Ishiguro on Why Adaptations Fail: 'Sometimes It's Not Just Loyalty but Laziness'
Ishiguro has watched several of his books become films, among them The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go and A Pale View of Hills. His account of the results is unsentimental: the best films break away from the book and the worst are too faithful, a failure he describes as 'not just loyalty but laziness.'
A transcription is not an interpretation. You can't simply have the text in front of you, he says; you need imagination to move it on. A film, in his telling, has to step out of the book 'on a journey to being something bigger.'
Whether that journey paid off is precisely what is contested: the Guardian's critic loved Ishiguro's 'distinctively spare and poignant' source novel and found Waititi's screen version less convincing — 'certainly noisy.'
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Loyalty to the book is a critic's ledger, and the festival crowd keeps a different one: at the London film festival, a group of young influencers trading highlights agreed on Klara and the Sun, calling it funny and moving, their favourite so far.
They had also gathered to meet the film's creators and stars, and affection on that footing is not a verdict. The paper's own critic, who loved the novel, left less convinced by the screen version.