‘Living’ Star Bill Nighy on Capturing the Heroism of ‘Normal People Getting Through Life’ (Video)

thewrap.com:

Oliver Hermanus and starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood, comes from a screenplay that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote, adapting it into English from Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese film “Ikuru.” (“Ikuru” itself was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 Russian novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”) Nighy plays a British bureaucrat in post-World War II London whose cancer diagnosis inspires him to reevaluate his life of solitude and try to make a difference in his community before he dies.

Hermanus, Nighy and Wood visited TheWrap and Shutterstock’s Interview and Portrait Studio at the Toronto International Film Festival for a discussion about the filmmaking process.Nighy plays the bureaucrat, Williams, and he and Hermanus weren’t too worried by the legacy of Kurosawa’s original film looming over their adaptation.

Having Kazuo Ishiguro’s screenplay writing helped immensely.“We had to ask for permission, and the story is that the [Kurosawa] family did not believe that Kazuo Ishiguro was involved in this form, and he even wrote a letter saying, ‘I, Kazuo Ishiguro, am going to be writing the screenplay’ And they didn’t believe that either,” Hermanus told Senior Film Reporter Brian Welk. “So then he sent a video message of himself and that’s when the family, I think, was like — all their trust was in Kazuo Ishiguro.

Like, if Mr. Ishiguro was going to do it, they felt that it was in good hands and we were all kind of protected.”Hermanus and Nighy were both approached by producer Stephen Wooley to do the film.