Latest news with #KazuoIshiguro
NHK
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- NHK
Kazuo Ishiguro: Recalling the past, reshaping the future
Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro attended the Cannes Film Festival in May for the premiere of the film adaptation of his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills. After the screening, the British author spoke with NHK about the fragility of memory and the power of art to build connections. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family when he was 5. Two decades later, when he wrote his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, it was his fading memories of Nagasaki that served as the inspiration. The book is loosely based not just on his own recollections, but also the experiences of his mother, Shizuko, who was in Nagasaki when the US detonated an atomic bomb over the city in 1945. It tells the story of Etsuko, who survived the bombing and later moved to England. At the bidding of one of her daughters, she confronts the painful memories of her time in postwar Nagasaki. Japanese actor Hirose Suzu played Etsuko. At the Cannes screening, which he attended with Japanese director Ishikawa Kei and members of the cast, Ishiguro joked that the movie "is based on a book I wrote when was 25 years old. It's a very bad book. First book I ever wrote. But there is a long history in cinema of bad books making wonderful movies." Kazuo Ishiguro, right, with director Ishikawa Kei and cast members The following comments, taken from a conversation with Ishiguro, have been edited for brevity and clarity. Kazuo Ishiguro The novel is now 45 years old and it was also my very first novel. At that stage, I didn't know how to write a novel. At one level, I think of it as a slight embarrassment now. So you mustn't look at this as the work of a distinguished, experienced novelist. This is a novel by a 25-year-old person. But perhaps for this reason it has a special relationship to me, but the other reason I think is that it was the book I wrote to try and preserve my feelings and memories of Nagasaki. Mother city Kazuo Ishiguro with his family In 2017, when judges awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, they commended his writing for uncovering "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." This fragile connection, which the author typically explores through themes of memory and forgetting, lies at the heart of his first book. As I got into my mid-20s, these memories were fading. And I thought if I created that world in a novel, they would be safe. I didn't use any of (my mother's) stories directly in the novel. But she had said to me not long before I started to write this book that she thought it was important that she passed on her direct personal memories of those years to me because I was of a younger generation, but also because I was starting to write stories. I wrote down all her memories in short stories and that was quite an important point in my writing life. But then I made a decision that I would not use any of her personal memories in my novel. I just felt it was somehow too personal, too intimate, but my mother knew and I knew that that first novel had at its foundation the conversations that we had for the two years before. Small things Ishiguro learned from his mother that war is not just about big, violent conflict. It's also about small, everyday lives. My writing career in many ways has got a lot to do with what my mother told me. It was an uncomfortable thing. It was like over a period of maybe two years. And often I could see she didn't particularly want to tell me, and sometimes I didn't want to hear. But somehow we thought we had to talk. It wasn't always traumatic memories. These are also stories about friends and very old lives that suddenly got interrupted by something in the world. It was a very important lesson for me that war isn't just this big thing that you see sometimes in the movie or in newsreel footage. I learned to think about the war in terms of my mother's very ordinary experiences of everyday life — the small things, terrible things. In the film adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, a young Etsuko asks her husband if he would still have married her if she had been exposed to the atomic bomb. The exchange is a reminder of the discrimination suffered by A-bomb survivors, who were widely shunned by the Japanese public — a subject that isn't explicitly explored in Ishiguro's book. The director, Ishikawa Kei, told NHK that he and his team "decided to add the scene so people today could look at that time and understand the problems that existed back then." Director Ishikawa Kei Ishiguro agrees the scene is an important addition. When I wrote the story, you only had to make a reference to these things and people understood. It was a time when in Great Britain people were very afraid of another nuclear war with the Soviet Union. They were very aware of things like radiation. So it was only necessary to make a few illusions. Of course, for today's generation, more things need to be made explicit about what a nuclear explosion can do. This is very much a retelling of the story for today's generation. I think on this 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb and the Second World War, it's very important for us to consider how to make these memories relevant to the younger generation. We have to almost repackage the memories of my parents' generation. How do you convince children that this is a very important story that is relevant to their lives and the world that they are going to build? 