TIFF 2010: THE HOUSEMAID (HANYO, 2010)—The Evening Class Interview With Im Sang-Soo & Lee Jung-jae

Singular pleasures. When I was invited by the publicists of The Housemaid (Hanyo, 2010)—the highly anticipated remake of Kim Ki-Young's 1960 Korean classic—to interview director Im Sang-soo, I agreed to do so if they would pull me a ticket to TIFF's North American gala premiere at Roy Thompson Hall. Little did I expect that—not only would they pull me a ticket—but they would seat me in the director's box with Im Sang-soo and The Housemaid's two lead actors Jeon Do-yeon (Cannes winner for Secret Sunshine) and Lee Jung-jae. At film's end when the spotlight angled up to our section during the applause, I had to resist rising and flexing my bicep. No sense in stealing Lee Jung-jae's thunder.

It was a grounding shift from that evening's spectacular spotlight to my relaxed conversation with the convivial Im Sang-soo and his disappointingly laconic actors the following day at the Four Seasons (especially Jeon Do-yeon who deferred to her director on every count, such that I finally gave up addressing her directly). While waiting for my interview to begin, I was afforded the added pleasure of overhearing Marion Cotillard pointing to the poster for Little White Lies to advise her rapt friends exactly who among that film's male cast was gay. (Don't worry, boys, your secrets are safe with me!)

As synopsized for TIFF: "In this erotic thriller, the housemaid of an upper-class family becomes entangled in a dangerous tryst. A satirical look at class structure, reminiscent of the work of Claude Chabrol, this sexy soap opera is a story of revenge and retribution." At MUBI, David Hudson rounded up the multiple reviews from The Housemaid's international premiere at Cannes. For those who didn't catch Kim Ki-Young's original version at any one of a number of revival screenings this past year (including its appearance in the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival's "Out of the Vault" selection), MUBI has continued to offer Kim Ki-Young's original on free streaming video.

A reminder to Bay Area audiences that Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid will be screening in the World Cinema sidebar at the upcoming 33rd edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Im Sang-soo was born in Seoul. He studied history at Yonsei University before enrolling at the Korean Academy of Film Arts. As a writer and director, his feature films include Girls' Night Out (1998), Tears (2001), A Good Lawyer's Wife (2003), The President's Last Bang (2005), and The Old Garden (2007). [This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!!]

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Michael Guillén: Recently, I had the opportunity to catch a revival screening of Kim Ki-Young's original version of The Housemaid at our Asian film festival in San Francisco and—now having seen your version of the story at last night's North American premiere at Roy Thompson Hall—I can express my admiration that your version is so different, that it's not really a remake at all, and that it's a true revisioning of the narrative. I commend you on that achievement.

I would, however, seek to explore those differences and why you decided to take the story in such a separate direction than the original and why you infused it with such an altogether distinct tone? What was the challenge for you in taking on Kim Ki-Young's much-beloved original?

Im Sang-soo: Kim Ki-Young's movie was made in 1960. The background of that film was its accurate description of the socio-economic environment at the time. The film emerged when Korea was just beginning to develop its middle class and many young women from the countryside would move to the city to work as housemaids for these burgeoning middle class families. I made my film different than the original because Korea's socio-economic environment has changed since then. These days, due to globalization, there is much more separation between the poor and the rich and the definition of the middle class has actually started to break down. Many Koreans who once thought of themselves as middle class—like Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon) in my film—have started to self-destruct as the separation between rich and poor has increased, such that now there is a super-rich class, like the family where Eun-yi is employed. So, as you say, Kim Ki-Young's film is legendary and I wanted to challenge myself remaking it.

Guillén: But what specifically was it that you found challenging in readdressing the socio-economic issues first described by Kim Ki-Young?

Sang-soo: The challenge was exactly in describing how the socio-economic situation is changing in Korea. As throughout Asia, there is now an emergence of the super rich, which is offset against the fact that in the past 20 years those who are poor are becoming even poorer and having even more of a hard time of it. I wanted to challenge myself by showing this social problem.

Guillén: When Noah Cowan introduced the film at last night's gala, he dedicated it to Claude Chabrol who passed away yesterday. Cowan likened your film to Chabrol's "chilly thrillers"; however, you have likened your film to Alfred Hitchcock's style of suspense. Can you speak to what you feel you have borrowed from Hitchcock and brought into your film?

Sang-soo: In François Truffaut's interview with Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock talked about what he felt were the true elements of suspense. For example, when his characters are having a sexual relationship, they think no one knows; but, Hitchcock makes sure the audience knows. The suspense arises from the tension between what is believed to be unknown by the characters but is known by the audience.

Guillén: Speaking of sexual tension, The Housemaid heats up the auditorium. How do you direct such intimate scenes with your actors? How do you create that erotic environment on set? Do you work on a closed set?

Sang-soo: I worked with the sexual relationship between Eun-yi and her employer Hoon (Lee Jung-jae) so that it would be secretive and express the danger of their lust. I'm wondering, did you feel that?

