Entered in Un Certain Regard at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, A Pale View of Hills [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Kei Ishikawa
fiche film] takes the viewer back and forth between Japan in the early 1950s – namely, the city of Nagasaki a few years after the atom bomb and in the midst of the Korean War – and the UK in the early 1980s. The main character is Nagasaki-born Etsuko, who later leaves for England and a new life, including two daughters. Japanese director Kei Ishikawa adapted the story from the debut novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, evidently to the author’s warm approval.

Cineuropa: When Kazuo Ishiguro stood on stage at the gala premiere screening, he did a little speech about “my first and very bad book that’s now been turned into a very good film”. How much truth do you think there is to this statement?
Kei Ishikawa: He was joking! And that’s exactly what I like about him: his sense of humour and his nonchalance. But at the same time, this is his first novel, and we put a lot of work into the research and also changed a few things around, like compacting the timeline a bit. The biggest difference is that the book can be read as Etsuko’s confession from the 1950s. In the film, I put her daughter, Niki, from the 1980s episode (which is much closer to today’s viewer), more at the centre, and then we cast a light back on Etsuko’s story. As a cinematic adaptation, I don’t think that was wrong.

Can you talk about the interaction with Kazuo Ishiguro? What made you want to adapt this novel?
I wanted to adapt it because it’s not just about Nagasaki in the early 1950s, after the bomb; it also touches on things that are much more contemporary, like immigration, feminism and women’s rights. This encouraged me, and I wanted to bring these things to the forefront so that the movie would easily connect with a modern audience. I started thinking about adapting the book around 2017. But right when we’re about to approach Mr Ishiguro, he goes and wins the Nobel Prize in Literature! My first thought was, “No, no, no – this will be very complicated, not to mention the price we’ll have to pay for the rights!” It wasn’t exactly easy, but it was still a lot less difficult than I expected. We did our treatment and then sent it to him, and he replied immediately. “OK, I like your take. We can meet.” When he saw the film, he reacted positively and liked it a lot.

Thus far, the most famous Ishiguro adaptation has been James Ivory’s 1993 film version of The Remains of the Day. In A Pale View of Hills, we meet Etsuko’s father-in-law, the more reactionary older man who defends the war and Japan’s role in it. There’s a parallel with the estate where the butler serves in Remains, with its Nazi leanings in 1930s England.
Absolutely. And Mr Ishiguro told me that he liked and wanted to develop this character further, which turned into the butler in The Remains of the Day. So, it really explains a lot. I thought about Anthony Hopkins quite a bit when I was writing this character in the script.

What other films have inspired your work here? It manages to look Japanese, “Western” and also quite “classic”.
For the structure, I thought about The Hours, with the different women at different times in the same story. We also talked about Carol [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], the Patricia Highsmith adaptation, which was made by the same UK producer as I worked with here – because we wanted vivid females wearing beautiful clothes. We didn’t want to show those typical Japanese females after the war, looking downwards, walking behind their husbands. It’s not very true: if I look at my own grandmother, she was very powerful. There was surely some suppression, but these women were not weak. As for the relationships, it also reminds me of the Ozu films, but with a modern eye.

Nagasaki, also the birthplace of Kazuo Ishiguro, is another main character in the film. How do you view this place, and do you have a personal relationship with it?
I have no personal relationship – actually, I’m from Nagoya myself, a very different area. Nagasaki really mixes different cultures. The US presence during the Korean War brought in jazz music, which became popular. There are Chinese areas that have influenced the city, and there’s also a Portuguese influence through the trading ships that came to the port – in fact, Nagasaki feels a little like Lisbon at times.