80 years on Equally important, Ishiguro says, is chronicling how humanity rises from the ashes of war to build peace, albeit imperfectly. Miraculously we figured out how to maintain some kind of peace for 80 years. I think people had to work very hard to achieve this. And so I do fear this is a dangerous moment right now in 2025 because many of the great institutions created at the end of the Second World War to maintain peace — mainly the United Nations, but also the economic arrangements created through the IMF and World Bank and the enshrining of human rights — today the value of these institutions is being questioned and the United Nations is being undermined. We are forgetting why these institutions were created. People realized that the world could not survive another world war. The human race would be destroyed. And I think this is a very dangerous moment because we have had peace for so long that many people believe it's a permanent condition. Art as meeting place Ishiguro says that with important global institutions increasingly under attack, his hope is that literature, film and other art forms can become "meeting places" for people who wish to build and preserve peace. Kazuo Ishiguro, center, after the official screening of A Pale View of Hills in Cannes, France. Can art, such as cinema or literature, preserve peace? I would like to say it can, but once again I'm aware of the fact that in the 1930s possibly the most developed cinema country was Germany. The greatest film makers were in Germany, and that did not stop Hitler coming to power. In fiction, great novelists like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, didn't stop the slide from the Russian Revolution into Stalin's rule and years and years of terrible suffering. So it would be naive to suggest that great writers or great cinema, great musicians can by themselves preserve peace or stop a slide into fascism. However, I do think at the individual level, literature and cinema are very good at crossing cultural barriers. I first came to Cannes 31 years ago to be on the jury of the festival here. And it was the first time I saw a movie by an Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami. I had no idea what life in Iran was really like. There were just these bad guys who took hostages and did terrible things. And I realized all these human beings live here, and they have many different opinions, and in the years since then I've become a big fan of Iranian cinema. Once that happens it becomes much more difficult to demonize an entire nation or to go to war. I think literature and cinema have become very internationalized now, and this is a very good thing because…we're at least having the same conversation. And we might disagree or have different views but it's very important that we're all participants in the same conversation. And I think art, culture and literature are a wonderful place for people to meet. Even if we're going to disagree and argue.
Evening Standard
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Why books are rewriting the box office in 2025
Another story that might feel more non-fic than sci-fi comes from Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro. The author of the emotionally devastating Never Let Me Go returns with Klara and the Sun, starring Jenna Ortega as Klara, an artificial friend bought to keep a sick child company. With AI dominating cultural conversations, Ishiguro's questions about what it means to be human couldn't be more timely. Directed by Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) and co-starring Amy Adams, Natasha Lyonne and Steve Buscemi, this one is already sparking serious chatter. Coming: October
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Makes a Stunning Return to Brazilian Cinema in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Masterful Period Political Thriller
An inspired streak of absurdism runs through The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) connected to an urban legend about a 'hairy leg' that moves autonomously, causing trouble in the northeastern Brazilian capital of Recife in 1977, when the country remained under military dictatorship. The leg turns up or is mentioned various times — being pulled from the messy guts of a large shark carcass; stolen from the morgue and disposed of by evidence-tampering police; tagged as the culprit in sensational tabloid crime stories; and literally kicking asses in a gay cruising ground, where men are getting it on under trees or on park benches. The rogue limb is a clever metaphor for the regime's persecution of the queer community, among other groups, including dope-smokers, longhairs and anyone else who might be automatically branded as a communist. The entire scene is a brilliant comic set-piece, starting with the gorgeous sight of chonky capybaras grazing in a field at night before shifting to the park, where all that al fresco friskiness is rudely interrupted when the leg strides into action. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'A Pale View of Hills' Review: An Overly Cautious Adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Haunting Novel Sissy Spacek Shares 'Carrie' Audition Doubts at Spirited 'Awards Chatter' Podcast Taping in Cannes 'The Phoenician Scheme' Review: A Brilliant Benicio del Toro Leads Wes Anderson's Poignant Narrative Jigsaw Puzzle It's the kind of bizarro detour you don't expect to take in a period political thriller centered on a widowed father whose life is in danger. But moments of anarchic humor amid genuine suspense are exactly the kind of thing that makes Kleber Mendonça Filho's fourth narrative feature such a thrilling original. There's also a conjoined-twins cat, with two faces on one body; a woman experiencing demonic possession while being helped out of a movie theater showing The Omen; a less perturbed gentleman at the same screening getting a zesty blowjob in a back row while poor Lee Remick gets whacked by her Antichrist child; a kid so obsessed with Jaws he has nightmares but is too young to see the 