Guillén: Definitely! My question, however, is more technical. I'm wondering how you contain the eroticism on set? Did this require a closed set so that the actors could indulge the intensity of the scenes?

Sang-soo: Usually, yes, it was a closed set but also it must be said that my actors are very professional. They could joke around with each before shooting; but, once the cameras started rolling, they took their direction quite seriously.

Guillén: The film's tag-line that "sometimes innocence becomes a menace" distinguishes the difference in character and tone that I noted between Kim Ki-Young's film and yours. In the original, I felt the maid was bad from the beginning but Jeon Do-yeon's performance is admirably multi-faceted and her character arc painfully enunciated. Why did you choose to focus on the—for lack of a better term—deflowering of her innocence?

Sang-soo: I actually don't think it's a "deflowering" of innocence because there is no person in the world who is innocent, per se. Eun-yi understood what was going on, she knew what was at stake in the situation and what the dynamics were within the house, but she went ahead and built up her hopes and enflamed her desires. Her revenge at film's end was a way to maintain her dignity in the face of her own choices.

Guillén: Jung-jae Lee, your character Hoon has to hold his own among a pride of lionesses, in effect; strong, beautiful, cruel women. How did you pull out of yourself the necessary strength to match these women?

Jung-jae Lee: Through unexpected behavior.

Guillén: How do you mean "unexpected"?

Jung-jae Lee: That the character himself would even think of having sexual relations with the housemaid in the presence of his family indicates that he possesses this strength.

Guillén: A strength which could probably be more accurately characterized as arrogant privilege. My favorite nuance in your characterization of Hoon was—when discovering that his wife and his mother-in-law have had Eun-yi's baby aborted—rather than being concerned with her welfare, he is indignant that this action was taken without his knowledge or compliance. For a moment you almost feel compassion for him, for his loss, and yet you realize it's mainly pride on his part and no sense of genuine care for Eun-yi.

Jung-jae Lee: I think every human being is capable of such selfishness and duplicity, pretending to put someone else's interests first but thinking only of themselves.

Guillén: With that arrogant privilege in mind, let's turn to how it has been represented in the film's production design. If your challenge to yourself, Im Sang-soo, was to depict the increasing divide between the poor and the super-rich, you have staged it excellently in this house where Eun-yi comes to work as a maid. The house is amazingly designed, not the least of which is its collection of paintings scattered throughout. They telegraph a sense of unbridled acquisition true to Hoon's privileged character. Clearly this was your intention? Can you speak to how you came up with the vision of the house?

Sang-soo: Just as in all the super-rich homes in Europe, Korea and Asia, what these people try to do is to copy the traditional European lifestyle: drinking good wines, collecting paintings, listening to opera. Myself, I find it questionable that this would be a life they genuinely enjoy or if it's not more for show.

Guillén: I don't want to give away the film's shocking and spectacular set piece ending; however, I am interested in the rhyme between the film's introductory scene where the young woman jumps off the high building to her death and Eun-yi's suicide. What are you trying to say by that framing rhyme?

Sang-soo: People don't know why the young woman in the first scene has committed suicide. These people witness the suicide and then they forget about it. It's possible that at film's end when Eun-yi commits suicide that people in the neighborhood heard about the housemaid committing suicide but then—just as easily as in the first instance—they will forget about it. The point is that—even though throughout the movie it is never explained why the young woman in the first scene committed suicide—she has a story. We just don't know about it like we know about Eun-yi's story. Suicide has become much more frequent in Korea as the economy has become unstable.

Guillén: My final question, then. The coda to the film is a nearly surreal and extremely stylized set piece that proves unsettling for being so ambivalent. Can you offer a bit of insight as to what you wanted the audience to take away from that scene?

Sang-soo: There has been a lot of controversy surrounding that last scene. Even one of the producers wanted it deleted. Many people complain about it. But without that scene, I think the movie would have been just so-so. I went with my gut feeling and included it. It's a simple set-up: they're giving a birthday party to a little girl who just witnessed something terrible and trying to cover up her trauma with expensive gifts. I wanted audiences to wonder if she could truly heal from such an event?

Cross-published on Twitch.

THIRST (BAK-JWI, 2009)—Q&A With Park Chan-wook

The Bay Area premiere of Park Chan-wook's Thirst was previewed at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinemas to a capacity audience composed of the combined memberships of the San Francisco Film Society and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) and made possible by Focus Features. CAAM's Festival Director Chi-hui Yang moderated the Q&A between director Park and his capacity crowd, with translative assistance from Moho Film's Project Development Manager Wonjo Jeeng. This transcript is not for the spoiler-wary.

