Lee Chang-dong
In Conversation With
Phoebe Chen
BY
Phoebe Chen
The Korean filmmaker and novelist discusses the unique possibilities of cinema.
Novel Encounters: The Films of Lee Chang-dong opens at 7 Ludlow on Friday, April 5.
In the films of writer and director Lee Chang-dong, characters are often left to wrest meaning from an inscrutable world after they experience brutal turns in circumstance. The elderly protagonist of Poetry (2010), Mi-ja, is a part-time care worker who must reckon with her 16-year-old grandson’s involvement in a schoolgirl’s suicide. In Secret Sunshine (2007), a young widow moves to a small town after her husband’s sudden death, only to find her son kidnapped for an impossible ransom. If these tragedies seem exceptional in their brutality, Lee also insists on the ordinariness of such crises, since it’s the long-term, structural failures of state and economy that continue to frustrate so many characters’ hopes for survival. These broader forces are notably centered in Burning (2018), and the reverse-chronological plot of Peppermint Candy (1999). The latter takes us from the personal misfortunes of a salaryman to his entwinement with half a century of Korea’s historic catastrophes, including the IMF crisis in the 1990s and the military’s violent suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980.
But even as Lee’s films are known for their desolation, we see other moods surface as characters attempt to coexist with their despair. These bursts of tonal variance are felt not only through small moments of levity—a character driving into a breathtaking dusk, another chancing on riverside flowers—but in the way Lee asks us to ride out the arc of a character’s grief or rage. No pain can crest forever. What happens after the chest-heaving betrayals, the weeks of violent sobbing? For Lee’s characters, attempts to reclaim agency begin with the search for another way of seeing, some perceptual shift to anchor them to life again, even if it risks newer complications, even if such meaning yields further crises. It takes the form of religious faith for Secret Sunshine’s Shin-ae, poetic expression for Poetry’s Mi-ja, fantasies of high life for Burning’s Hae-mi. Tellingly, Lee never ends a film with some conclusive gesture towards brighter days to come. His films are attuned to the mercurial effects of life’s ongoingness, sentiments that surface not as hope, but something more banal and precious. For his upcoming retrospective at Metrograph, I corresponded with Lee over email about chance, agency, and the causality at play in narrative cinema and the world at large.—Phoebe Chen
Peppermint Candy (1999)
PHOEBE CHEN: What does filmmaking offer you that writing doesn’t? How do you know when a story or script needs to become a film? Is there a feeling or a moment that you’re looking for?
LEE CHANG-DONG: Film represents time and movement on the screen. The audience experiences the time in the film together and watches the movement on the screen. Such an experience can never be achieved through literature, but only film can provide it. For example, in Peppermint Candy, a story told in reverse chronological order, the same temporal experience can never be conveyed through literature. I think there are certain stories or scripts that fit to become films. Literary works are often made into films but simply translating the story into video is not enough. For me, filming is about waiting for a cinematic moment. Those cinematic moments that nothing else but only films can provide, where you experience the representation of time and movement, are not pre-conceived or planned in advance, but often arrive unannounced. It can be revealed by a breath of wind shaking a tree in the background, some light between clouds, or a subtle facial expression of a character. While filming, I always feel and wait for such cinematic moments.
PC: Some of your films, like Peppermint Candy, follow a more precise, episodic plot structure whereas others, like Secret Sunshine, are looser in its narrative. What is your process for developing a film’s structure? How much is determined in the script vs. the editing stage?
LCD: You can say that the structure and plot of a film are practically all decided at the script stage. There are times where changes are made during the editing stage, but even then, they can only be partial. Establishing a plot is about finding the necessity of the narrative, and for me, it is the most important and difficult process in all stages of filmmaking. Once the necessity is set, the next step is capturing the contingency on camera. Just like our lives, necessity is built on a myriad of contingencies. I believe that mechanically conveying only the cause and effect of events is what makes a film thin and un-filmlike.
PC: A few years ago, you mentioned in an interview that you started writing literary fiction again. How does this affect your screenwriting and filmmaking process, and vice versa? Do you see a conversation between these two forms of your creative practice, or is one an escape from another?
LCD: I don’t exactly remember what I said in the interview, but I haven’t started writing literary fiction again. There was a time when I started and quit, though. I do think about writing a novel again someday, and that day might not be too far away. There definitely is an interaction between writing novels and directing films for me. The experience of working on literary fiction has been influencing me even after becoming a filmmaker. The most fundamental of all is to ask myself the meaning of what I do. As a writer, I have always questioned the meaning of my writing. What kind of meaning does it bear for my reader and for me? That question itself was the starting point and driving force of my writing. Films are, however, made with something other than meaning, for instance, entertainment, commercial success, or ambition to provide the audience with new stimulus. Audiences do not come to the theater looking for some meaning. Asking about the meaning of the film you’re making as a filmmaker makes it fundamentally difficult to make a film and it also seems unnecessary.
