I try to write unfilmable novels,” Kazuo Ishiguro has said, which suggests he’s doing something very wrong. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day was converted quite beautifully into a Bafta award-winning picture. His acclaimed sci-fi tale Never Let Me Go was duly made over as an acclaimed sci-fi thriller. He’s the most cine-literate, film-friendly British author on the scene, a man whose unadorned prose translates serenely to the screen. So his efforts are in vain; he’s cursed with success in both fields. I’m guessing he tries to write unfilmable novels in the same way he tried not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
For a brief spell, it looked as though 2026 might contain a logjam of splashy Ishiguro productions. Then Taika Waititi’s much-touted adaptation of Klara and the Sun (featuring Jenna Ortega as the “Artificial Friend”) stalled near the finish line, while Guillermo Del Toro’s stop-motion treatment of The Buried Giant has only just begun moving. That means we’re left with A Pale View of Hills, the durable tortoise of the trio, which creeps into cinemas next week. Lifted – if anything, a little too carefully – from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut, it’s a hushed, tense tale of buried secrets and banked emotions, the public and the private self; a ghost story of sorts that slides from a creepy 1980s England to a postwar Nagasaki still dazzled by the bomb. There’s a locked bedroom door at the end of the hall; a daughter who demands answers; a middle-aged mum who would rather not spill the beans. This family, we learn, has had to adapt and move on.
Ishiguro’s not fussy; he’ll set his tales anywhere. In Dark Age Britain or a dystopian near-future, a murky Mittel-European city or 1930s Shanghai. But his fictional landscape remains reassuringly familiar – as distinctive in its way as Austen’s Regency England or Hardy’s doomed, rustic Wessex. Time is a trickster that both conceals and reveals. The narrator means well but is not entirely to be trusted. “Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?” asks A Pale View of Hills’s inquisitive young heroine, and it’s an early clue that Ishiguro’s characters tend to lead more than one. These people are a mystery – and often to themselves most of all.
Thick layers of mystery don’t typically translate to the screen, and yet Ishiguro’s novels rarely become bogged down in analysis and function more as emotional whodunnits of existential spy thrillers. Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the martyred heroine of Never Let Me Go (2010), lays a teasing trail of breadcrumbs for the attentive viewer to chase. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), the prissy head butler in Merchant-Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993), only belatedly deduces that he’s in love with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), and that his workplace was really a safe haven for Nazis.
Critics tell us that Ishiguro is a literary lion, unashamedly highbrow, which may well be the case. Structurally, though, his tales aren’t dissimilar to those of the great genre authors: Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie or John Le Carre. They contain the same shadowed corners. Their plots are powered by the same investigative zeal. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Failing that, how about a buried secret, a liar, and someone who seeks the truth?
Probably it helps that he’s a cinephile, too, as fascinated by movies as he is by books. Last year, he named Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) and Gints Zilbalodis’s animated Flow (2024) as among his favourite recent pictures. He’s served on the jury at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals and bagged an Oscar nomination for writing Living (2022), a London-set remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) that whisked Bill Nighy’s dying bureaucrat on a redemptive late-life journey.
The principles of storytelling remain the same, he feels, whether you’re telling that tale on the page or the screen. But it could be that his prose is naturally suited to screenplays because it’s restrained and unflashy, like a series of unhurried prompts. It’s the showboating author (Nabokov, Amis or Roth, for instance) who comes a cropper at the movies; the unobtrusive plain speaker can sometimes slip through unscathed. Ishiguro’s tales may be complex, but his language is simple, encouraging readers to half-write the book in their heads, or the filmmakers to show what it might look like on screen. It’s a fool’s game, explaining why some books make great films while others die in transit (“Nobody knows anything,” as William Goldman used to say). But Ishiguro’s best novels have a far better strike rate than most.
He once said that he views his novels as the equivalent of campfire tales – a yarn that’s alive and in flux and might play out differently each time. That’s essentially what happens to Stevens in The Remains of the Day. He wants to give his version of events, but facts and feelings trip him up. It happens in A Pale View of Hills: the mum concocts a parallel story to keep the truth at arm’s length. And it happens all the time in the business of film adaptation, as books are pulled apart, reassembled and passed on. The stubborn author guards their text; the smart one gives it up and mostly thanks their lucky stars.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and moved to Surrey as a kid. He started out writing songs and then took a side step into fiction. That’s a pretty good primer; it prepares you for Hollywood. He’s learnt to adapt to survive and has grown to quite like it. He’s culturally omnivorous to the point where the boundaries break down. Ishiguro writes books that invite exploration. His open-ended human stories guarantee a second life down the line.
‘A Pale View of Hills’ is in cinemas from 13 March