As synopsized at Cannes: "Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a beloved and admired priest in a small town, who devotedly serves at a local hospital. He goes to Africa to volunteer as a test subject in an experiment to find a vaccine to the new deadly infectious disease caused by Emmanuel Virus (E.V.). During the experiment, he is infected by the E.V. and dies. But transfusion of some unidentified blood miraculously brings him back to life, and unbeknownst to him, it has also turned him into a vampire. After his return home, news of Sang-hyun's recovery from E.V. spreads and people start believing he has the gift of healing and flock to receive his prayers. From those who come to him, Sang-hyun meets a childhood friend named Kang-woo (Ha-kyun Shin) and his wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin). Sang-hyun is immediately drawn to Tae-ju. Tae-ju gets attracted to Sang-hyun, who now realizes he has turned into a vampire, and they begin a secret love affair. Sang-hyun asks Tae-ju to run away with him but she turns him down. Instead, she tries to involve Sang-hyun in a plot to kill Kang-woo."

Synopses are rarely as wry as Maggie Lee's for The Hollywood Reporter: "Korean auteur extraordinaire Park Chan-wook's Thirst is a torrid expression of predatory instinct and insatiable, all-consuming love, embodied through its protagonist's difficulty in holding his day job as a priest-cum-miracle-healer, and his night shift as an accidental vampire and fornicating murderer." Okay! There you have it.

Initiating the questioning, Chi-hui Yang noted that Park Chan-wook had been a film critic before he began making films, accounting for his keen sense of storytelling and genre. Park's play with genres—the political thriller, the revenge film, the fairy tale, the vampire film—typify his films but likewise defy and upend audience expectations by transcending genre. Chi-hui asked director Park how he liked to play with genre in his films?

Park responded that, for him, genre is a kind of chain and a bit of a headache. As a commercial film director who's granted a considerable amount of money to make his films, genre has become a fence delimiting his filmmaking. He can't seem to escape it. To remain within the limitations (i.e., fences) of genre is incredibly boring. But the real problem is the fact that he doesn't really hate genre and the specific genres that he plays around with are the thriller, horror or film noir. A genre he would like to tackle in the future would be science fiction. The thing is, however, that—despite their limitations—he loves these genres, even though over a long period of time these genres have become related with old conventions, which he sometimes embraces; other times destroys; sometimes only partially changes. That's how he plays games with these clichés. As Tae-ju says to Sang-hyun in Thirst, she considers him a "germ" that has infected their happy family, creating havoc. Much in the same way, Park considers himself a "germ" who has infected the realm of genre conventions.

Scott Macaulay addresses this in his career overview for Film In Focus. Macaulay writes: "The genre-savvy cinema of Park Chan-wook is one that delivers true movie-movie kicks, but it's also one that embeds its shocks within the ethical dilemmas posed by the world around us."

Chi-hui next asked Park how he thought about his audiences when creating his films? Of course, like many other artists and filmmakers, what Park strives for in his films is to try and pose a question, but he has no illusions that his questions are original and haven't been posed by many filmmakers and artists before him. Questions like: where is the end of revenge? What are the consequences—or rewards if you like—of revenge? Why are we born into certain conditions? Where do our identities come from? These questions have been repeatedly posed by a great number of artists; but, what's important is—not how the question is posed—but how a director makes the question relevant to the audience? Or how he can make the audience acutely aware of the questions? To that end, Park designs many of the visual and sound elements in his films; he develops the narrative structure so that it flows; and envisions how the actors will perform. He attempts to control each and every required element in hundreds of shots so as to build and pose this question.

These questions posed by film directors are usually conceptual and can be expressed in sentences; however, a film should not be doing that. A film in all cases should try to convey and present these questions in the most sensual way possible. In Park's opinion, that is the point of filmmaking. That's why a filmmaker uses all kinds of mediums—music, sound, imagery—to pose the question. Furthermore, when Park makes a film, he tries not to just use aural or visual senses; but, also a film that you can touch, or almost smell. Although not always successful, he strives for that level of sensory filmmaking.

At the Cannes press conference, Park answered similarly: "My top priority was to make a film that would appeal to our five senses. I was careful to think about how the film would feel physically. I wanted Thirst to be seen, heard, and felt, either by smell or touch. In each shot, I strove to keep the audience's five senses constantly tingling."

By example, when Sang-hyun goes to Africa there's a scene where he's playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on his recorder. He starts out with Bach's beautiful cantata melody but it turns into the sound of blood gushing out of every hole of the recorder. To transition this beautiful Bach melody into the sound of blood spurting out of all these holes, Park isn't just seeking horrific effect. The scene is a metaphor for the main character Sang-hyun who is noble and holy and has risked his own life to save humanity. He contracts the virus that initiates the disease in his body. At the same time, this scene foretells what's to come in the rest of the film and how Sang-hyun will experience a moral downfall and ends up as a creature, or being, that has to commit horrific wrongdoings in order to survive.

One more example would be the observing eyes of Lady Ra (Hae-sook Kim). When Sang-hyun kills Tae-ju and is sucking on her blood, his eyes meet those of Lady Ra's and it becomes a shocking moment. But why should it be so? Lady Ra is a paralyzed person whose gaze taunts (haunts?) Sang-hyun. For an audience member, a close-up on Lady Ra's eyes is not just a close-up; rather, it feels like needles are coming out of her piercing eyes. In a sense, Park is trying to create a physical shock through a sensory experience. Also at film's end when the sun is coming up, Park has many shots of the sun coming up but it's not just about the sun rising; it's also about creating the feeling of hundreds of thousands of needles coming out from the sun.

