Kazuo Ishiguro: Last News

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro‘s A Pale View of Hills will be distributed by GAGA Corporation and produced by Japan‘s Bunbuku and the U.K.’s Number 9 Films.

EXCLUSIVE: UTA has signed fast-rising British actor Spike Fearn for representation in all areas.

EXCLUSIVE: Hot on the heels of a Best Animated Feature nomination for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Netflix is back in business with del Toro on another major animated film that he will direct.

EXCLUSIVE: UTA has signed award-winning British-Spanish actress Patsy Ferran for representation in all areas, with plans to help her secure new opportunities across film, television, theatre and more.

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will factor in this year’s movie awards races.

After some 50 years in the business, Bill Nighy is used to people getting his surname wrong. It actually rhymes with ‘sigh’: the ‘y’ is silent. “My dad was very particular about it,” he says, “and for a while, I used to correct people on his behalf, because he couldn’t bear it when people said ‘Nigh-y’. It really got to him. But I’m very, very accustomed to it. The first time I was ever in a show that was reviewed in a paper, I was Bill Nigby. I’ve been Bill Nighty — that’s a regular one — and if there’s one more than any other, it’s Nighly. It’s funny, when people get things wrong, they don’t get them wrong by simplifying them, they get them wrong by making them more complicated. So, they lengthen my name. It’s always slightly longer than it should be.”

“You know you’re in a hit when you get messages from people you were at school with or people you haven’t heard from in a long time,” Bill Nighy said during the Sony Pictures Classics panel for Living at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles awards-season event. 

American actress Glenn Close has been announced as the jury president for the Official Section of the 70th San Sebastian Film Festival, running from September 16-24.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentJulianne Moore will preside over the main jury of the Venice Film Festival’s upcoming 79th edition.The Oscar-winning U.S. actor, who most recently starred in A24’s “When You Finish Saving the World,” directed by Jesse Eisenberg, and will next appear in Benjamin Caron-directed “Sharper,” alongside Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow, also from A24, is a longtime Venice regular.Moore was last on the Lido with George Clooney-directed “Suburbicon” in 2017.

American actress Julianne Moore has been announced as the president of the international jury of the competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, running from August 31 to September 10.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“What would you do if you had six months left to live?” asks the doctor who diagnoses a do-nothing bureaucrat with terminal cancer in “Ikiru,” a 1952 masterpiece I suspect precious few of those who see its English-language remake, “Living,” will recall. Quite unlike anything else in Akira Kurosawa’s career, “Ikiru” ranks among the Japanese director’s best: With no samurai battles or set-pieces, the low-key contemporary melodrama raises profound questions about how we choose to spend the limited time we’re afforded, focusing on a stoic functionary about whom even the narrator apologizes, “He might as well be a corpse.”Culturally specific as so much of “Ikiru” may be, its lessons translate quite well to midcentury British society, courtesy of Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who did the work of adapting it to 1953 London for director Oliver Hermanus (“Moffie”).

I have always had a philosophy that if you are going to do a remake, remake a movie that didn’t work the first time like Howard The Duck,not a classic by a great filmmaker. Well, the latter is exactly what director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) and Nobel Prize winning screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go) have had the audacity to do in “reimagining” (the popular term for remakes today) iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s highly praised 1952 drama Ikiru. And they haven’t even bothered to change the early 50’s era in which it takes place, only the location and language. moving from Japan to England. Despite my reservations I am happy to say Living, which has its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival today, works very well and that is solely thanks to the loving care these filmmakers have put into a new version exactly 70 years after the first was released.  Of course it helps to have a writer on the level of the great and admired Ishiguro who vowed to be faithful to the script of Ikiru by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni. There have been some character enhancements, a new love story and other touches but this all holds up and shines a light on life and purpose all this time later as it centers on a decades-long straight-laced office bureaucrat (played in the original by Takashi Shimura) who has been lost in grief for many years following the death of his wife but only discovers the magic of living himself when he is told he is going to die. The other blessing for this version is in the absolutely 100% perfect casting of Bill Nighy who could not be better as the man in question, Mr. Williams.