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    LEE Chang-dong
    LEE Chang-dong
    LEE Chang-dong
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    LEE Chang-dong

    By KIM Young-jin

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    About this ebook

    Written by KIM Young-jin, one of Korea’s foremost film critics, this book—which includes interviews, a biography, a filmography, and synopses—examines the cinematic world of LEE Chang-dong, widely hailed as one of Korea’s top directors. LEE’s films embrace the scars of Korean history and reality as well as the illusory nature of the film medium. His 2007 work, “Secret Sunshine”—a comeback film of sorts as LEE returns to directing after a stint as Korea’s Minister of Culture—was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. His filmography includes “Green Fish,” “Oasis,” and “Peppermint Candy.”

    Korean Film Directors

    Created by the Korean Film Council, this series offers deep insight into key directors in Korean film, figures who are not only broadening the range of art and creativity found in Korean-produced commercial films but also gaining increasingly strong footholds in international markets.

    Each volume features:
    - critical commentary on films
    - extensive interview
    - biography
    - complete filmography
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeoul Selection
    Release dateSep 30, 2011
    ISBN9788991913950
    LEE Chang-dong

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      Book preview

      LEE Chang-dong - KIM Young-jin

      Author

      Preface

      LEE Chang-dong is a director who positioned himself uniquely in the Korean film scene. LEE is like an island isolated from any of his contemporary film directors. It was at the age of almost 40 when he came on to the film scene as a scriptwriter and assistant director. Riding on the coattails of his reputation as a novelist, LEE’s debut film Green Fish successfully ushered him into Chungmuro.

      Green Fish, borrowing stylistic elements from gangster flicks, is a film that intersects the story of a young man with the dark shadows of Korean society under industrialization. Critics praised the film’s solid storytelling technique, but also pointed out the lack of visual appeal. This seemed to foreshadow the strengths and weaknesses of his next films, which originates from his background as a novelist.

      LEE, however, began to build his own cinematic world which cannot be categorized by the critics. Peppermint Candy adopts a unique technique of reversing the time frame while portraying the life of a man drifting around in the oppressive and painful space of Korean history, beginning with the Gwangju Democratic Uprising. Oasis is a love story between an ex-convict and a disabled woman, entangling brief fantasies with traditional melodramatic conventions.

      LEE’s films have provided the audience with a chance to question and introspect the nature of film as a medium. Conventional but avant-garde at the same time, the unique characteristics of his films seem to result from both obsessions with realism and a self-reflective structure. In his films, LEE embraces the scars of history and reality as well as the illusory nature of the film medium. At the same time, he asks the viewers if a film can be a medium of mass communication to convey the meaningfulness of reality. This is something that his contemporary directors have never attempted. And this is why LEE is considered as a great artist in the Korean film scene even though he has a filmography of only three films with his fourth to be released soon.

      LEE Chang-dong is of the same generation as PARK Kwang-su, one of the Korean New Wave directors; but what sets LEE apart from them is his idealistic attitude toward history and reality. PARK’s focus on imagery and his tendency to favor intellectual narrators are not found in LEE’s films. Neither is found in LEE’s films the radical deconstruction of film structure that JANG Sun-woo, another Korean New Wave leader, experimented with. Nor does LEE deal with conventionally prohibited historical subjects like JUNG Ji-young does. Rather, with his essentialist attitude, LEE creates his films as a way to make the viewers reflect on the possibility that a film can be a medium to explore meaningful realistic subjects. As he moved from the realm of a novelist focusing on text to the realm of a filmmaker focusing on visual language, LEE became a serious director in the Korean film scene who quietly questions the essence of cinema. Even though his filmography is not many, he seems more adventurous than his younger fellow directors in the sense that his skeptical attitude about the function of film, ironically enough, keeps him trying continuously to find out what film can do. By asking skeptical questions, he regenerates himself.

