Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, as the Nobel Prize committee stated in 2017, “discovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection to the world.” The beloved 68-year-old Japanese-born British writer has earned an international reputation for spiraling, emotional works like “Remains of the Day,” “Never Let Me Go” and “The Buried Giant,” among others.
Ishiguro has also written a few movie scripts, including for directors Guy Maddin and James Ivory. But his screenplay for 2022’s “Living,” an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) set in 1950s London, marks Ishiguro’s purest expression of his talents in the world of cinema. The Nobel committee’s quote about the uncovered chasm could be applied to this story of a secretive bureaucrat (played by an incandescent Bill Nighy) facing his own mortality.
On Tuesday, Ishiguro was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Nighy was also cited in the Best Actor category, the first Oscar nomination of his career.
TheWrap spoke to Ishiguro from his London home base about writing, adaptation, the Oscars and his deep affection for his competitors in the writing category.
He’s won a Nobel Prize and a Booker Prize (in 1989 for “The Remains of the Day”), but how does being an Oscar nominee compare in terms of its excitement?
Well, obviously, it was great to receive the Nobel Prize and the Booker Prize, but that’s my day job. This, the Academy Award nomination, is something different. Getting an Oscar nomination is… well, it’s just ridiculously exciting. It is far beyond anything I have expected. I feel a lot like an amateur compared to other writers.
I’ve always been a movie fan, ever since I was a kid. Movies have always been a passion for me. And my favorite movies stay with me and become part of my emotional landscape. When my life is going a certain way, I remember my favorite movies. They seem to intervene with something.
And people have always encouraged me to write more scripts, but it’s more something I do for fun, like a side project. But this project has gone very well.
As a great movie lover, is there something special about being nominated for an adaptation of a Kurosawa film?
Yes. I relied a lot on Kurosawa’s film “Ikiru”, which I adapted into “Living”. In Kurosawa’s film, which is a masterpiece, the main character is very emotional. He is very un-Japanese in that sense. It is a very emotional performance, often tearful and expressive. It’s a great job by actor Takashi Shimura, but we wanted that part to be played very differently. And we talked to Bill (Nighy) about how one of the main things we wanted from Kurosawa’s film was how that central character would be portrayed. He immediately understood how the film could work with a more subtle kind of acting.
Is that the kind of acting you’re a fan of in movies?
Yes, and there’s a great tradition of this kind of acting, the more internalized acting, from people like Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall. Bill does an English version of what those guys do, which I find particularly appealing. There was a Japanese actor named Chishū Ryū, who appeared in Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”. He was the Japanese master of that kind of acting: very subtle, the emotions always hidden. When that kind of acting works, it’s very powerful. It’s incredibly moving. But it takes a remarkable actor to do it.
Is it exciting for you that Bill Nighy has also been nominated? It’s a beautiful performance, light and inconspicuous.
Absolutely. I’m so happy for Bill. It is an incredible performance that he gives and I am very happy for him that he has been recognized. Bill was involved from the beginning and I wrote the script for him.
Also, the film’s two nominations will encourage more audiences to search for the film.
Yeah, well, I think the Best Actor nomination encourages people to go see a movie. I understand that most normal human beings will go see the Best Actor nominee. Personally, I also sometimes watch a movie because of a screenplay nomination (laughing), but I don’t expect everyone to behave like me.
And I have to say that even though Bill and I ended up with Oscar nominations, a lot of the credit has to go to our director, Oliver Hermanus. He set everything up. And there’s a slight illogic to awards season, as different departments get nominated for different things. And I understand all of that, but I still feel bad that Oliver wasn’t nominated and actually wasn’t considered to be in the running during awards season.
Nighy’s performance here in “Living” has overtones of Anthony Hopkins’ work in “The Remains of the Day,” the 1993 film version of his book. That script was written by Merchant-Ivory’s Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
I think he had already won two Oscars at that point.
It’s true. And that movie was nominated for eight Oscars, though it won none. Were you part of that whole Oscars race back then?
No, I was less involved in it. Merchant-Ivory were at the top of their careers at the time. They were in an incredible run because they had just done Howards End, which had won a few Oscars. There was simply no need for the author of the book to be involved in “The Remains of the Day”, and I was much less well known than they were.
My wife and I had a son under a year old at the time, so I wasn’t about to get out on the road too much. But I became very friendly with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. In fact, the last time I was in New York City, last month, I saw Jim a couple of times.
Really? He’s in his 90s now, right?
He is now 94 years old and still going strong. In fact, he is the oldest Academy Award winner. He won for the script for “Call Me By Your Name” when he was 89 years old. And he just finished a new movie called “A Cooler Climate.” They are images that he filmed in Afghanistan almost 70 years ago, which they edited together and with which they made a new film. Have not seen it yet.
So I was part of the Merchant-Ivory circle, but this is the first time I’ve been this close to an awards campaign. It’s been quite fascinating to watch.
May I ask you about the other films nominated in your category? It’s a very diverse group: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Glass Onion,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” and Women Talking.
I haven’t seen “All Quiet” yet, but I will. I’ve seen the other three and I’m truly honored to be with them. They are very different and I like them all terribly. I met Sarah Polley in New York in November at an event at the Museum of the Moving Image. She is extraordinary and “Mujeres que hablando” is a very interesting film, very different from ours, but very good.
I enjoyed “Glass Onion” a lot, as did “Knives Out”. Anyway, my wife and I are huge Agatha Christie fans, and we love that clever kind of storytelling. And I really admire its construction, in terms of the plot. “Top Gun: Maverick”, well, what can I say, it’s just great. It’s just a wonderful experience at the movies, and that’s why we go to the movies.
I’m surprised Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script for “She Said” hasn’t been nominated. But, I mean, that’s the thing. There are plenty of other good movies that weren’t nominated this year.
But the five that were nominated represent a very wide range, from remakes to sequels to book adaptations. That’s exciting, all in one category.
They are all so different. This is the wonderful thing about cinema. The idea that people have of what is excellent is much more varied than in the world of books, where I come from. There is a certain idea of what good literature is and it can be difficult to expand on it.
Whereas here, the Oscars are the main movie awards, and you can look at this category to see how different these movies are. What they’re trying to do, the ideas that motivate them, the role they play in people’s lives. That is one of the strong points of cinema. It is a very large church.