July Jung
BY
Anna Fitzpatrick
A conversation with the Korean director and screenwriter about her debut feature, A Girl at My Door (2014), produced by Lee Chang-dong.
A Girl at My Door plays 7 Ludlow beginning on Friday, April 26, as part of Novel Encounters: The Films of Lee Chang-dong.
It’s a familiar story: a cop with a mysterious past is reassigned to a small town, where they find themselves at odds with the suspicious residents. The premise of A Girl at My Door (2014) will be a recognizable one to even the most casual fans of detective fiction, but rather than go the conventional neo-noir route, filmmaker July Jung’s debut feature is a taut domestic drama with forays into psychological thriller: a feminist excoriation of a patriarchal, homophobic community and the lengths women—and girls—are forced to go to to survive.
The film opens with troubled, alcoholic police officer Lee Young-nam (Bae Doona) relocated from Seoul to a seaside town. She meets a young teenage girl, Sun Do-hee (Kim Sae-ron), who is being physically abused by her stepfather, a fact which is well known but either unacknowledged or downright condoned by the other adults in the vicinity. When Do-hee runs away from home, Young-nam becomes her inadvertent caretaker and protector, capturing the ire of the girl’s father who is determined not only to regain control of his daughter, but to see Young-nam punished.
A Girl at My Door, with its smart, unpredictable script and the commanding performances of its lead actresses, cemented Jung’s status as an astute storyteller with a deep understanding of the ways austere systemic struggles can manifest in multidimensional individuals. The film, which was produced by prolific writer-director Lee Chang-dong, premiered at Cannes to a standing ovation. I spoke to Jung over video about the journey to get her first film made, depicting queerness on film, and her working relationship with Chang-dong.—Anna Fitzpatrick
A Girl at My Door (2014)
ANNA FITZPATRICK: A Girl at My Door is playing at Metrograph as part of a series on Lee Chang-dong, who produced this film. How did he get involved?
JULY JUNG: I graduated from the Korea National University of Arts and Lee Chang-dong was a director there. The CJ Cultural Foundation had a sort of screenplay contest going on, where [the Foundation] would produce the selected screenplays. I was selected for [the first] several rounds. But in the final round, my screenplay wasn’t chosen. After those processes were over, director Lee Chang-dong came to me and said that he would still like to work on this screenplay together, and to hopefully make it a reality. And so, that’s how it all started.
AF: Do-hee is such a young character, but she carries so much emotionally. It’s a very intense role. What was the experience of casting the right actor for this role like?
JJ: Kim Sae-ron, the actress who plays the character of Do-hee, was actually 14, the same age as Do-hee in the movie. She’s been known as a child actor before this film. She made her debut as an actor in one of the movies that director Lee Chang-dong actually produced, A Brand New Life (2009). When I was writing the screenplay, I wrote the character with her in mind from the beginning. But when I first offered the role to her, she declined because she said it was really a lot to take.
We went through the casting process of auditioning maybe 1,000 actors for the role, but even till the end, I just couldn’t find anyone who I thought was as suitable as Kim Sae-ron. Once again, the story sort of got out that we were still looking and we were still casting. And Kim Sae-ron, she heard this, and then she reconsidered and she told me that she would give it a try. That’s how it was finally cast. It was rather a dramatic process, I would say.
Later on, when I met Kim Sae-ron, I actually asked her, how did you reconsider and decide to actually take on this role? And she told me, “Yes, I anticipated that it would be a difficult role, but then something in myself told me that this was meant for me and this is a role that I have to do.”
AF: The relationship between Young-nam and Do-hee is often ambiguous on screen. I saw Young-nam as unsure of herself, of how to act with this child that she was trying to support without the real structures in place to guide her or help her. They were both in this situation with no rulebook, where this child is so vulnerable and away from her abusive family. How did you and the actors approach that on set?
JJ: I feel that a lot of the ambiguity comes from the character of Young-nam, her being a woman, and then her being a police chief. And I think that lends to her predicament in how to respond to this dilemma. Now it may be different, but I think in a small town in Korea, where a woman is a police chief, that’s basically the highest ranking officer in that police station. My imagination sort of went to a place of, how would things unfold when a person is in this kind of rank, and also in this kind of environment. Add to that fact that she is LGBTQ, how does that factor into all of these things?
We had a lot of conversations about how someone like Young-nam would respond, not primarily as a police chief, but as a human being. What would realistically be a response when these things are happening to her? That’s how we carried on in the conversations on set.
A Girl at My Door (2014)
AF: The residents of this small town are the antagonists of the film, in their treatment of both Do-hee and Young-nam. Could you speak to using that small town setting as a place of conflict?
JJ: When I was developing this work as my first feature, I started with the two characters first of Young-nam and Do-hee. I wanted to depict these two people as the loneliest people that could possibly meet each other. For Young-nam, she’s living a life sort of in a chosen exile for herself. With Do-hee, she’s a character where she’s almost unaware how lonely she actually is because she’s always been that way. I wanted to see what would happen if these two characters connected. I think fleshing out and filling in the environment that was surrounding them was like a natural progression of trying to figure out how that would fit into the story.
I have also lived in my childhood in a small town adjacent to the ocean. And for Young-nam, I wanted to give her the feeling of being in a place where she couldn’t run, like literally there’s an ocean there, so you’re just trapped. For Do-hee, she’s already there. But she’s basically stuck in the situation. I think all those thoughts culminated in fleshing out the environment and trying to flesh out what I wanted to say as well.
AF: I’m wondering what the response to this film has been like, both in Korea and abroad, and if there’s any differences?
JJ: I will say that this film was released about almost 10 years ago. So I do have to sort of think back, but if I do, I think my initial worry about an audience was that I wasn’t sure if they would actually connect to this story or the characters because it deals with seemingly tertiary people in a very remote area. I wasn’t really sure they would connect. But I remember the first foreign screening of this movie happened at the Cannes Film Festival. I was really surprised because it really felt that it had struck almost, like, a universal cord with the people who viewed it there. And I felt that a lot of people really understood the kind of deep loneliness that the characters were both dealing with. So I remember being very surprised by that response.
A Girl at My Door (2014)
AF: I know you’ve had another big feature come out since this movie. Is there anything else you’re working on that you are able to talk about in this interview?
JJ: You’re correct. Last year, I came out with a new feature film. The English title is Next Sohee. It’s not released in the US yet, but it did run the festival circuit. I was really surprised, because at the Milwaukee Film Festival and then the Seattle Film Festival, they won pretty big awards. And I was just very grateful to learn that audiences in the US also connected to the themes that I was trying to work with in this film. And I am also, yes, I am also working on a new project currently this year. And if all goes well, we will be able to start production this year.
AF: Thank you so much. July, it was so lovely to be able to talk to you.
JJ: I just wanted to add I’m so happy that my debut feature is screening alongside the work of director Lee Chang-dong. I can’t say enough things about him, because he was such an immense presence and support in the beginning of my career. A Girl at My Door wouldn’t have been made were it not for his support and just genuine help. I was a filmmaker just with pure ambition alone, and then he was the person who really bet on my potential and because of him, I was able to get it done and finished. His support means so much to me, and I’m so grateful for that. And to know that it’s being screened alongside his works in New York, it truly is an honor, and I am just so honored and happy to be a part of this event.
Anna Fitzpatrick is a Toronto-based writer and journalist. She is the author of the novel Good Girl (2022, Flying Books).
A Girl at My Door (2014)
