At the end of an evening with friends, actor Bill Nighy and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro decided to share a taxi home, a simple yet fateful decision which in time led to the new movie “Living.”
“I kind of said almost spontaneously, ‘Oh, Bill, I know this fantastic role for you that will win you all these awards,’” says Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel laureate in literature, whose novels include “Klara and the Sun,” “Never Let Me Go,” and “The Remains of the Day.”
“And my wife, Lorna, said immediately, ‘Stop bothering, Bill; he’s got plenty of work,’” he says, laughing.
“He did, at the end of dinner, say, ‘We know what your next film should be,’” Nighy recalls in a separate video call. “I said, ‘Well, when you’re ready, let me know.’” And two weeks later, Stephen called and said this is Ishiguro’s suggestion.”
Film producer Stephen Woolley and his wife and producing partner Elizabeth Karlsen had hosted Nighy and the Ishiguros for dinner that night. Ishiguro’s idea, the producer explained, was for Nighy to star in a British remake of Japanese director Akira Kurasawa’s 1952 classic “Ikiru.”
“Not that I would participate in it,” Ishiguro says. “I said to Stephen, ‘Please make it because you have a real love of a certain kind of British film. You have a great relationship with Bill Nighy. Talk him into it and you’ve got a movie.’
“That was supposed to be my contribution,” he says. “But he came back and said, ‘Look, you’re talking about a Kurasawa movie, Japan, England. It’s your idea. Why don’t you have a go at writing the movie yourself?’ And that’s how I got sucked into it.”
“Living” is the story of Williams, played by Nighy, a London governmental bureaucrat, drifting through the mundane routines of his life until the day his doctor tells him he is terminally ill.
Forced to consider the life he’s led since the death of his wife years earlier, Williams strikes up a friendship with Miss Margaret Harris, played by Aimee Lou Wood, a former secretary in his office, whose joyful vivacity inspires him to make the most of the time he has left.
The film opens Friday, Dec. 23 in the United States, but already Ishiguro’s instincts are proving true: Earlier this month Nighy was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in the film, adding more fuel to the growing Oscar buzz around his performance.
Impactful ‘Ikiru’
Ishiguro, 68, was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in Britain where his parents immigrated in 1960. As a boy curious about the country and culture of his forebears, it was a big deal when a Japanese film turned up on British television.
“‘Ikiru’ had been of huge impact on me when I was 11 or 12 when I first saw it,” he says. “Probably I was too young to really appreciate the movie, but it really made a profound influence on me.”
Despite the melancholy of much of the movie, Ishiguro says he found its ultimate message encouraging.
“I didn’t come from the kind of background where you might expect that you’d go on to be famous or do huge things,” he says. “I thought I would be like the commuters I saw going into London from my suburban town when I grew up, just doing some kind of regular job.
“And I found this story about this man, who with a supreme effort, within the confines of the very restrictive world that he has to live in, and the confines of who he has become over the years, finds it within himself to turn it around,” Ishiguro says.
That transformation felt realistic to the young Ishiguro.
“He just does things a little bit better, and that makes the crucial difference between his life being empty, a shallow life, and one that that is actually fulfilled and magnificent,” he says.
“Ikiru” in time would influence in ways large and small the novels he wrote, Ishiguro says.
“Almost everything I’ve written I think has been shaped by that kind of vision that actually you have to find a kind of rather lonely sense of success and failure,” he says.
“A novel like ‘The Remains of the Day,’ you might see parallels between the character in ‘Living’ and the English butler,” Ishiguro says of his novel that was later adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. “A figure that is in danger of losing his humanity, who’s been ground down by the everyday and ground down by his fear of emotions and exposing himself to the contingencies of life.
“Perhaps less obvious, but also a novel and movie, ‘Never Let Me Go,’ uses a very similar device to ‘Ikiru’ and ‘Living,’” he says of the way the shortened lifespans of characters in each force protagonists to consider how best to live. “The question becomes very urgent: So what do you do in the time you left? What are the important things?”