Asked why his scenes are often contained in small, nearly claustrophobic spaces, Park explained that he is trying to make the questions he's throwing at the audience as clear as possible. Confined spaces serve as a device to help clarify his questions. In limited or confined spaces, there are only a limited number of variables that a director can come up with. How characters interact with each other within confined spaces reveals the true nature of the question.

At the Cannes press conference, Park answered this question alternately: "The movie is not in a single room, but a single house. In Thirst, incarceration is psychological rather than physical. I like the motif of incarceration. That's because these places are miniaturized universes. These are the spaces where existential circumstances that people face are more clearly revealed. Also, it saves on the budget to shoot on sets like these."

At film's end, however, he has the characters come out of the confined spaces into a wide open space at the edge of the ocean. There's a sense of liberation coming out of the claustrophobic environment. Energy applies to vast spaces as well. There are conditions of course. These wide environments need to not have much else going on; they should be spatially simple, spare and clear. Similarly to his confined spaces, these vast open spaces simplify and purify the questions he's trying to ask. By doing this, Park maximizes the effect of his film's ending. The effect he's aiming for is to try to create a simple background, much like a film screen itself with little projected upon it. By minimizing what you see in the background, Park woos the audience to consider their own thoughts and to come to their own conclusions after watching the film. Would his characters be happy after going through all this? What will become of them? Is this a happy ending? In order to give the audience space to think about and answer these questions, a clear space is required so they can focus on these questions.

As for why he made his protagonist a Catholic priest, Park offered that his idea was centered around a truly noble character who—regardless of his good wishes or intentions and (if you believe in God) due to God's will or (if you don't) due to some unforeseen forces—becomes a being who is farthest from what is noble. He experiences a great downfall. In telling this story, he thought, "What if the main character was a Catholic priest? Catholic priests always pray for others and live to serve others." This character—now a priest—was to do some truly good deed which backfires and makes him a vampire, an evil being just by the fact that he lives on the blood of humans. This transition—or, more accurately, downfall—from a high position of nobility to the lowest point of immorality is the key idea of the story. Priests are a group of people who—by vocation—have to drink the wine of transubstantiation each time they conduct mass and the wine represents Christ's blood, of course. Drinking the wine, they contemplate the mystery of Christ's blood that was shed to save and redeem humanity. But having become a vampire has inverted the sacrament. The blood Sang-hyun drinks is not to save or redeem mankind; but, to insure his own survival. He's not ritually drinking wine but literally drinking human blood. Park didn't intend to ridicule or mock Catholicism in any way. Vampirism and Catholicism were simply devices to tell the story of this noble character's downfall.

Asked a similar question at the Cannes press conference, Park Chan-wook replied: "When I made the hero a priest, my idea was not to criticize the calling or the religion, both of which I respect. I was just looking for the purest and most humanistic job a person in our society could have, and the priesthood seemed obvious to me. To have a character who practices charity and does good deeds in daily life, and who needs to drink blood to stay alive … I was curious about the dilemmas that could create, and what the moral of the story could be…. When I was mulling over this project ten years ago, I wanted to avoid all the usual vampire flick clichés, like the manor house, the cloak, the garlic, or the Christian cross. Vampires are always shown in a romantic way, with their fangs, and all … I wanted my own vampire to be quite realistic and even scientific."

Of related interest: The video of the Cannes Press Conference with Park Chan-wook and his leading actors, Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-bin is available at the festival's official website.

And though Dave Hudson has scooped up most of Thirst's Cannes coverage at The Daily @ IFC, I might add Brian Hu's recent review for Asia Pacific Arts. "It's often said," Hu writes, "that what made Kurosawa's Shakespeare adaptations better than any of Hollywood's is that the change in culture and setting liberates the material from the need to create Shakespeare. Park Chan-wook's vampire drama Thirst benefits similarly." Hu notes the film contains "moments of pretension, interspersed with operatic brilliance."

One of my main reactions to Thirst, however, pivots around the issue of timing. Park admitted Thirst has been a project brewing for 10 years and I'm curious if that delay lost him an element of surprise? Writing for Austin360, Charles Ealy observed: "If you've ever watched True Blood, you'll spot the similarities immediately." Alan Ball's HBO series True Blood, which premiered in 2008, includes a young vampire named Jessica Hamby, "made" by the protagonist vampire Bill Compton as a part of his punishment for murdering a fellow vampire. Raised in an overly strict environment, Jessica relishes being made a vampire because—through vampirism—she achieves emancipation. But her newly-won freedom based on ravenous instinct proves problematic. Sound familiar? Watching Tae-ju's character arc in Thirst, I was immediately reminded of Jessica Hamby in True Blood. What would the reception for Thirst have been like if Park had been able to get it filmed even two years earlier? I sense it would have hit as hard as Oldboy. Instead, because Thirst has come out a year after True Blood—whose vampiric erotics are now part and parcel of American pop culture—Thirst's reception has been weakened for feeling derivative, though as Ealy also qualifies: "[T]his doesn't mean that Thirst should be dismissed. It's quite stylistic, with the unmistakable imprint of an auteur." I mentioned this to the film's publicist who admitted that, indeed, timing was an issue in the film's reception; but, he wasn't convinced that the audience for Sookie Stackhouse's story would be the same audience for the subtitled Thirst. Still, the popular trope of vampire conversion as feminine emancipation is intriguing.

