Kazuo Ishiguro Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

You have won the Nobel Prize and a Booker Prize (in 1989 for “The Remains of the Day”) but how does being an Oscar nominee compare in terms of your excitement?Well, obviously, it was great to get the Nobel Prize and the Booker, but that’s my day job. This, the Academy Award nomination, is something different. To get a Oscar nomination is — well, it’s just ridiculously exciting.

The number of outstanding genre projects that Taika Waititi (“Jojo Rabbit“) is attaching himself keeps growing as the Kiwi filmmaker is still developing a mysterious “Star Wars” feature film after working on “The Mandalorian” and is trying to put together a new live-action remake of “Flash Gordon“ for 20th Century as well.

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. 

Women Talking has had Oscar pundits talking since its festival premieres in Telluride and Toronto, with buzz surrounding actors Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw and Polley herself as writer-director, adapting Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel about a group of women who meet to discuss abuse in a small religious colony.Laura Poitras is a past Oscar winner, for her 2014 documentary about whistleblower Edward Snowden, and is heavily favored to enter the doc race again for this year’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, centered on photographer Nan Goldin’s attempt to hold Purdue Pharma responsible for the massive rise in opioid deaths (similarly explored in the Hulu series Dopesick last year).Despite plaudits and awards aplenty for his novels and stories, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro has only written a handful of film scripts, and his latest for the Bill Nighy-starring Living might be his ticket to Hollywood’s big night.

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”).

Attempting to remake a classic film is never an easy assignment. Especially when said classic is as revered as Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru.” Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro could have placed the story in contemporary times, making a new version more palatable for some critics, but instead, set it in the exact same era only interchanging London for Tokyo.

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.

Lionsgate has taken UK distribution rights on Living, the Bill Nighy-starring English-language adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Ikiru.

BAFTA and Golden Globe winner Bill Nighy is set to take the lead in Living, an English-language adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 Japanese classic Ikiru from Nobel and Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of The Day and Never Let Me Go. Oliver Hermanus (Moffie, The Endless River) will direct the feature, heading to next month's American Film Market (AFM) with Rocket Science.

Naman Ramachandran BAFTA and Golden Globe winner Bill Nighy (“Love Actually,” “Emma”) will headline the cast of “Living,” alongside Aimee Lou Wood, known for her breakout role in Netflix’s “Sex Education.”The screenplay by Nobel and Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of The Day”) is an English-language adaptation of the 1952 classic “Ikiru,” written by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni.The film will be directed by multiple award-winning filmmaker

Andreas Wiseman International EditorBill Nighy (Love Actually ) and rising UK actress Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) are set to star in feature Living for director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie).The screenplay by Nobel and Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of The Day) is an English-language adaptation of the 1952 classic Ikiru, written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni.Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen’s Number 9 Films (Carol) will produce.