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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.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: An Overly Cautious Adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Haunting Novel
In a modest home in the English countryside, a young woman rummages through her mother's belongings. Among half-packed boxes and cluttered papers, she finds an envelope of photographs. 'I've not seen many pictures of you in Nagasaki, you look so young,' Niki (Camila Aiko), a British-born Japanese writer says to her mother, Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), before handing over one of the images. There's a brusqueness to their interaction, a brevity that hints at secrets untold. Etsuko says she hadn't intended to put the photos out and proceeds to make the bed. These kind furtive exchanges litter A Pale View of Hills, Kei Ishikawa's overly careful adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's debut novel of the same name. The film, which premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, braids together two stories. The first is set in 1980s England, where Niki helps her mother prepare to sell their house. As the two women pack up a lifetime of belongings, Niki interviews her mother about life in post-war Japan. The young writer, who recently dropped out of university and lives in London, is working on a memoir about her family and she hopes these conversations with her mother can help her understand her older sister Keiko's suicide. Working with DP Piotr Niemyjski, Ishikawa defines this timeline with cool tones — dark blues, muted greens and a gray pallor that haunts every frame. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Secret Agent' Review: Wagner Moura Makes a Stunning Return to Brazilian Cinema in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Masterful Period Political Thriller 'Slauson Rec' Review: Shia LaBeouf Inspires Wannabes - and Frequently Turns on Them - in an Intimate Chronicle of His Theater Experiment Wes Anderson, Benicio Del Toro's 'The Phoenician Scheme' Cannes Premiere Draws Polite Ovation The second story takes place in Etsuko's memories, a golden-hued recollection of Nagasaki in 1950. Ishikawa transports viewers to the decade after the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb on the port city which, killed hundreds of thousands of people and exposed countless others to harmful radiation. The tone is warmer in this section, the director shaping the images from this period with a bright, almost surreal visual language. Together, these threads form a lopsided and sometimes prosaic film. Not only do the post-war Japan sequences have more resonance than the stiffer generational trauma-drama of 1980s England, but a vague sense of viewer distrust plagues this adaptation. It's almost as if Ishikawa, eager to do the source material justice, fears that inviting any ambiguity will fail the mystery propelling Ishiguro's novel. But a little uncertainty can be beneficial, especially when it comes to interpreting an author whose work is so haunting. After Etsuko shares that the stress of the move has been instigating some nightmares, Niki goads her mother into telling her some stories of life in Nagasaki. The elder woman's initial reluctance dissolves into a timid willingness as she recalls the cautious optimism saturating the city after the bomb. In those post-war years, Etsuko (now played by Suzu Hirose, Our Little Sister) and her husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita), a prickly man whose long hours at work make him both cranky and distant, are expecting their first child. Their relatively quiet life undergoes dramatic changes when Jiro's father Ogata (Tomokazu Miura, Perfect Days) comes for an extended stay and Etsuko meets Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido of Shogun), a single mother who lives in a run-down cottage nearby. The presence of both figures challenges Etsuko to confront the painful legacy of World War II as well as the role women played in post-war society. In Ogata, the expectant mother begins to understand why a younger generation feels betrayed by their elders, whom they accuse of leading them to war because of blind faith in imperialism. And through Sachiko, Etsuko expands her sense of who a Japanese woman can be in and beyond Nagasaki. Sachiko harbors dreams of leaving the city with her daughter Mariko, a solitary and malcontent child who she believes might thrive with some distance from Japan. When she meets a white American soldier named Frank, who offers to take her overseas, these dreams seem closer to becoming reality. One of the underlying mysteries fueling Ishiguro's novel revolves around the strange relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. The two women, as recalled by Etsuko, can come off eerily similar and some critics have posited that one might be a projection of the other. Part of the thrill of Ishiguro's novel is in how ambiguous the writer leaves this; the text offers clues, but few solid answers. That intentional inscrutability makes the book excitingly capricious, reflecting how nations remember or untangle painful ruptures in their history. Ishikawa, who in addition to directing and editing A Pale View of Hills also wrote the screenplay, is most confident with the Nagasaki timeline, which conforms to a conventional family drama. It's when Ishikawa must interweave and balance that timeline with the one in England that the director struggles a bit more. The impact of A Pale View of Hills is blunted by a tendency to over-explain and flatten. Still, there are some highlights, including the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. The chemistry between Hirose and Nikaido makes their performances compelling to watch and amplifies the intriguing elements within their characters' friendships. Those strengths coupled with Ishiguro's popularity mean that, despite its shortcomings, A Pale View of Hills could find some stateside success. 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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)
Hindustan Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Japanese director tells Cannes he had last chance to make Ishiguro's 'Pale View of Hills'
* 'Pale View of Hills' stars Suzu Hirose as Nagasaki survivor * Film competing in second-tier Un Certain Regard category * Author praises film's relevance to younger audiences CANNES, France, - Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, set in post-war Nagasaki and 1980s England, needed to be made into a film while there were still some of Japan's World War Two generation alive to share their stories, director Kei Ishikawa told Reuters. "The hurdles were high, but I felt strongly that if I had the chance to make the movie, I should do it now," Ishikawa said at the Cannes Film Festival, where "A Pale View of Hills" is competing in the second-tier 'Un Certain Regard' category. "In a few years' time, we might not be able to get to hear their stories, and that weighed heavily on me," said the Japanese director, whose 2022 film "A Man" premiered at the Venice Film Festival. "A Pale View of Hills" intertwines the central character Etsuko's memories of life in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing in 1945 with her interactions with her daughter in 1980s Britain. The film, which stars Suzu Hirose and Yoh Yoshida, premiered on Friday, with The Hollywood Reporter describing it as a Cannes hidden gem. ADTED FOR NEW GENERATION Ishiguro, an executive producer on the film, is also in Cannes. Adapting the novel, which he wrote when he was 25, was different from taking his other books, including "The Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go," to the big screen, he told Reuters. "Not just because it's so very personal, but because at the time when I wrote the book, it was just 35 years after the end of the Second World War," the Japanese-born British author said. Now there have been at least two generations since the one that experienced the war that ended 80 years ago, he said. "For me, that's a very special thing. Possibly this is the first time maybe the Japanese people are prepared to look carefully at those experiences," said Ishiguro. He praised Ishikawa, 47, for making a film that was relevant to younger audiences from what he called an "apprentice book". "He's made the movie really for today's audience, for his generation and the generation actually even younger than him," said Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. Director Ishikawa said he hoped the film would also alter foreign perceptions of Japanese women, who "are often seen as demure, walking a step behind their husbands". But that's not the case at all, he said. "There were definitely such strong women in that era," he said. "We've made this film from our own lived experiences and I believe that if many people see it, it could really refresh the image of Japan itself."
