Kei Ishikawa On Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘A Pale View Of Hills’

Japanese film A Pale View of Hills will have a theatrical rollout in the UK from March 13 next year, after a busy festival run from Cannes, to Toronto, London, Shanghai and Taipei, among others.

The film will also open in Taiwan’s theaters from December 5 this year.

Director Kei Ishikawa sits down with Deadline to talk about collaborating with prolific novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, getting advice from fellow director Hirokazu Kore-eda, and preparing his next film, The Excursion (working title), which will be set in Poland.

Adapted from Ishiguro’s debut novel, A Pale View of Hills is a mystery drama set in England in the 1980s.

The film follows a young Japanese-British writer named Niki (played by Camilla Aiko). She plans to write a book based on her mother Etsuko’s post-war experiences in Nagasaki in the 1950s. Haunted by the suicide of her older daughter, Etsuko begins to recount her memories to Niki from 1952 as a young mother-to-be.

Describing Ishiguro as a very “charming” person, Ishikawa shares that he had numerous conversations with Ishiguro, who became a “script doctor” of sorts for the film adaptation.

“He loves Japanese cinema and we talked about this for a long time,” says Ishikawa. “From the beginning, he was so cooperative. This is his first book, so it’s also special for him. He was really trying to help me, but at the same time, he was like, ‘This is going to be your film, so I won’t control you.’

“It was a great time, and he acted a little bit like a script doctor. He said there were some problems in the book, and that we could solve it together.”

Ishikawa adds that fellow Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda also read through one of his screenplay drafts and provided some advice.

The film stars Suzu Hirose (Our Little Sister), Fumi Nikaido (Himizu), Yoh Yoshida (Kamen Rider Black Sun) and Camilla Aiko (Kraven the Hunter).

Previously, Ishikawa directed A Man, which premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in 2022. The film swept eight awards at the Japan Academy Film Prize ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Director.

One of the biggest changes that Ishikawa introduced in his film adaptation of ‘A Pale View of Hills,’ is telling the story through Niki’s perspective, instead of the mother’s (Etsuko’s) perspective.

“We changed the setting, where Niki is trying to find the mother’s story, so in this sense, we have another narrator. It’s more complicated, but at the same time, it gives us more freedom to the story,” says Ishikawa.

Ishikawa enjoyed the challenge of reflecting on the nature of time and memory in A Pale View of Hills, pointing out different temporalities which exist in his adaptation: on one level, he was adapting a novel published over 40 years ago; on another, the novel itself is also about a woman recounting personal and historical events which happened over 30 years ago.

“For the 1980s readers [of Ishiguro’s novel], the 1950s were much closer than for the audience now. I just felt that we had one more layer compared with the readers at the time. So it was difficult, but at the same time for me, it also worked quite well, because for us Japanese filmmakers dealing with the topic of the atomic bomb, it’s really difficult to make a film as our generation has not had the experience of the older generation.

“I always thought that you need those experiences to have the right to make the film, but actually, you don’t. For example, Kazuo-san wrote this book from London, and he wrote this in English, so he also had a certain distance to the subject,” added Ishikawa.

On how he decided to depict the Japanese city of Nagasaki in the film (where the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945), Ishikawa says that the first layer was to represent it the way that the character of Etsuko remembers it, and then the way novelist Ishiguro remembers the city.

“It was really interesting how the history was told, but for me, I sense that the memories are getting more and more vague, because the people who experienced this event are also dying. In a few years, it’s going to be so hard to talk about them. I think for now, this is a time when we can still tell the story as a memory. In a few years, it’s going to be a film about history.”

Looking ahead, Ishikawa says that he is currently working on The Excursion (working title), which will be set in Poland and feature several Polish talent in the cast. The project marks a return to Poland for Ishikawa, who studied filmmaking at the National Film School in Lodz.