Tim Burton is set to direct an original film written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, according to a Deadline exclusive. Multiple sources tell the trade the project is set in post-World War II Japan. No studio, distributor, or cast is attached.
The project was developed entirely outside the studio system. "It's an original thing that Tim and I put together, privately, without any producers," Ishiguro told Deadline on the red carpet of the Klara and the Sun premiere at the London Film Festival. "I was visiting him in his beautifully crazy house and we thought of an idea and I wrote the script."
Ishiguro has written for the screen before. He wrote the screenplay for Living (2022), starring Bill Nighy, according to Deadline. His novel Klara and the Sun, adapted by Taika Waititi, premiered at the London Film Festival this week. As for the new Burton project, Ishiguro told Variety it is "not a war film" and described it simply as "a Tim Burton film."
Burton wrapped production on Season 3 of Wednesday earlier this year. According to Deadline, the plan is to attach additional talent and take the project to market once the script is further developed. It has not been confirmed whether this will be his next directorial project. The pairing is unexpected: Ishiguro's fiction is interior, elegiac, and restrained. Burton's is expressionist and maximalist. Their meeting point, it turns out, is postwar Japan.