“Life”: Read the script for the Bill Nighy drama adaptation of a Kurosawa classic

Editor’s note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the screenplays of films that will appear in this year’s film awards races.

For his acclaimed Sony Pictures Classics drama life With Golden Globe winner Bill Nighy, adapted director Oliver Hermanus ekiruAkira Kurosawa’s classic 1952 film.

During several stops at Deadline’s festival studios, Hermanus explained that the project will be based on a screenplay by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro (don’t ever leave me) which was written as a vehicle for Nighy. Pic tells the story of veteran civil servant Mr. Williams, who finds himself a powerless cog in London’s bureaucracy as the city struggles to rebuild after World War II. Buried under paperwork at the office and lonely at home, his life feels empty and meaningless. Then a devastating medical diagnosis forces him to take stock—and try to understand fulfillment before it becomes unattainable.

When he was approached for the project, Nighy quickly had the idea to focus on “the quiet decent man”. “There is a challenge, but also [in playing] someone who was in grief and loss … and in this extreme situation that the film puts him in, and also the whole institution that he works in, which is a kind of monument to procrastination,” the actor said in a virtual appearance at Deadline Sun Dance. “What’s happening to him means he has little time to make sense of a life he’s spent avoiding things.”

Hermanus notes that he had to meet the film’s writer and “pass the Ishiguro test” before he got the chance to direct the film. He and his producer Stephen Woolley were “so… great [fans] of the original film,” he recalls, “they were very selective about who they would direct.”

After coming on board to direct the film about finding meaning in man’s final days, Harmanus was challenged to grapple for the first time with the logistics of filming outside his native South Africa. “I was also immersed in a world that was very, very periodic, so creatively it was a pretty big bite for me,” Hermanus said. “But I think I loved it and it was amazing, and I kind of thrived on being out of my comfort zone in almost every way.”

World premiere at Sundance 2022, then Venice, Telluride and Toronto, life Today, Nighy received his first solo nomination at the SAG Awards. Woolley was joined as producer by Elizabeth Karlsen, with the likes of Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp and Tom Burke rounding out the cast.

Ishiguro’s screenplay will compete at the Critics Choice Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay on Sunday, having also been nominated at the British Independent Film Awards.

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