      I hope that this book can function as an entryway into the unique cinematic world of LEE Chang-dong, a distinguishing figure in Korean film history. The interview in this book is a compilation of four different interviews I had with director LEE. Also, with permission from my fellow critic KIM Seong-uk, I excerpted a part of his interview with LEE, which was published in Film Language (Summer 2003). My assertion on the relationship between reality and fantasy appearing in LEE’s films was mainly influenced by discussions with KIM. I would like to thank him for his generosity.

      To write this book, I met LEE Chang-dong for the fifth time. He was in the post-production process on Secret Sunshine, which was soon to be released. I wasn’t able to see the film nor was I able to talk much about it with him. That is because LEE, who completely immerses himself in the work until he finishes, has an obsessive aversion to any premature predictions about his unfinished films. Yet, I had a premonition that his new film would be a significant turning point in his career. For now, I hope my premonition will turn out right. The film will be released around the time this book is published. One thing is for sure—his new film will show how he has evolved for a four-year hiatus that resulted from him taking the position as the Minister of Culture and Tourism.

      LEE Chang-dong is a director who does not rest on his laurels. Maybe so are most artists, but he is a particularly strict one. His ceaseless efforts for self-innovation are full of enormous energy and I don’t think that energy will go down any time soon.

      KIM Young-jin

      Spring, 2007

      Seoul

      Introduction

      The last time I met LEE Chang-dong was late March 2007, when he had just finished a rough cut of his new film Secret Sunshine and was about to begin the sound mixing process. Before meeting him, I called the production company and asked for a peek of the rough cut to get some idea for an interview, but they said it’s impossible. So I had to interview LEE, feeling like a blind person trying to understand an elephant by touching it, about his new film and what he had been up to since he resigned as the Minister of Culture and Tourism.

      I met LEE Chang-dong at a café located in the quiet area of Samcheong-dong, Seoul. A little while after we seated ourselves, the café owner came over and said discreetly, I am afraid the electricity will go out for a while. My apologies for the inconvenience. Just as the photo shoot was almost done, the café fell into a pleasant darkness. It wasn’t all too dark. It was like the whole inside of the café was fully shaded. There was also pleasant quietness, as music couldn’t be played because of the electricity failure. Talking to LEE about his new film often seemed as desolate as the darkness in the café.

      We exchanged our thoughts rather than information. The conversation started at 2 pm with a cup of tea and lasted until dusk when we finished dinner. It wasn’t a conversation with serious questions and answers. Rather, it was a loose and relaxed chat with many jokes and frequent silence, gossiping about films, filmmakers and social phenomena. We spent the afternoon as if we were slackers.

      Although Secret Sunshine is LEE’s first film after a long hiatus, he is deliberately indifferent to the fuss about it being his comeback film. It’s been a while, so I think I lost some sense of making films. This film is just ‘normal.’ I’m not satisfied. Things could’ve been more ‘normal.’ Even after finishing the editing, I wished it had been simpler. He emphasized several times that Secret Sunshine is a ‘normal’ film. Assuming that this should be the secret aesthetic keyword for the new film, I tried to lead the conversation to get more out of it, but he stopped me.

      Your choice of the word, ‘normal,’ arouses me, I told him. I’m getting anxious to see the movie, all of sudden.

      No, LEE said, Like I said, the film is just ordinary and normal. There is nothing more to it. There aren’t any stylized cinematic devices. I just have plain looking shots. You will understand when you see it.

      There were rumors going around in Chungmuro that the shooting of Secret Sunshine was done under the extremely tense atmosphere. According to the rumors, the lead actors, SONG Kang-ho and JEON do-youn, almost passed out from exhaustion because of LEE’s well-known perfectionism. I once heard that SONG jokingly complained to someone on the phone that, because of the repeated shooting which went on forever, his body smelled like meat loaf. When I told LEE about these stories, he was nonchalant.

      It wasn’t that bad. We didn’t particularly do more shooting repeatedly for the same shot than other times. We decided on one thing, which is ‘No long takes for this movie.’ Instead, we tried to shoot the same shot from different angles, so we could use them in editing. But then again, that made things way too complicated. So sometimes we just went for long takes again.

      Did you shoot them in sequence?

      "Most of the time I did, because

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