My favorite visual in Thirst was that of Tae-ju's veins nearly glowing beneath her skin. I'd never seen lust represented like that before. Not only Tae-ju's thirst for erotic gratification, but Sang-hyun's own thirst gone "irreversibly sexual." Brian Hu has written that the sexual energy in Thirst—more than being visual—is fabulously tactile and sonic. I wish Park could have spoken to how he worked with his sound designer to effect horror and how he and frequent collaborator Cho Young-uk decided upon baroque pieces of music to effect the film's romantic melancholy?

Finally, comparable to our discussion on the distinction between guilt and culpability, I wish Park and I would have had time to discuss the nature of Sang-hyun's righteousness. Park stated that he felt this was an example of nobility, from which he could stage the character's moral downfall; however, I actually took Sang-hyun's righteousness as the proverbial pride before a fall; not quite as noble as Park attests. In his righteous zeal, Sang-hyun allows himself to be experimented upon, resulting in his vampirism. At what point must one be responsible to the pride of righteousness? And what can be said of the dangers of conversion, whether religious or vampiric? "Vampires are a metaphor for all kinds of exploiters. I certainly do believe in the existence of exploiters," Park has said. I wish we would have had time to discuss the exploitive danger of conversion, both vampiric and religious.

Surprisingly enough, Park's attendance at San Diego's Comic-Con appears to have been overshadowed by the buzz over other studio projects. I haven't seen a smidgen of coverage from the Los Angeles Times—who has been cranking out reports on the convention (maybe I just haven't seen it yet?)—and Ryan Connors' dispatch to ScreenRant described the Comic-Con panel for Thirst as "the Anti-Twilight." Noting that the crowd thinned out after the Kick-Ass panel, "only a few hundred hard-core fans remained for acclaimed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's first Comic-Con appearance, promoting his vampire-romance Thirst. [A] trailer for Thirst was played for the partly empty crowd."

Thirst opens in the Bay Area on July 31.

Cross-published on Twitch.

THIRST (BAK-JWI, 2009)—The Evening Class Interview with Park Chan-wook

Winner of this year's Cannes Jury Prize Ex-aequo, Park Chan-wook's ninth feature Thirst polarized audiences arguably satiated with blood and violence in a festival line-up described as the most sanguine in Cannes history. Surveying the aggregate compiled by Dave Hudson for the IFC Daily, Thirst received a fierce dismissal from Daniel Kasman at The Auteurs Notebook—who found the film apparently stupid and hollow—as well as a gushing endorsement from Blake Etheridge at Cinema Is Dope who tagged it "the first masterpiece of 2009." In his admittedly more moderate concurrence for Screen Daily, Darcy Paquet stated that at "its best moments, Thirst offers something of the poetic force of cinema's timeless masterpieces." Poetry being a glittering crown to place on the head of a narrative, one has to take such anointments with a smidge of caution. Todd Brown's assessment for Twitch weighs the pros and cons quite fairly, ultimately queuing in the con camp.

"While hardly a favorite of the festival," Eric Kohn dispatched to The Wrap, "Thirst succeeds as a lively crowd pleaser." The film did well with its Korean audiences on opening weekend, scoring nearly $6,000,000 in box office. Thirst contains several firsts: 1) It's Park Chan-wook's first vampire movie and, indeed, his first venture into the genre of supernatural horror; 2) it's the first mainstream Korean film to feature full-frontal adult male nudity from one of its leading box office stars (which might have had something to do with its opening weekend box office); and 3) it's the first Korean film co-produced by U.S. studio Universal Pictures International, distributed by Focus Films. Focus, in fact, has done an admirable job promoting the film on its website Film In Focus. Not only have they provided a succinct and well-written career overview by Scott MacAulay, but they've included three intriguing slideshow surveys: Nick Dawson profiles 12 of the directors grouped into the "New Korean Cinema"; Anne Billson provides a short history of the vampire film; and Peter Bowen addresses the issue of "sexy priests".

By separate entry, I'll finesse the film in more detail; but, for starters, here's my transcript of a conversation I had with Park Chan-wook when he was in San Francisco for the film's press junket. My thanks to John Weaver at Terry Hines & Associates for setting up this one-on-one and to Moho Film's Project Development Manager Wonjo Jeong for his translative assistance. Further thanks to the suggested query from Twitch teammate Ard Vijn. Warning: This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!

