Good times: Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood at the pictures in Living.
INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT
IN LIVING, OLIVER Hermanus’ transposition of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to ’50s London, Bill Nighy gives the performance of a lifetime, rightly rewarded with his first Oscar nomination, for Best Actor. He plays Mr Williams, a repressed civil servant who, diagnosed with fatal stomach cancer, finds a new passion for life, turning his attention to building a children’s playground as his parting shot. Interpreting a sensitive script by acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Nighy delivers a nuanced, extremely moving turn, as far away from Billy Mack in Love Actually (“Yes I have, Ant or Dec”) as you can get. Battling a cold and smarting from a bruising 3-0 Boxing Day defeat for his beloved Crystal Palace (he is a club patron), Nighy is, as you’d expect from a man who has pretty much secured national-treasure status, sparkling company, be it talking acting technique, sitting in fake blood on Shaun Of The Dead or, of course, Wilfried Zaha…
Did you know Kurosawa’s Ikiru going in?
No, I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never heard of it. Unlike Ishiguro or [producer] Stephen Woolley, I am not really a cinephile in that regard. I watch lots of films but I don’t watch the films you’re supposed to watch. So, I hadn’t watched it and then I did and admired it very much. But I didn’t feel oppressed by the idea of it. I suppose I should have really, but because the central performance [by Takashi Shimura], although marvellous, was very different from anything I might have done, I didn’t feel as daunted as I possibly should have done.