Latest news with #Ishiguro
The Age
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears
For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel. He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic. In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work. 'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.' He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series. Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults. Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another. Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.
Sydney Morning Herald
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
For 20 years this novel has reduced the most hardened critics to tears
For more than a decade, Kazuo Ishiguro had a box file in his study marked 'Students Novel'. In it were notes, diagrams and some pages of a story he'd tried to write in 1990, then again in 1995. Each time he'd abandoned the attempt and had written a completely different novel. He knew his students would share a strange destiny that would shorten their lives but also make them feel special. But what would that destiny be? Here was where he got stuck. He'd played around with ideas such as a virus or radioactive poisoning, but it all seemed too melodramatic. In 2001, he returned to his project with fresh ideas. They were inspired partly by new developments in science, and partly by the contact he'd had with a new generation of British writers such as Alex Garland and David Mitchell. While Ishiguro had come of age in an era when literary fiction avoided any whiff of 'popular' genres, the younger writers had no such qualms. They blithely incorporated all sorts of influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror into their work. 'My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me', Ishiguro writes. 'They opened windows for me I'd not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.' He writes this in his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Never Let Me Go, the extraordinary novel that gradually emerged from those early notes. It's the Nobel Prize winner's most-read novel, has sold in millions, is widely studied and has been translated into 50 languages. It's been adapted into a film, two stage plays and a Japanese TV series. Like many fans, I remember vividly my first reading. It starts so quietly, narrated in simple and artless prose by Kathy, a student at Hailsham, a mysterious boarding school in the English countryside with kind teachers and a nostalgic Enid-Blyton feel. We follow the everyday lives of Kathy and her two schoolfriends, Ruth and Tommy, as they grow into young adults. Gradually the purpose of the school is revealed. I won't give it away except to say there's a dark future for these idealistic, hopeful kids and their tender feelings for one another. Talking of tender feelings, this is a novel that reduces the most hardened critics to tears. 'No matter how many times I read it … it breaks my heart all over again,' writes Alix Ohlin in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 'I was nothing less than stunned by it,' David Sexton writes in the New Statesman. He reread it on a day ferry when he was a judge for the 2005 Booker Prize (it nearly won, but the casting vote went to John Banville's The Sea) and was glad he was in a windowless cabin, 'so tearful it made me'.
Tatler Asia
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
5 Asian films making their debut at Cannes Film Festival 2025
'A Pale View of Hills' (Ishikawa Kei) Above A still from 'A Pale View of Hills' (Photo: IMDB) Kei Ishikawa brings to life the first novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro; the film is the third of Ishiguro's books to be adapted for the screen, joining The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go . The story focuses on Japanese widow Etsuko, who is shown as living in England and navigating her experience of loss and war after leaving a shattered post-war Nagasaki. Ishiguro is an executive producer on the film and has publicly praised Ishikawa's poignant screenplay. The piece will premiere in the Un Certain Regard section this week and is set for wider release in the summer, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. 'Homebound' (Neeraj Ghaywan) Above Bollywood actor Ishaan Khatter plays a lead role in 'Homebound' Ten years after his Cannes debut with the award-winning Masaan, filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan is returning to the French film festival. Homebound tells the story of childhood friends who pursue a police job that they believe will provide them with an essential sense of dignity and status. The narrative explores themes of friendship and survival, when the pair's bond is threatened as they inevitably clash due to their own desperation. Martin Scorsese joined the movie as an executive producer and went on to say that Ghaywan had crafted a significant contribution to Indian cinema. The piece will premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. 'Resurrection' (Bi Gan) Above Chinese star Jackson Yee stars in Bi Gan's 'Resurrection' Resurrection marks Gan's first entry into the festival's Official Competition, after his feature Long Day's Journey into Night premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 2018. The film is set in 2068 and follows the life of a woman who becomes trapped in a surreal state, in which she stumbles upon the remains of an android. After developing a connection with the android through storytelling, she must decide whether to return to the real world or stay with her newfound companion. The piece will premiere in the Official Competition and is set for wider release later this year by early 2026. 'The Exit 8' (Genki Kawamura) Above Kazunari Ninomiya in 'The Exit 8' Renowned Japanese filmmaker Genki Kawamura takes a step further into the world of psychological storytelling in his latest venture. The Exit 8 is a live-action adaptation of the 2023 horror game The Exit 8 by Kotake Create; the game features looping corridors and a series of subtle differences. The movie will continue with this story, in which a trapped man will have to navigate through what appears to be an endless tunnel in order to find 'Exit 8', and must return back to the beginning should he spot any anomalies. The surreal piece is highly anticipated by the game's users looking forward to a new take on the game's intense premise. The piece will premiere in the Midnight Screenings section of the Cannes Film Festival and is set for wider release from August 29, 2025.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: The Supple Ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel Stiffen and Seize Up in an Unsatisfying Adaptation
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1982 debut novel 'A Pale View of Hills' is an elegant, slippery examination of lives caught between identities both national and existential: Its tale-within-a-tale of two Japanese women living eerily overlapping lives in post-war Nagasaki, as related to the mixed-race daughter of one of them 30 years later, is rife with deliberate, subtly uncanny inconsistencies that speak of immigrant trauma and disassociation. Such lithe literary conceits turn to heavier twists in Kei Ishikawa's ambitious but ungainly adaptation, which mostly follows the letter of Ishiguro's work, but misses its haunting, haunted spirit. Attractively and accessibly presented, this bilingual Japanese-British production aims squarely for crossover arthouse appeal, and with the Ishiguro imprimatur — the Nobel laureate takes an executive producer credit — should secure broader global distribution than any of Ishikawa's previous work. Viewers unfamiliar with the novel, however, may be left perplexed by key development in this dual-timeline period piece, which strands proceedings somewhere between ghost story and elusive, unreliable memory piece; even those more au fait with the material may well query some of Ishikawa's storytelling choices. On more prosaic fronts, too, the film is patchy, with multiple subplots drifting erratically in and out of view, and an uneven quartet of central performances. More from Variety 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Ishiguro's novel was narrated firsthand by the character who bridges both its timelines. The melancholic Etsuko appears in 1952 Nagasaki as a timid, dutiful housewife (played by 'Our Little Sister' star Suzu Hirose) pregnant with her first child, and 30 years later, in Britain's genteel home counties, as a solitary widow (played by Yoh Yoshida) preparing to move from a house filled with pained memories. In between there has been a second marriage, a second pregnancy, a seismic emigration and more than one bereavement. Our access to Etsuko's inner life is limited, however, as her story is filtered through the perspective of her younger daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko), an aspiring journalist who has grown up entirely in Britain. Visiting her mother in 