14-certificate release; and a shark motif that even appears in an old black-and-white Popeye episode. Oh, did I mention it takes place during Carnival week, when revelers pack the streets by the hundreds of thousands and music saturates the air? But even that collective jubilation doesn't escape the specter of mortality. A broadsheet headline late in the film reads 'Death Toll of Carnival: 91,' as the pages are draped over the lifeless face of a contract killer in a pool of blood on a barbershop floor. The magic of the film is that all these incongruous elements fit organically into the larger picture, without ever diluting the tension or undermining the life-and-death stakes for the central character, initially known as Marcelo. He's played with soulful eyes and a cloak of melancholy and hurt by Wagner Moura, in a stellar return to Brazilian cinema after several years away. He's always been a good actor, but Mendonça Filho makes him a movie star. Despite its humorous flourishes and droll characters, The Secret Agent is a deeply serious movie about a painful time in Brazil's past, when people were disappeared in countless numbers, hired assassins haggled over rates, and even far-flung cities where the dictatorship was largely invisible felt its long reach. It's both of a piece with and completely different to Walter Salles' Oscar winner from last year, I'm Still Here, the main action of which takes place in Rio at the start of the '70s. Mendonça Filho's gift for exploring Brazil's complex sociopolitical realities in idiosyncratic ways was already apparent in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, and especially Bacarau, an anti-colonialist Western in which UFOs hover over a remote village mysteriously wiped from the map. But this new feature is his strongest yet and deserves to lift him into the ranks of the world's top contemporary filmmakers. The previous work that now feels almost like a companion piece to The Secret Agent is the elegiac 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, about the director's childhood home in Recife and the now-vanished movie palaces where he found his calling. The seven years he spent making that film while poring over city archives is a significant part of the seed from which this new movie sprouted. It opens with Marcelo pulling in for gas in his yellow VW at a middle-of-nowhere station, where he's startled to see a dead body lying on the gravel in the blazing sun, only partly covered by a sheet of cardboard. He learns the man was shot by the night-shift attendant while attempting to rob the place, and the police are too busy with Carnival to come, though the stench attracts wild dogs. But two cops do pull in, showing no interest in the corpse. Instead, one of them does a close inspection of Marcelo's documents and car, looking for drugs, weapons or any kind of infraction. Finding nothing, the cop puts out his hand for a police fund donation. That scene clues us in that Marcelo is already on the authorities' radar. It also explains the urgency once he arrives in Recife to get things sorted and get out. The unofficial mayor of a tight-knit leftist community, 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria, wonderful), sets him up in an apartment and provides an envelope full of cash and details for a contact who can help facilitate fake IDs for himself and his son. Marcelo's late wife's parents have been taking care of young Fernando (Enzo Nunes) while he's been away. His father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) is one of a handful of disarming characters, along with voluble Dona Sebastiana (historically the patron saint of death), who give the movie a buoyancy that works in lovely counterpoint to the corrosive fear driving the plot. Alexandre works as a projectionist at one of the movie palaces revisited in Pictures of Ghosts; scenes in the booth as well as posters in the lobby and outside provide a fresh hit of the affection for the moviegoing experience that was so intoxicating in the doc. Only gradually does it become clear that Marcelo (whose real name is Armando) made an enemy of Ghirotti, a crooked federal official from Sao Paolo, who stripped public funding from the university research department he headed. He condescendingly tells Marcelo's team to focus on work more in line with local business concerns, like tanning cow hides, and leave the sophisticated technological developments like lithium batteries to the more advanced experts in the southern cities. Marcelo has already patented lithium batteries, which doesn't go over well. He manages to hold his tongue during an uncomfortable dinner in which Ghirotti gets drunk and dismisses the Recife research team's work. But Marcelo's wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), lets loose with an angry tirade that turns into a physical altercation. Marcelo has explained her death to Fernando as the result of pneumonia, though the suspicion lingers that Ghirotti might have had her iced. The part of the movie in which Mendonça Filho jacks up the tension and gets to demonstrate razor-sharp genre technique comes when Marcelo is anxiously awaiting his and Fernando's fake passports from a resistance facilitator known as Elza (Maria Fernanda Candido), while two hitmen paid by Ghirotti, Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobby (Gabriel Leone), arrive in town to track him down. The extended sequence where the killers get closer and closer to Marcelo is almost Hitchcockian in its tightly wound dread, made more agonizing by the raucous brass and drums of Carnival music. Perhaps the most daring trick Mendonça Filho pulls off is revealing the close of Marcelo/Armando's story through a present-day Sao Paolo researcher, Flavia (Laura Lufesi), who goes through audio tapes of bugged conversations and newspapers from the time to