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Michael Guillén: Welcome to San Francisco! Have you been driving around like Jimmy Stewart in compulsive pursuit of some elusive object of desire? I understand that's the specific scene from Hitchcock's Vertigo that compelled you to venture into filmmaking? Did I Confess have anything to do with Thirst's sexualized priest?

Park Chan-wook: For me, the film Vertigo itself is an object of desire. I've seen a limited sampling of locations where Vertigo was shot while in San Francisco; but, I didn't have enough time to make it to the cemetery at Mission Dolores, which is of course an important location for a pivotal scene in that film. But rather than seeing any particular San Franciscan location, what has been most attractive to me about Vertigo is Jimmy Stewart's literal pursuit of Kim Novak's character. That's what I like in Vertigo. There isn't a particular scene or bit that I like in the film; it's Stewart's overall pursuit that I enjoy. There's several point of view shots and endless roads and streets that he travels following her.

Pursuing Vertigo as an object of desire, however, is a desire that cannot be filled because so many things are different now than when the film was shot: the atmosphere is different, the air at the time, the kind of sunlight at the time is something that cannot be recreated. My pursuit of a Vertigo "experience" is something that will probably remain elusive forever.

Speaking of Hitchcock and influences, especially from his film Vertigo, the surrealism that Hitchcock captures in realistic moments is something I'm always trying to achieve. Looking at North by Northwest, for example, its villainous, bitter and dark sense of humor is also something I always strive for. But I Confess? Though Montgomery Clift is an actor I like very much, the film itself not so. In all honesty, I can't even recall the film very well.

Guillén: Via Twitch teammate Ard Vijn: Some of your movies, notably Oldboy, have been based on mangas, and often feature sequences which are full of visual jokes and fantastic elements. I'm A Cyborg… especially contained some stunning, playful and abstract images. Are you interested in creating a fully animated movie?

Park: A lot of directors say during film production that—if they had more money—they could build a set that they could destroy, take a wall out and move a camera around, and be given total freedom to shoot a film in whatever way they want. There's also the restriction of the "magic hour": there's a very limited time of the day when you can utilize the beautiful sunlight as it sets during the magic hour. Directors always complain about these restrictions and limitations placed on them while creating their art. That being said—with so many directors complaining about restrictions and limitations—why don't they all switch to animation? There must be a variety of reasons.

Speaking for myself, my reason is that there are no actors involved. What I mean by that is that—in my filmmaking—I thoroughly prepare storyboards. In fact, I prepare a storyboard for an entire film from start to finish. This is a means of controlling my production as much as I can. I try to plan ahead as much as I can from the earliest pre-production stages. However, an actor's performance is the only element that cannot be calculated 100%. Often your film will depend upon your actor's performance, ability and passion. Amid all these things that I've predicted and prepared for and the plans I've set in place, the only thing that still holds an element of surprise is an actor's performance. It's by always being ready to be surprised by an actor's performance that I'm able to still be tense during a film shoot. If it weren't for that variable, shooting film would be a boring process where everything is predictable and everything goes according to plan.

Animation is a fully-controlled environment, as opposed to a live-action film where there is still an element of surprise in an actor's performance that the director can't fully control or anticipate 100%. Just for the sake of argument—and not because I think directors are God—but, if directors were God, would this God prefer a world where every human acts in accordance with His will? Or would this God find it more interesting to watch over a world where humans are given free will with which to act? Within that metaphor, an argument could be made that it's preferable to be a live-action director than an animation director. Despite the fact that it probably is more interesting to be in a situation where humans act off free will, when I watch animation films like Mamoru Oshii's Ghost In the Shell or Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira—very well-made animation films—I feel a desire to do animation films. So who knows? I might actually go ahead and do an animation.

Guillén: Can you speak to the connective tissue between Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin and your film? When did you first read the novel? Why did it speak to you? And what did you sense was potentially cinematic about it? Accordingly, what elements have you felt have most successfully transferred over into Thirst?

Park: I began thinking about this story one night 10 years ago and—even within that first imagining—it included the scene (which made its way into the film) where Sang-hyun strangles Tae-ju. Despite being overcome with sorrow, he can't resist his lust for blood and he begins to drink her's. Within moments, however, he realizes how animal-like he has become drinking the blood of someone he loves so much. He decides to give his blood to her, thereby reviving her, but as a vampire. All the details of that scene came up when I first thought of this story 10 years ago.

After I first thought of the story, it ended up on the shelf for years. Where this woman came from, how he fell in love with her, the details of their relationship, were all left blank. Then one day I came across Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin and—when I first read the novel—I meant to make a separate film; but, then I thought, "Why not fuse Thérèse Raquin and the vampire story?" Why I felt I could do this was because—when I fused the two together—I felt Thérèse Raquin filled in the blanks left by the vampire story. I first visualized this scene where Sang-hyun turns Tae-ju into a vampire—and his subsequent realization of the true nature of his sucking the blood from someone he loves, being shocked by his own behavior, and his attempt to reverse the process by turning her into a vampire—10 years ago. I first visualized that moment of realization as taking place in the bath room where Sang-hyun would catch his reflection in the mirror and realize what he was actually doing. But I didn't actually like using this device of the mirror because it was the easy way out. Anyone could think of using a mirror in this situation.

