--- title: Klara and the Sun Is the Latest Ishiguro Film to Fail Where The Remains of the Day Succeeded description: Klara and the Sun flopped. The Remains of the Day earned eight Oscar nominations. Every Kazuo Ishiguro film, and why some work while others fail. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-05T09:30:00.036Z updated: 2026-11-05T09:30:00.043Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/kazuo-ishiguro-films-klara-and-the-sun image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/unsplash-j39x2xx-8cq.webp categories: Literary Culture content_type: Feature publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Kazuo Ishiguro description: Japanese-born British novelist and screenwriter, born in Nagasaki on 8th November 1954. Author of The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989, Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. jobTitle: Novelist and screenwriter sameAs: - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/facts/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazuo_Ishiguro --- Kazuo Ishiguro turns 72 on Sunday 8th November, a fortnight after the worst reviews any film of his work has received. Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun, starring Jenna Ortega as the solar-powered Artificial Friend and Amy Adams as the mother who buys her, opened in Britain and the United States on 23rd October. The Guardian, the Telegraph and the Times each gave it one star, its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 24%, and it has taken about $1.7 million at the box office. Waititi responded by calling his critics irrelevant, out of touch and obsolete. Ishiguro has said he tries to write 'unfilmable novels', yet almost every one of them has reached the screen, and he has written several films himself. Over forty years the record runs from eight Oscar nominations to a Merchant Ivory film that earned back barely a seventh of its budget. The pattern says a good deal about what his books are and what film can do with them. ## The Remains of the Day set a standard nobody has matched Harold Pinter read The Remains of the Day in proof and optioned it before it was published in 1989, the year it won the Booker Prize. Mike Nichols was to direct from Pinter's script. The project passed to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who brought in their regular writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to rewrite it, and Pinter declined a shared credit and took his name off the film. The 1993 film, with Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens and Emma Thompson as the housekeeper Miss Kenton, earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. It won none, in the year of Schindler's List, but it took $63.9 million on a $15 million budget, and in 1999 the British Film Institute ranked it among the hundred greatest British films of the century. There is an argument that it worked because it found a screen equivalent for Ishiguro's narrator. In the novel, Stevens tells the reader far less than he knows, and the story lives in the gap. On screen, Hopkins plays the same withholding with his face, so the audience reads what Stevens will not say. ## Never Let Me Go kept the love story and lost the audience Alex Garland, a friend of Ishiguro, asked for the rights to Never Let Me Go before he had finished reading it, and had a script written before the novel came out in 2005. Mark Romanek directed the 2010 film, with Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley as the three friends raised at Hailsham to become organ donors, and Ishiguro served as an executive producer. Romanek chose to make a love story rather than a science fiction film, and stripped out the futuristic design he had first planned. Reviews were generally warm, and the film still turns up on streaming lists, but it made about $11 million worldwide on a $15 million budget. The novel's slow reveal, which readers piece together over hundreds of pages, is hard to stage for an audience that has read the poster. ## Ishiguro as a screenwriter in his own right Ishiguro wrote for television before most readers knew his name, with two original television films in the 1980s, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason and The Gourmet. His original screenplay The Saddest Music in the World became Guy Maddin's 2003 film, although Maddin and George Toles kept only the title, the premise and the contest to find which country makes the saddest music, and rewrote the rest. The White Countess, his original screenplay for James Ivory, set among displaced Russians in 1930s Shanghai, starred Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave. It was Ismail Merchant's last film, as he died shortly after shooting ended, and it grossed about $4.1 million against a reported $30 million budget. The New York Times called the script anaemic. His best screen work came much later, and from someone else's story. Living, his 2022 adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, moved the dying bureaucrat to 1950s London and gave the part to Bill Nighy, the only actor Ishiguro had pictured in it. Ishiguro and Nighy were both nominated for Oscars, and the film holds a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score. ## A Pale View of Hills went home to Japan His first novel, published in 1982, drew on his mother's memories of Nagasaki, where she was living when the atomic bomb fell. The Japanese director Kei Ishikawa filmed it in Japanese with Suzu Hirose and Fumi Nikaido, moving between 1950s Nagasaki and 1980s England, and it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes on 15th May 2025, with Ishiguro as executive producer. Critics divided: the film holds a 68% Rotten Tomatoes score, while the Guardian, reviewing its British release in March 2026, found it frustrating and flat. ## Klara and the Sun widened a story that only works in one head Sony held Waititi's film for more than two years before releasing it. It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 15th October, and the reviews that followed made the same complaint in different words. The novel is told entirely by Klara, a machine who misunderstands the human world in ways the reader slowly learns to see through. Screen Daily argued that the film loses something by stepping outside Klara's view, and the Guardian objected to the jokey tone Waititi brought to a book that is mostly about grief. Waititi calls it his most dramatic film, and Ishiguro was an executive producer, so the author was not shut out. The weakness the critics named is structural, not a matter of loyalty to the book. ## What Ishiguro says makes a film of his work survive Ishiguro has been unusually clear about what he wants from the people who film his books. At Cannes in 2025 he told the Associated Press that he wants a film to differ from the novel, that adaptations fail when they are too reverential, and that a film which simply reproduces the book can end up 'like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation'. He also said that for every adaptation that reached the screen, ten or fifteen others he worked on fell away. He compares the process to storytellers round a fire, each telling a familiar tale a different way, and jokes that if his stories keep being retold he might one day become Homer. By that measure, the films that lasted were the ones that changed the most while keeping the narrator's blind spot at the centre. The Remains of the Day kept Stevens's silence at its centre. Living was not even his story to begin with. Klara and the Sun added comedy and widened the frame, and lost the single, mistaken point of view that made the novel work. ## Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger is next Ishiguro's next novel, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, is due from Knopf on 9th March 2027. It is set in London in 1938, the year before the Second World War, around an encounter between the mysterious title character and a lover of the music hall. His American publisher, Jordan Pavlin, describes it as spy fiction with the kind of wit associated with P.G. Wodehouse, which would be a new register for a writer known for restraint. It returns him to the England of The Remains of the Day, the book that gave him his best film. Whoever adapts it, on his own evidence, should feel free to change it. ## FAQ **Q: What is Kazuo Ishiguro's most famous book?** The Remains of the Day, published in 1989, is usually named as Kazuo Ishiguro's most famous book. It won the Booker Prize that year and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Never Let Me Go, from 2005, runs it close: it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is widely taught in schools, and is the Ishiguro title searched for most often. Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 for his body of work rather than for a single book. **Q: In what order should I read Kazuo Ishiguro's books?** Reading in publication order shows how his style developed: A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), the story collection Nocturnes (2009), The Buried Giant (2015) and Klara and the Sun (2021). Many readers start with The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go, which are the most accessible, and leave The Unconsoled, his longest and most dreamlike novel, until later. His next novel, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, is due in March 2027.