Tanjil Rashid

Kazuo Ishiguro: My love affair with film

The Nobel Prize-winner and screenwriter of Living talks about the effect Japanese film had on him

A Nobel laureate who can’t stop fantasising about a life of mediocrity and failure: Kazuo Ishiguro. Credit: Franco Pagetti / VI​I / Redux / eyevine 
issue 05 November 2022

Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’

But as I wait at the offices of a West End PR firm to interview Sir Kazuo about his new film with Bill Nighy, Living, I can’t help but wonder what unlikely preoccupations these are for arguably the nation’s greatest living literary talent. Those of us with humdrum lives may daydream about winning a Nobel Prize. But in Ishiguro we have a Nobel laureate who, perversely, can’t stop fantasising about a life of mediocrity or failure. 

In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1989), it is the English butler Stevens (memorably portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Merchant and Ivory’s film version) who looks back on a life of service only to be nagged, after the second world war, by the feeling that he had all along served the wrong master – a Nazi collaborator. In Ishiguro’s earlier novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986), the ageing painter, Ono, broods on much the same, in post-fascist Japan. These themes now take a new form. Though directed by the South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, Living was very much Ishiguro’s brainchild, a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) that tells the tale of Mr Williams (Bill Nighy), a terminally ill bureaucrat in 1950s London, whose last wish is to make a difference after a lifetime of conformity.

At the start of his career, Ishiguro says, it wasn’t clear if he was going to be a screenwriter or a novelist

As Ishiguro arrives, exactly on time, a small party for film industry types is happening in the lobby.

GIF Image

Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it

TRY 3 MONTHS FOR $5
Our magazine articles are for subscribers only. Start your 3-month trial today for just $5 and subscribe to more than one view

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in