Instead, I came across Thérèse Raquin. I felt the character of the mother-in-law (Madame Raquin in the novel; Lady Ra in the film) could stand in for the mirror. Rather than using the actual mirror in the bathroom, I could use her observing eyes. When Sang-hyun's eyes meet hers during this scene, reflecting her shock and horror, he realizes what he's doing. As an audience member, you might consider this a minor detail; but, for a filmmaker like me, it's possibly one of the most important decisions made making this film. Once I came across this piece of the puzzle—inspired by Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin—everything else fell together.

Guillén: You have said "No one will be able to conceive of the religious issues that are embedded in Thirst." Let's take that on. For me the strongest religious issue in Thirst was the subtle distinction between guilt and culpability. Did you intend to address that distinction? How do you distinguish guilt from culpability?

[At this juncture the interpreter asked me what I meant by "culpability" and I said that—as I intended it—guilt is an emotive response of conscience; feeling "bad" about something one has done—whereas, culpability is something at fault within an individual, inherently "bad", for which an individual is truly blameworthy; but, for which—notwithstanding—he or she must likewise be responsible.]

Park: You have actually put your finger on a point I repeatedly emphasize in my films. This priest Sang-hyun has become a vampire despite his wanting to do a good deed. He didn't ask to become a vampire. What's worse, he was actually trying to do something good. Vampirism has befallen him. His identity has become defined for him. His choice was not involved in this process. Perhaps he could have just accepted his fate and become a "good" vampire living by whatever his desires dictated? He might have even found happiness living the life of a vampire the best he could? Instead, Sang-hyun struggles against his identity as a vampire, which opposes his teachings in the Catholic faith and his moral standards as a human that include not committing murder and so on.

In Sang-hyun's struggle to live as a vampire while holding onto his human faith, we see him fall into ridiculous, contradictory situations. Ultimately, he ends up killing a woman he loves, turning her into a vampire. This she-vampire is honest to her instincts. She revels in the fact that she has become a vampire and finds pleasure in killing people. Sang-hyun, as priest, feels responsible for this and—despite the fact that committing suicide is also a sin in Catholic teachings—he takes responsibility for creating a creature who he knows will kill many other people. Sang-hyun is a character who—as you say—feels culpability. He tries to take responsibility even though he probably doesn't have to—he was forced into his situation; he didn't choose to be a vampire—but, whether it's right that he tries to take responsibility right up until the end or whether it's wrong, whether it's a smart or stupid thing for him to do, accepting responsibility is up to each and every individual to decide. I find Sang-hyun's decision to take responsibility for his vampirism, noble and heroic. He achieves integrity through his attempt to accept responsibility for his actions.

To take a specific example from Thirst to highlight where I've made a distinction between guilt and culpability, I cite the scene where Sang-hyun is trying to justify his killing people who want to commit suicide anyways. He says that—when he meets these people who want to commit suicide and whose blood he drinks—they seem to have a comfortable and peaceful death. In a way he feels he is helping them somehow. That's, of course, a ridiculous justification—it's only an excuse for taking their blood—and killing them in the process is, of course, a sin. Yet, in order to avoid the sin of committing suicide—in this case indirectly because if he chose not to survive, if he chose not to drink other people's blood, he would (in effect) be committing suicide—Sang-hyun kills because he needs other people's blood to survive. Thus, in order to avoid committing the sin of suicide, he's helping kill those who want to commit suicide. Of course this is not logical; but, this is nevertheless Sang-hyun's attempt to avoid guilt. It's his attempt to stop feeling bad about the wrong things that he does. By film's end, he ultimately realizes his behavior is morally corrupt, he has committed sins, and he takes responsibility for them. That's how I distinguish guilt from culpability.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2006 SFKAFF: TaeGukGi: The Brotherhood of War (2004)

Closing night at 2006 SFKAFF saw the return of Je-Gyu Kang's Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) to the Bay Area after its initial run last Fall. This go around, however, director Je-Gyu Kang introduced the film and fielded questions from his Presidio audience afterwards.

Taegukgi was Korea's official submission to the foreign language category of the 2004 Academy Awards®. As I expressed to Je-Gyu Kang, I found the film a scathing indictment of war as well as a powerful historical corrective. Je-Gyu Kang admitted his pleasure that the film has screened in more than 40 countries.

