika, who is married to pop star Rita Ora, explained, "Right from the start, I talked to Ishiguro and said, ‘This is the kind of tone I’m looking for. This is the sort of thing I want to do,’ and he was so supportive. He said, ‘I don’t want you to do a faithful, super loyal adaptation of the book because that’s going to be boring. Every time someone tries to do that with my work, it doesn’t work out.'”

"So he encouraged me to push it more in my direction,” the director of Jenna Ortega starrer, Klara and the Sun said of how the movie came together.