He has allowed his own work to be brought to the big screen with films such as ‘The Remains of the Day’ (1993), which won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and is considered by many to be the greatest living British writer. “Never Leave Me” (2010) limited her film debut to the original screenplays of “The Saddest Music in the World” (2010) and “The Russian Countess” (2011). Now he signs ‘Living’, which is nothing more than a re-reading of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece. when you’re about to lose it.
Why did you decide to write a new version of a movie that is generally considered a masterpiece?
Of course, I didn’t do it for the purpose of healing or repairing. I felt that the story told in it would fit very well with some of the British values that were lost after the Second World War. Growing up in England in the early 1960s, I remember that many of my family’s friends and my friends’ parents were very similar to the hero of ‘Living’. I used to take the train to school every morning, and all the men who traveled by train every day wore their suits and bowlers, carried umbrellas with them even if it wasn’t raining, and read ‘The Times’ or ‘The Telegraph’. . I’m fine with the fact that England no longer exists, but I feel nostalgic and fascinated by it.
Why is that?
Because, despite grappling with austerity, poverty and broken infrastructure, this generation of British men and women has managed to bring the country into a flawed but still wonderful creation welfare state.
What is your personal connection to Kurosawa’s film?
When I saw this as a teenager, it meant a lot to me and others my age and around me in the suburbs of England, even though it was talking about an old Japanese man. Because the existential message he advocated was ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1938) or ‘How good it is to live!’ (1946). It’s not advocating that in order to find meaning in our lives, we need to change who we are or achieve something great that the whole world will applaud. Instead, he recommends: Know your limits, accept that your movie will be small, and try to play the best possible hand with the cards you are dealt. You’ll probably be forgotten in the end, but it doesn’t matter because things aren’t done for praise. When I was young, I never thought that one day I would be here, speaking to the press, or winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. I assumed that my life would be insignificant, so such a message touched me deeply.
In fact, a message that never loses its relevance…
Different. Both ‘Vivir’ and ‘Living’ are linked to an emotion that is very common today. Many people have to work long, long hours at jobs that they do not fully understand their meaning or connection to the outside world. The compartmentalization resulting from capitalism has made it increasingly difficult to know how we contribute to social development. So how can we make our lives worthwhile? This is a universal question.
Through your literary work you have come to be recognized as a master of dramatic limitation, another paradigmatic example of this is ‘Living’. Does this classification sound right to you?
There’s only one thing I can add to Kurosawa’s movie, and that’s that I don’t think it’s a controlled movie. Let’s not forget that the Japanese master gained fame primarily thanks to samurai films, and ‘Vivir’ shows the clear disconnect between the sincerity of the stories and the dynamism in which they are told; it is directed like an action movie with camera movements and ‘zooms’. So I always thought this story would fit so well in post-war England. After all, both the way of being English that fascinates me and the idea of the English ‘gentleman’ rest on this constraint. And indeed I believe that somewhere inside all of us we carry an English gentleman who is afraid to express his feelings, who uses phlegm and sobriety to shield himself from the dreadful.
At the same time, it seems that in today’s society everyone needs to constantly showcase their own life. What do you think about that?
There are a lot of things that excite me about new technologies and social networks, but I think they’re out of our control and it’s dangerous. We were convinced when we realized that access to all developments and facilities is free and that the price to be paid for this is our privacy and autonomy. It’s too late now because we’re addicted. Ironically, we will need strong laws to reclaim some of the freedom lost. But there is one thing that scares me the most, and it’s the culture of hate facilitated and legitimized by new technologies.
A clear example of this culture is the stabbing of his friend and writer, Salman Rushdie, while he was preparing to give a talk a few months ago. How did you experience this?
Of course I was terrified, scared and angry. And it got me thinking. When Iran sentenced Salman to death for his book ‘The Satanic Verses’ in 1989, the entire liberal arts community came together in solidarity and protest, and I’m afraid that support wouldn’t have been possible if it were happening these days. I think many in the West would have raised their voices against Salman to demand his cancellation. This forces us to reflect on the world we have created, where freedom of expression is so easily boycotted and artists in general are afraid to express their opinions.