Though markedly different in tone and scale, Taegukgi and Spring in My Hometown (1998) both assert that the Korean war was not a war Koreans really wanted to fight. They were pawns ground up between democratic and communist ideologies. It was, in effect, not really their war even though they killed their own kind and ravished their own country. Of course Koreans wanted the war to stop so they could return to their homes and get on with their lives. Whereas Hometown depicted the effect of the war and American presence on Korean family life in a village far removed from battle, Taegukgi marched fearlessly into the trenches, replicating battle carnage to a degree I've rarely seen. Its unflinchingly melodramatic flourishes elevated its characters above the bloody clamor to achieve a heroic stature. The grand, sweeping score by Lee Dong-jun securely manipulated sympathies.

Asked whether films like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan had exerted any kind of pressure or influence upon the kind of war movie he wanted to make, Je-Gyu Kang's asserted his film was different. Its focus was not on any one side winning out over an enemy; but rather, a movie where both sides won out against war. Asked which scenes were the most difficult to shoot, he responded that the multiple battle sequences were filmed in the mountains under severe weather conditions. Further, because they needed so much smoke for the movie, and because their budget would not allow the usual Hollywood price of $50 per smoke canister, Je-Gyu Kang was forced to burn tires, sometimes up to as many as 300 a day. Not only did this deplete the stock of tires in the region but polluted the air so badly that breathing the smoke day in and day out proved problematic for actors and crew.

Well into the film an oversized Hershey's chocolate bar is introduced into the narrative as an indication of the arrival of an American military presence in Korea (and its concomitant colonial implications). I asked if the product placement was thematic or commercial? Je-Gyu Kang assured me the Hershey's corporation did not give him the license to use the product, let alone any funding. This scene has been deemed "anachronistic", however, by Sanjuro, reviewer for Love HK Films.com who observed that "companies weren't required to list the 'Nutrition Facts' until the 1990s."

Both lead actors—Jang Dong-gun as the older brother and Won Bin as the younger—successfully carry the weight of the film to its anticipated denouement where brother is pit against brother in the hellish confusion of battle. Won Bin especially conveys a vast array of emotions in contrast to his stern, steel-faced brother. Whereas Won Bin cries frequently thoughout the film, Jang Dong-gun cries but once.

Of related interest: Darcy Paquet provides background at the Korean Film Page.

2006 SFKAFF: The "Voice" of Yeogo Gwedam

While most are probably tiring of the alphabetical horror coming out of Asia (J-horror, K-horror, T-horror, etc.), I remain infatuated with the material. Like rock & roll, horror movies keep me young. Thus, I couldn't resist Ik-Hwan [Equan] Choe's Voice, the fourth installment in Korea's yeogo gwedam (girls high school horror) series. I haven't seen the other three—Whispering Corridors, Memento Mori, and The Wishing Stairs—though I intend to. I was properly horrified by The Tale of Two Sisters, however.

Kyu Hyun Kim's synopses for both the SFKAFF catalog and the Korean Film Page background the tale.

Voice adds a whole new ouch to the paper cut. Its strength lies in its atmospheric dread and attendant special effects. What most impressed me was its riff on the premise that hearing is the last sense to go before you die and that it is in the remembrance of those departed that they remain alive. Without memory, death conquers. Choe does a fine job of capturing the confused pain of a ghost unwilling to let go of life. Most ghost stories make a point of showing how frightened the living are of the dead; but, Voice inverts the formula to show how frightened the dead are of the living.

2006 SFKAFF

Caught two features--Double Agent and Spring In My Hometown--at the 4th San Francisco Korean American Film Festival (SFKAFF), co-presented by KIMA, San Francisco State University and Stanford University. First, I have to say how great it was to see a movie in the Presidio again!! It's been years. Over a decade.

Watching both of these films made me aware how painfully uninformed I am about the Korean war and Korean history. I guess one could blithely dismiss such ignorance, wondering why one should even have to know, but, due to the American presence in Korea and its effect (masterfully portrayed in Spring In My Hometown), I welcome the opportunity to learn more.

Spring In My Hometown was beautiful, sad, and revelatory. Darcy Paquet's commentary at his Korean film site deepened my insight.

Lee Kwangmo's 1998 autobiographical piece won several awards when it first traversed the festival circuit. Told from the point of view of two childhood friends, and filmed in long shots that capture the Korean landscape and Korean village life, with silent intertitles that catalog developments in the Korean war, I was genuinely moved by this story of occupation by American soldiers and their devastating effect on the locals through a sequence of unfortunate consequences. The flame of a cigarette lighter becomes a meager beacon of hope and perseverance.

Double Agent reminded me of the value of genre, how the structure of a genre can carry a film even if the details confuse. I can't say I knew what was going on half the time in this movie, but, towards the end, I was on the edge of my seat. A great espionage story!! And Ko So-young is breathtakingly beautiful!! Kyu Hyun Kim's synopsis for the Korean film page pretty much encapsulated my reactions to this film. "Whatever happened to movies like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold or The Third Man? Simple: they moved to Korea." I'm glad I got a chance to see this.

My only complaint would be the technical difficulties that caused near to a 40-minute delay. Expecting a film to start at 9:15PM and having it pushed to 10:00PM is problematic. But being that the festival is entirely run by student volunteers, I allowed leeway.