discover what became of him. But rather than cheating us out of a satisfying conclusion, it cuts a path to a profoundly affecting one when Flavia travels to Recife to share her findings with the now adult Fernando (also played by Moura), who runs a blood bank. That medical facility occupies the spot of a phantom movie theater. Expertly chosen music gives a rhythmic pulse to much of the action in a 2-hour-40-minute film that never drags. The atmospheric score by Tomaz Alves Souza and Mateus Alves has exquisite passages steeped in mystery and sorrow, combined with an eclectic mix that ranges from the festive Carnival bands to international hits like Chicago's 'If You Leave Me Now' and Donna Summer's 'Love To Love You Baby' to Brazilian songs of the period, notably a swoony number that Marcelo plays on the stereo when he first settles into his Recife apartment, which amplifies the emotion of his hometown return. Shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses in the slightly saturated colors of film stock from the era, the movie looks ravishing, every frame packed with interesting details thanks to the expert production and costume design of Thales Junqueira and Rita Azevedo, respectively. Enlivened by a populous, almost Altman-esque gallery of characters — way too many to mention — played without a single false note, and by the strong sense of a community pulling together for safety from the oppressive forces outside, the movie luxuriates in an inebriating sense of time and place that speaks of Mendonça Filho's intense love for the setting. It's a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Asahi Shimbun
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Asahi Shimbun
Ishiguro talks about movie based on his Nagasaki novel
Kazuo Ishiguro, front, and the cast of "A Pale View of Hills" acknowledge the applause May 15 at the Cannes Film Festival (Haruto Hiraoka) CANNES, France—The movie depicting survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bomb based on a novel by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro drew thunderous applause at the Cannes Film Festival at a recent screening. Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2017, published 'A Pale View of Hills' in 1982. It touches upon the lives of those in Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. The novel is focused more on how the hibakusha strove to rebuild their lives rather than on the devastation caused by the bomb. The movie, directed by Kei Ishikawa, is a look back on the life of the protagonist Etsuko who eventually moves to Britain from her native Nagasaki. Ishiguro himself was born in Nagasaki, but he and his family moved to Britain when he was young. The movie, screened at Cannes on May 15, is entered in the Un Certain Regard section. Ishiguro, who also served as an executive producer of the movie, said it was important that its release came in the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Ishiguro said he wrote the novel because he wanted to do something about the many negative stereotypes of Japan in Britain as a war enemy. He added that he avoided writing about the damage caused by the bomb because he felt that since he was only in his mid-20s when he wrote 'Pale View' he was not yet qualified to write about the tragedy of war. Ishiguro said he focused on the effects on each individual from a major event that an insignificant individual could not control as well as about the process by which people recover through the courage to make their lives a little better even with the scars that they carry. He felt that theme had a universal quality. The movie also does not show any actual damage from the bomb, but the scars of those in the movie are expressed through their conversation with others. They strive to better their lives while also praying for the rebuilding of Nagasaki. Their conversations contain such words as 'hope,' 'dawn' and 'awakening.' Ishiguro recalled feeling surprised that the movie was very similar to how he described the war in his novel. He added that it was likely difficult for a Japanese in 1980, when he wrote the novel, to think about the war and why the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan because of the still bitter memories many held. He said it was easier for him to write about it living in Britain. He added that in the same way, Ishikawa could distance himself from the war since he is still in his 40s. Touching upon the fact that his mother died in 2019, Ishiguro raised concerns about the day when there will be no people with actual experience of the war. He said he felt as though the war had become a myth from the distant past. Ishiguro added there was a need to find new ways of describing the war so that children and young people will become interested by relating it to what is occurring today rather than describing only the fear and anger felt by the victims. The movie will be released in Japan in September. Kazuo Ishiguro responds to an interview with The Asahi Shimbun in Cannes, France. (Haruto Hiraoka)
South China Morning Post
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Cannes 2025: author Kazuo Ishiguro on films, adapting his books and becoming Homer
Kazuo Ishiguro's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. Advertisement When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, started writing fiction in his twenties, 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 five, moved to the UK with his family. A Pale View of Hills marked the start of one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it is a film, too. Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered on May 15 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 film watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Advertisement 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).
