Man out of time

How the film Living has become the role of a lifetime for Bill Nighy.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Before he created a lead role in Living specifically for Bill Nighy, the film's screenwriter had mostly written novels. They'd done quite well ... in a Booker and Nobel Prize for literature kind of way. Oh, and Nighy ranks him, too.

"You know what? He's not bad," the actor and bookworm answers with a wheezy chuckle down the line from London after the Listener asks his thoughts about the man who created the role that has led to Nighy's first Oscar nomination.

The writer? Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, author of, among many other things, the Booker-winning The Remains of the Day, which became a classic British period film.

Living feels like another one. Well, as much as a British remake of a 1952 Akira Kurosawa movie inspired by an 1886 Tolstoy novella directed by a South African (Oliver Hermanus) can be.

Ishiguro has had mixed past results as an infrequent screenwriter. His last one was 2005's The White Countess, the largely unloved final film from the powerhouse period-film partnership of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory.

But a few years ago, the cinephile novelist had the idea to adapt Kurosawa's Ikiru to 1953 London, with Nighy perfect for the lead of the jobsworth bureaucrat who undergoes a late-life epiphany. It has earned him his own first Oscar for best adapted - and Nighy's etergratitude. "Just what did I nomination, screenplay nal do in a previous life? Honestly, I must have been very, very good or something."

Nighy remembers meeting the Nagasaki-born writer at a dinner with veteran British producer Stephen Woolley. As they were leaving, Ishiguro said, "We know what your next film should be", without elaborating.