A quiet life
For Nighy, 73, the character of Williams appealed to him from the first read of Ishiguro’s screenplay.
“It’s absolutely in my area of interest in every way,” he says. “There was never any doubt in my mind. I was born into that period. My father is almost contemporaneous with that character. I grew up in the atmosphere of the ’50s.
“And I’m very interested in that kind of restraint that they required of themselves in those days,” Nighy says. “I know it’s unhealthy, you know, to suppress all your feelings and repress all your emotions. But I see it as sometimes there’s a degree of an element of heroism involved there.”
The transformation of Williams over the final months of his life, and through his friendship with Miss Harris, also appealed greatly to him.
“The idea that a so-called ordinary person can have a meaningful and valuable life without having to reach for world domination,” Nighy says. “And as Ishiguro says, try and make the most of the life you have rather than what you didn’t get, or worrying about what you’re not going to get in the future.
“You just make the most of the day. It’s the big thing: How do you do today? How do you not compromise today with regret from the past? Or dread of the future? How do you do that – that’s the project.”
Nighy, whose best-known roles are often larger than life – think of the aging rocker Billy Mack in “Love Actually,” Davy Jones in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, or any of the Edgar Wright comedies in which he’s appeared such as “Shaun of the Dead.”
In “Living,” his work is delicate and inward-looking as emotions and meaning are often conveyed through subtle expressions than words.
“I like when it’s kind of what I call ‘close work,’” Nighy says. “I don’t know whether one’s harder than the other. But I mean, as close as I ever get to enjoying acting, I did enjoy this part. I found it fascinating, that thing of trying to express quite a lot with not very much.”
Opposites attract
For Aimee Lou Wood, even after watching “Living” on screen, the fact that she acted opposite Nighy, in a movie written by Ishiguro, still feels surreal.
“Every time that I’ve seen myself back in things I, first of all, get straight into being critical, obviously, of myself,” says Wood, 28. “But I’m always very much aware that that’s me.
“Whereas with ‘Living,’ I had this really weird thing where I was like, ‘That can’t be me. It’s not me,’” she says. “Because there’s something about the movie that was so magical I couldn’t quite grasp that that was me.”
It’s an unfamiliar feeling that the actress, whose credits include the Netflix series “Sex Education” and the period film “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” says has been there since the day the script first arrived.
“I opened it up and I immediately cried,” Wood says. “Like within the first page, it made me so emotional. And what was amazing about it was that my actor brain, which usually kicks in straight away, didn’t actually until afterwards.
“Like I really got lost in the story and was just so moved by it and really inspired by it.”
In contrast to the closed-off Williams, Margaret is the warm, open heart of the film.
“She’s this character who notices every small thing and delights in all the small details,” Wood says. “I found her totally kind of aspirational as a person, so the idea of playing her was just so thrilling to me.”
Nighy says his quiet performance was enhanced by the emotions that Wood brought to Margaret.
“She’s wonderful and gorgeous and fabulous,” he says of his costar. “And deeply conscientious and professional and dreamy to do business with.
“The fact that Mr. Williams is drawn to a young person who is vibrant, with that vivacity and spontaneity, well, there’s Aimee Lou. I mean, you stand around Aimee Lou for a while, you’ll feel a whole lot better.”
For Wood, who grew up watching Nighy in films such as “Love Actually” and “About Time,” acting opposite him was a dream.
“It’s going to be so different to what people are used to from Bill,” Wood says. “Because he is the most charismatic, charming, sparkly man. He just exudes charisma. And Mr. Williams does not.
“Bill has that lovely thing where everyone kind of feels like they know him, you know,” she says. “Everyone kind of feels like he’s their mate. And all of a sudden he was this man who just spoke so quietly and was so restrained and so lost.
“I was just so desperate for people to see it for so long,” Wood says. “Because I want people to see Bill. I want people to see what he’s doing.”
‘Living’
The film opens Friday, Dec. 23 exclusively at the Laemmle Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, before expanding to more theaters in coming weeks.