1982 with the intention of writing a family memoir of sorts, Niki struggles to square her westernized upbringing with a Japanese history and heritage that her mother is loath to talk about. Etsuko's reticence is partly rooted in grief: The elephant in the room between them is the recent suicide of Keiko, Etsuko's Japanese-born elder daughter and Niki's half-sister, who never adjusted, culturally or psychologically, to her new environment after emigrating with her mother and British stepfather. Keiko is never directly seen on screen, though there may be an analog of sorts for her childhood self in the film's 1950s-set section, where the young Etsuko — lonely and brusquely neglected by her workaholic husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita) — befriends single mother Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido, recently seen in FX's 'Shōgun' series) and her sullen, withdrawn pre-teen daughter Mariko. Sachiko is a glamorous, modern-minded social outcast, marginalized both for her rejection of Japanese patriarchy and the scars of her and Mariko's radiation exposure following the 1945 Nagasaki bombings. (The stigma of the latter is such that Etsuko maintains a lie to Jiro that she was not in Nagasaki at the time.) But she's planning her escape, having attached herself to an American soldier willing to sweep her and Mariko back to the States. As the two women bond, the meek Etsuko begins to wonder if this life of traditional domestic servitude is really what she was made for. Though we are never party to her early years of motherhood, nor the transition between her first and second husbands, the mirroring between these unseen, imminent life changes and Sachiko's situation grows ever clearer — as the women themselves even begin to resemble each other in costume and comportment. Is Sachiko merely a model for Etsuko to emulate, a phantom projection of what her future could be, or the older Etsuko's distanced reflection of her past? DP Piotr Niemyjski's heightened depiction of midcentury Nagasaki — sometimes a postcard vision of serene pastels, sometimes luridly bathed in saturated sunset hues — suggests some embellishment of reality, but Ishikawa never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page, building to a reveal that feels overwrought and rug-pulling. Back in Blighty, shot in drabber tones outside a flash of red maple foliage in Etsuko's lovingly maintained Japanese-style garden, the drama is more straightforward, but stilted and inert nonetheless. The script musters scant interest in Niki's career ambitions and romantic complications, and her halting conversations with her mother keep chasing a climactic point of mutual understanding that never arrives — a poignant impasse, perhaps, but a difficult one to structure a film around. There's more interest in the past, and in Hirose and Nikaido's delicate performances as two women living parallel lives in full view of each other. But 'A Pale View of Hills' commendably resists nostalgia, as it brittly sympathizes with immigrant identities unsettled in any place or any era. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
The Advertiser
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Kazuo Ishiguro: 'When you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment'
Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family. A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too. Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed." Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer. "There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go." Remarks have been lightly edited. AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive? ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation. Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on. AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer. ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition. I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer. AP: I think you're well on your way. ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go. AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s. ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes. AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations. ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity. AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation? ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories. My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier. AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time? ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism. Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values. This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us. Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family. A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too. Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed." Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer. "There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go." Remarks have been lightly edited. AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive? ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation. Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on. AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer. ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition. I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer. AP: I think you're well on your way. ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go. AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s. ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes. AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations. ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity. AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation? ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories. My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier. AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time? ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism. Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values. This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us. Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family. A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too. Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed." Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer. "There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go." Remarks have been lightly edited. AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive? ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation. Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on. AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer. ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition. I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer. AP: I think you're well on your way. ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go. AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s. ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes. AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations. ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity. AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation? ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories. My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier. AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time? ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism. Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values. This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us. Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family. A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too. Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed." Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021). Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer. "There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go." Remarks have been lightly edited. AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive? ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation. Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on. AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer. ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition. I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer. AP: I think you're well on your way. ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go. AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s. ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes. AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations. ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity. AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation? ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories. My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier. AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time? ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism. Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values. This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
