Oliver Hermanus: Last News

Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells’s debut feature Aftersun has bagged three awards in the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) craft categories, the year’s most wins.

Composing the score for the Oliver Hermanus-directed drama Living began with a very simple question: Is it really necessary to write only sad music for a story about a man facing his mortality?

EXCLUSIVE: Oscar winner Julianne Moore is set to lead Sky and AMC period-drama series Mary & George, about powerful royal family favourites Mary Villiers and her son George.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Fragments of the Last Will,” a post-WWII prisoner of war drama, has been set as the opening title of next month’s Tokyo International Film Festival. It is directed by Zeze Takahisa. The festival, which runs Oct. 24-Nov. 2, 2022, will close with “Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus and starring Bill Nighy. The film is a reworking of Kurosawa Akira’s 1952 classic “Ikiru,” with a revised screenplay by Ishiguro Kazuo. “Fragments” is based on the true story of Yamamoto Hatao, a Japanese prisoner of war detained in a Siberian gulag. He believed that he would be able to reunite with his wife and children in Japan and for eleven years fought to keep the light of hope alive for his fellow POWs.

UK sales company Protagonist Pictures has named Alice Vail as Creative Executive.

Naman Ramachandran International finance, production and sales company Protagonist Pictures has appointed Alice Vail as creative executive, reporting into head of development Len Rowles and head of acquisitions Luane Gauer. Vail will be working across Protagonist’s film and television projects with a focus on supporting new talent.Vail previously served as the development editor at Number 9 Films, working on several high-profile projects including Eva Husson’s Cannes 2021 official selection “Mothering Sunday,” and Oliver Hermanus’ “Living,” which bowed at Sundance earlier this year.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Living,” an acclaimed re-imagining of Akira Kurosawa’s classic meaning-of-life story, has been sold to Sony Pictures Classics follow its premiere at Sundance Film Festival.Sony Pictures Classics, the indie division of Sony Pictures, has acquired rights in North America, Latin America, India, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Germany, South Africa, Southeast Asia, and airlines worldwide. A release date has not been announced yet.“Living” was directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

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.

Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal are teaming up for a brand new movie.

The Crown Emmy winner Josh O’Connor and Normal People star Paul Mescal have been set to star in The History of Sound, a World War I love story adapted from Ben Shattuck’s Pushcart Prize-winning short story. Oliver Hermanus (Beauty, Moffie) is aboard to direct the pic, which hails from Cop Car producer End Cue. Production is set to begin in summer 2022 in the U.S. and on location in the UK and Italy.

For his first film on Apartheid, South African director Oliver Hermanus did not expect to focus on the trauma of white men. Hermanus, who was born in Cape Town and now lives in London, is mixed race, the group labeled "colored" under the racist regime that ruled South Africa until the early 1990s.