LIVING Q&A with Oliver Hermanus | TIFF 2022

The team behind LIVING in conversation with TIFF in advance of its premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. In a luscious and textured remake of Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, a British bureaucrat (Bill Nighy) questions his life choices after receiving a terminal diagnosis.

The 47th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8 to 18, 2022. For more, visit http://tiff.net.

In this exquisitely realized remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, director Oliver Hermanus teams with Nobel- and Booker Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro to renew a classic. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) is a buttoned- down, pinstripe- and-bowler hat–clad stereotypical English gentleman in 1952, with a mid-level bureaucratic job in a post- war London county council. Through his taciturn manner, Mr. Williams lets his staff (which includes Aimee Lou Wood, Sex Education) know that maintaining the status quo on files is more important than progress. One day Williams receives a dire diagnosis from his doctor and soon the tightly held reins of his very prosaic life begin to loosen. We discover he is a widower, estranged from his only son, with few friends and fewer interests. Williams realizes that he isn’t facing death; he’s been living it. And so, in the clumsy manner of one who is unpracticed in these things, he begins putting work aside for new experiences. In charmingly awkward sequences, Nighy beautifully captures that specific lead-up to the end of life and the inevitably accompanying questions: did I accomplish anything? Will I leave anything behind? While the heart of the film is Nighy’s understated lead performance, equally as masterful is the profound sense of time and place created by the craft elements, notably production design by Helen Scott (Mothering Sunday, TIFF ’21; Small Axe) and costume design by the multiple Oscar–winning Sandy Powell. It’s all captured on screen by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay (Mothering Sunday), who deeply impresses with his creation of beautiful images filled with light. Mr. Williams would be pleased.

Oliver Hermanus was born in Cape Town. He worked as a press photographer in South Africa before completing his master’s degree at the London Film School. His features Shirley Adams (09), Beauty. (11), and The Endless River (15) played the Festival. Living (22) is his latest film.