Cannes, France – Cannes, France (AP) – Kazuo ishiguro The mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb dropped.
When Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize and author of “Remiasians of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go”, first made the writing of fiction in his 20 years, his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” of 1982, was inspired by the stories of his mother and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5 years old, he moved to England with his family.
“A pale view of the hills” marked the beginning of what has become one of the most praised writing careers of contemporary literature. And, now, like most of the other ishiguro novels, it is also a film.
Kei Ishikawa’s film with the same name premiered Thursday in the Cannes Film Festival In its section of a certain consideration. The 70 -year -old author has been here before; He was a jury in 1994 that gave “Pulp Fiction” La Palma d’Or. “At that time it was a surprise decision,” he says. “Many people booed.”
Ishiguro is a movie observer and sometimes also creates. He wrote 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation “Live.” The films are a regular presence in their life, partly because the filmmakers continue to make their books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a movie from the most recent novel in Ishiguro, “Klara and The Sun” (2021).
Ishiguro likes to participate in the early development of an adaptation and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing “a pale view of the hills” became an elegant and reflective drama is especially significant for him because the book, in itself, deals with inheritance, and because it represents its beginning as a writer.
“It didn’t make sense that someone else read this thing again,” he says. “Then, in that sense, it is different, for example, the movie of ‘Representatives of the Day’ or the ‘Never Let Me Go’ movie.”
Comments have been slightly edited.
Ishiguro: Often, people think I’m more modest when I say I want the movie to be different from the book. I don’t want it to be very different. But for the movie to live, there must be a reason why it is being done then, for the audience at that time. 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 as a tribute or an impersonation of Elvis.
Every time I see adaptations of books that do not work, it is always because it has been too reverential. Sometimes it is lazy. People think: everything is there in the book. The imagination is not pressed to work. For each of these things that has reached the screen, there have been 10, 15 developments with which I have been personally involved that was on the road. I always try to make people simply move it.
Ishiguro: You can adopt two types of approaches. You write a novel and that is the discreet and perfect thing. Other people can pay tribute, but basically that’s. Or can give another vision that stories are things that are simply transmitted, generations. Although you think you wrote an original story, you have gathered it from other things that have come before you. Then it is part of that tradition.
I said Homer but it could be popular stories. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They appear in different ways. It is because people can change them and adapt them to their times and culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people sat around a fire and these stories were said. You feel with some anticipation: this type will tell it in a slightly different way. What will you do? It is as if Keith Jarrett sits and says he will play “night and day.” So, when you pass from one book to another, that is a moment next to the fire. That way, he has the opportunity to last, and I have the opportunity to become Homer.
Ishiguro: I have some centuries to go.
Ishiguro: I was between 24 and 26 years old. It was published when I was 27 years old. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember having written many of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend at the time. We were both graduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When he entered at the end of the day, I had to pack even if he was at the crucial point of a scene. It wasn’t a big thing. I was just doing something indulgent. He had not felt real to have a career or that would be published. So it is strange all these years later than her and I are here and we attend this premiere in Cannes.
Ishiguro: I think it’s really insightful what you just said. There is a limit for the amount of understanding that may be between generations. What is needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, respect the generations of others and the difference in values. I think I understood that the world was a really complicated place, and that people often cannot expect to have a perspective of the forces they are playing in them at that time. Actually understand that needs generosity.
Ishiguro: It wasn’t like a journalist who tried to get things out of my mother. There is a part of me that was quite reluctant to listen to these things. At some level, it was a bit shameful to think about my mother in such extreme circumstances. Many of the things that told me that they had nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Those were not their most traumatic memories.
My mother was a great oral narrator. Sometimes he had a lunch appointment and made a complete version of a work by Shakespeare alone. That was my introduction to “Hamlet” or things like that. I was anxious to tell me, but also distrust me. It was always a tense thing. Having something formal: “Oh, I’m becoming a writer, I’m going to write something for these memories to be preserved,” that made it easier.
Ishiguro: Someone told me the other day: “We live at a time when many people would sympathize with the elderly, what you could call fascist views.” It is not openly expressed; The Major Master says that it is tradition and patriotism.
Now, perhaps we live in a world where it is a good point, and that had not occurred to me. It is an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of bubble. But the power of stories is that they have to enter different values.
This issue of how it conveys stories, this is one of the great challenges. You have to reexamine each scene. Some things that could have been a very safe assumption just a few years ago would not be because values systems are changing around our books and movies as much as they are changing around us.
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Jake Coyle He has covered the Cannes Film Festival since 2012. He is watching approximately 40 films at this year’s festival and informing what he highlights.
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For more coverage of the Cannes 2025 Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/cannes-film-festival
