Nobel and Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) relocates the story from Japan to Britain in the 1950s. However, that film’s tale of a civil servant diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to spend his final days doing something good in the world, remains relatively the same. He tells Ian Haydn Smith about the impact the original film had on him, his desire to adapt it and finding the right team to not only channel the spirit of that earlier era, but to create a film that feels as though it had been made back then.
IAN HAYDN SMITH: WHEN DID YOU FIRST SEE AKIRA KUROSAWA’S ORIGINAL FILM?
KAZUO ISHIGURO: I think I was about 10 or 11. I came to this country in 1960 and it was very difficult to see Japanese movies in those days. So, if one was on the TV, usually late at night, I would watch it, regardless of what it was. The only [Japanese] films you could really see were ones by Kurosawa. And even then, it was a very limited repertoire. The ones I saw around that age, which included films like Seven Samurai (1954), had a big impact on me. Ikiru particularly so. Then, when I was a student, it became a very important film for me. I think it presented me with an attitude of how I should live my life – at an age when you’re really trying to figure out these things.
Living (2022)
IHS: WHEN DID YOU BEGIN TO CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY OF ADAPTING IT?
KI: I originally made a few tentative enquiries about a possible stage adaptation. But I have no background in theatre. And then it struck me that that if Bill Nighy was in it, in a version set in Britain, it could be a tribute to the kind of British films that were made in what I personally consider to be the golden years of British cinema – from the late 1930s to late 1940s, before, during and just after World War II. I thought it was possible to take this story and marry it with an exploration of Englishness and the rebuilding of Britain after the war. But to have Bill in it was a very important aspect of the whole thing. This idea of Bill came out of the fact that although he is a really great actor, he has rarely ever been fully centre stage. I also thought he was a lot like the Japanese actor Chishū Ryū, who appeared in so many of Yasujirō Ozu’s films. As much as I like Ikiru, as important as the film is to me, I always had a lingering feeling that although it’s a superb script, superb vision and superb story, the film’s execution isn’t quite right when it comes to the main performance. It shouldn’t have been [Kurosawa regular] Takashi Shimura, great actor though he is. It should have been someone more like Chishū Ryū as he is in the best of Ozu’s films – very stoic, smiling through the pain and being very philosophical. And those qualities made me think of Bill. He’s rather like the English Chishū Ryū.
Living (2022)
IHS: AND IN STEPHEN WOOLLEY YOU HAVE A PRODUCER WHO REFLECTS YOUR FONDNESS FOR THIS ERA OF BRITISH FILMMAKING.
KI: Yes. Stephen is encyclopaedic about this era. He recently made Their Finest (2016), which roughly covers the same period. And a large plank of our
friendship has to do with talking about films from that time – discussing evermore obscure films made in an era, some of which maybe have a tiny sliver of virtue in them. So, our passions were fully in this script. To make it, we felt we needed to find a director who wouldn’t so much create this era in a pastiche kind of way, but certainly not in any style that films are currently being made here. We wanted the visual grammar to be different. So, we thought about someone outside of this culture who could look in on this world. It’s around this time that Stephen encountered [South African director] Oliver Hermanus’ Moffie (2019) at the London Film Festival. We both thought that this guy’s a monster talent. And he’s young, so he’s not going to be so expensive! I asked him to watch two British films: Rome Express (1932) and Death at Broadcasting House (1934). Both featured English people behaving in a very ‘English’ way. He took all those things on board, but like Bill, brought his own vision to it that complemented what I had written. And together, all these elements created this very specific vision of Britain at a particular moment in time.
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