Kazuo Ishiguro on the state of the planet: ‘This is a very fragile and dangerous moment’
The Nobel-winning author talks to James Mottram about how the nuclear tensions of the 1980s compare to today’s global anxiety and why film adaptations of classic books need to be more than simply exercises in homage
A Pale View Of Hills was your first novel. What do you remember about writing it? The background is that I had not written much fiction at all. I started to write a few short stories relatively late. I’m not one of these people who wrote stories as a child. And it was partly because my mother said: ‘If you’re going to be a writer, I should tell you some of my memories of the war years.’ Not necessarily just bomb, but about the whole war years, because she thought that it was good that she handed on memories to the next generation. I wrote short stories based on them. And it was directly after that I thought: ‘I want to write a novel.’
Did her stories then make it into the novel? I made a conscious decision that I would not use these stories that were directly based on my mother’s experiences. I thought they were too personal sometimes and also, just from an artistic point of view, I didn’t want to write a novel that was episodic. But somehow her experiences would inform the world of this novel. For this reason, I would say this story has a personal dimension that perhaps the others don’t. I’m sad that my mother didn’t live to see the movie.
How did you feel about Kei Ishikawa adapting it for the screen? Even when I published the book all those years ago, there were things that I felt weren’t quite right, so I said to Mr Ishikawa: ‘Look, you can feel very confident about making this your movie.’ At the beginning we discussed many of the areas that I thought were weak and I think he has made them the strengths: the ambiguity of the story, the relationship of the two main women. In my book, it’s too baffling, too puzzling, too tricksy. And I felt that almost immediately after the book was published. I think Ishikawa has used that ambiguity, the mysteriousness of people’s identities, how they talk about other people from the past when they really wanted to talk about themselves. I think he has done that very well and made it one of the great strengths of the story.
The film coincides with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Does that feel significant? Yes. There were all these great institutions created after that: United Nations, International Monetary Fund, human rights conventions. With all their flaws, we took these things for granted. I’ve never known a time when they were so doubted and so challenged. So, for me, having grown up mainly in a period of peace, I feel this is a very fragile and dangerous moment.
Do you have strong memories of England in 1982, one of the eras depicted in the story? I would have been in my late twenties. It’s easy for people to forget but there was a moment before the end of the Cold War where it got very, very tense. Often people think that incrementally things just got nicer and nicer, and then the Berlin Wall fell. Actually, there was a moment around that time when we got seriously worried about a nuclear war and the government actually sent out these leaflets about what to do in the event of an attack. They were quite amusing. We were told you should clear space underneath your staircase and have some emergency beans! I remember going on these big peace marches and at that time I wrote this novel. Now that feels like a historic moment.
This is not the first time one of your books has been adapted. Are you quite good at handing one of your babies over? I like to think I don’t interfere too much. When I see a film based on a well-known book and it doesn’t work very well, it’s almost always because the filmmakers have tried to be too faithful; I think it’s quite easy for the filmmakers to become lazy in terms of imagination and lean too much on what is already there in the book. I believe my job, in a way, is to keep reminding the filmmakers that they have to make their own film because that is the easiest way to not make a mediocre or even a bad movie.
You’ve adapted other works yourself. Living, with Bill Nighy, was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru. How was that process? In some ways, the original is the enemy when you’re doing anything, though I wouldn’t want to say Kurosawa was my enemy! But I think adaptation is a very fragile process, because you’ve got to get this balance right to honour what you valued in the original. Unless it has its own energy and its own vision, it’s worthless. It’s just an empty homage exercise.
A Pale View Of Hills is in cinemas from Friday 13 March; Kazuo Ishiguro picture: Jeff Cottenden.