Secret Sunshine (2007)
PC: The characters in your films live in a world that is structured to deny their social and economic agency, but they still try to search for answers, like Jong-su in Burning, or for meaning, like Shin-ae in Secret Sunshine or Mi-ja in Poetry. How do you approach the question of agency for your characters when they are so constrained by limited possibilities?
LCD: My films can be said to be stories about individuals fighting to find the meaning of their lives. They are the weak, yet they engage in a reckless and foolish fight with the absolute strong. They fight against a society’s moral insensitivity and hypocritical ideology (Poetry and Oasis), they fight against the inequality of the mysterious world (Burning), and they don’t mind fighting with God like the heroine of Secret Sunshine. The main character of Peppermint Candy even stands up to the meaninglessness of time like trying to stop a running train. This fight itself is their identity and their agency.
PC: How do you collaborate with performers to create their characters? Has an actor ever changed your initial characterization in the script?
LCD: I like that you said “collaborate with performers” rather than “direct the performers.” I don’t really care for the term “directing the actors.” There probably are a million different methodologies for so-called “directing the actors,” which is equivalent to saying there is no method. One thing I say a lot to actors is, “Don’t act.” It can make the actors bewildered and confused. “Wait a minute, I am an actor. I am supposed to act, but what do you mean not to act?” I tell actors not to try to express certain emotions of the character, but to feel as the character. This is of course easier said than done. At times, it requires a lot of conversation with the actors. I often share conversations that seem irrelevant to the film, such as what I have experienced in life. The good thing about this way (collaborative way) is that the actors don’t feel like they’ve received direct directing, but instead, they think they have found the necessary emotions on their own. Actors can draw even extreme emotions that they will never experience in real life from their own experience. I call this “grabbing the doorknob.” Once you grab the doorknob, you can open the door no matter how heavy the door is. The director helps the actors grab the doorknob. What more can a director do? I never thought that an actor changes a character. Strictly speaking, a character, by nature, is never planned or determined, but is completed by an actor.
PC: The reverse structure of Peppermint Candy becomes a way to explore cause and effect, at the level of an individual character, but also in the context of broader historical forces. How do you approach this idea of causality in your work?
LCD: If we go back in time, namely, if we reverse the cause and effect, know the result first, and then see what brought the result, we can better understand how our life itself is a series of ironies. It is said that the ancient Greeks divided the concept of time into two: time that can be divided evenly into each minute and second (Chronos), and time that can have different weight and meaning when looking back in the face of death (Kairos). Peppermint Candy can be said to be a film that looks back one’s time in the face of death and asks for its meaning.
We live making countless choices in our own time. And if you look back at the time in reverse order, that is, if you look back already knowing the result, you can see the terrifying meaning of the choices that led to that result. Not only personal history but also the history of a nation is the result of choices. Korea’s most recent modern history was the result of the choices made by the Korean people, including the Gwangju Uprising, the military regime, and the IMF national bankruptcy. Peppermint Candy is a film that shows it. I wanted audiences, especially young audiences, to feel the meaning of choices that we make at countless moments in our lives.
Green Fish (1997)
PC: Relatedly, many of your films open with a moment of chance or coincidence that triggers unfolding events, like the scarf on the train in Green Fish (1997), or Jong-su meeting Hae-mi in Burning. What is the role of coincidence and chance in your films?
LCD: I believe a story begins when one person meets another. Just like our lives. It seems like a coincidence, but in retrospect, it was inevitable. In Green Fish, the story would not have begun if Mak-dong had just pretended not to see the woman, the owner of the scarf, being bullied by the gangs, or if he had not tried to settle the score. The same goes for Jong-su in Burning, who grants Hae-mi’s favor to feed the cat while she travels to Africa. A film captures coincidence and chance and represents it on the screen, but audiences realize that beneath the coincidence and chance lies the framework of the inevitable story.
PC: You mentioned that a sense of widespread, simmering rage motivated you to make Burning. What do you think art can do with this despair?
LCD: When people are enraged and despairing of the pain of reality, what can art do? This is a question I have been constantly asking myself, from the time I was writing as a writer until now as a filmmaker. Earlier, I said that I ask about the meaning of the film I make, and it can be said to be the same. It’s not easy to answer, but to put it simply, wouldn’t it be what art can do to express their anger and despair? The question here seems to be how art, especially films, treats them and with what kind of attitude. Even now, films are pouring out problems and suffering of the real world onto the screen, whether it is the pain of war, terrorism, the tyranny of capital or state power, or murder. They are, however, simply consumed as entertainment or materials for cheap catharsis without affecting the soul of the audience.
PC: Have you revisited any of your older films and experienced something unexpected, or realized something new?
LCD: I usually don’t watch my films again once I’m done making it, so this new remastering project offered me a chance to see my films for the first time in a long time. Films make us see the world through the eyes of someone else other than me. This time, I was able to see through my eyes from 20 years ago or ten years ago, and at times it felt unfamiliar. It was interesting to realize that I was subtly or significantly different from who I am now.
Phoebe Chen is a writer and PhD candidate living in New York. Her work has been published in Artforum, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
This interview has been translated from the Korean by Miyonne Lee.
Burning (2018)
