Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has been obsessed for half a century with Ikiru, a classic Japanese film about an aging bureaucrat who after being diagnosed with cancer races to find meaning in what remains of his monotonous life.
The Japanese-born British novelist and movie buff, 68, began to imagine a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s heartbreaking masterpiece, still set in its original 1950s era, but transplanted to London.
“I’m one of these terrible people who come up to filmmakers and say ‘Look, here’s a great idea for a film, please go and make it, and let me know when you’ve done it,’” joked Ishiguro.
But when he pitched the idea of a remake “that married the material of the old Kurosawa movie to a certain study of Englishness and particular kind of English gentleman,” Hollywood producer Stephen Woolley quickly persuaded the author to pen the screenplay himself.
The result is a critically adored drama that has already earned Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards nominations for its star Bill Nighy, and is a frontrunner for the best-adapted screenplay Oscar.
The film plays on the “many parallels between Japanese and English culture,” particularly in the 1950s when both countries were rebuilding from the ruins of World War II, Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, told AFP.
Echoing Kurosawa’s original, Living follows the sudden realization of Nighy’s Mr. Williams character that he has achieved nothing in his decades of robotic, bureaucratic stasis.
Facing his own mortality, and unable to open up to his family, the London civil servant finally decides to help a group of housewives who have begged him for years to help construct a modest playground for their children.