We speak to Lee Myung-se the visionary and dazzling director of Duelist and Nowhere To Hide, as the first of KCCUK’s The Year of the 12 Directors series…

Brought to the UK to conclude a month of screenings, including Gagman and M, Lee Myung-se will present a screening of Duelist that evening. An ambitious undertaking by the Korean Cultural Centre UK, they plan to bring a different director to the UK each month to celebrate their work – a sign of how popular and successful the annual London Korean Film Festival has been, and how appreciation has grown for Korean Film in the UK. They’ve got the year off to a flying start…

I ask Myung-se if he has a favourite own film. ‘My next!’, he says mischievously. ‘Mr. K is my next movie, it’s a Korean 007 movie!’ The film will star Seol Kyeong-gu (Public Enemy) as the secret agent, reunited with his Oasis and Peppermint Candy co-star Moon So-ri (The Housemaid, Ha Ha Ha) playing his wife and TV star Daniel Henney (My Father, The Fugitive Plan B, Spring Waltz) playing his first villain as a terrorist. He can hardly contain his excitement over the project, even if it is still in pre-production, which he maintains will be ‘better than James Bond’.

It’s a return to action for Myung-se after his last film, the ghostly, almost surreal M – not that his films can be too tightly attributed to any genre. His debut Gagman, a comedy, led to a series of romantic comedy dramas in the 90, but it was Nowhere To Hide, about a Detective and his squad, who pretty much bully their way to the truth more than investigate, that won him international acclaim.

For most of us, it was our introduction to South Korean film, just emerging from a new freedom in censorship and an incredible flood of creativity and expression in that country, it spearheaded the so-called Korean New Wave, as films like Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri, Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family and Park Chan-wook’s JSA: Joint Security Area emerged. It was the first South Korean film to be released on DVD.

(An over simplification admittedly, but then those were simpler times…!)

Did this global exposure put him under any pressure from distributors, both within Korea and internationally?

‘At the time, no. but the experience taught me a lot about what they expected from me. Duelist and M attracted quite a lot of interest from distributors, though it was quite different from Nowhere To Hide – I think they were extremely disappointed.’ Put in its simplest terms, they were expecting more action, and he admits that’s been a factor in his choice of subject for the next film Mr. K.

He explains: ‘Firstly I choose the genre, and for me that is just a tool to reach the audience in the easiest way. Once that decision is made, I try and absorb everything that’s been done before in that genre so I can make mine the best. So in the case of Mr. K, out of all the 007 films in the world, whether it’s James Bond or Mission: Impossible, I want to try and make that into my own style as a director.

‘When trying to attempt a film like Duelist, I looked at Samurai and martial arts films but interpreted it very much in my own way. So for example, if I were to direct a hardcore melodrama, then looking at films like Basic Instinct, then my challenge would be to overcome or do better than those films in my own style.

‘So that’s always the goal I have in mind when I’m directing.’

Myung-se rather shrugs off the suggestion that many of his lead characters are flawed, simply saying ‘Aren’t we all?’

Explaining the process of how he come to make films, Myung-se uses Auguste Rodin’s statue of Balzac as an illustration. ‘When Balzac first showed the sculpture, a lot of reviewers criticised it. But Rodin made thousands and thousands of sketches in order to make that sculpture; he even wore his clothes and walked the streets in order to get the feeling of being Balzac. And he condensed all of that into the one form he could make.

‘For me it’s exactly the same process, I constantly sketch just like Rodin did, all towards the one final outcome, the film.’

I want to try and get to the bottom of Myung-se’s highly visual style, but the director seems uneasy being considered in those terms. ‘After Duelist came out there was a lot of talk about storytelling and visuals in the film. To me the visual is just a part of the storytelling process in film, but a lot of people talk as if they are two separate elements.

‘Even when Duelist previewed at a lot of international film festivals, there were exactly the same comments that there was not enough story but too many visual elements. I’m really curious at how people can say such strange, foolish things. Film is, after all, a visual medium. But there is a trend lately that film is becoming more related to literature.’

It seems those criticisms of Duelist, even though it was well received in Korea and internationally, has been hard for the director to shake off. Later in the Q&A he tells of how he used to think it was a shame that he’d had so little opportunities to watch movies while growing up and in film school, but now he thinks of it as an advantage. I would imagine my own teachers and seniors, and created my own film world in my head, and I’d rely on poetry and literature to get my inspiration.

I ask him if all the meticulous research and sketching contributes to the long gaps between films?

Myung-se chuckles. ‘Well, that is part of the reason why. But more importantly my last film didn’t do so well, so it’s a tragic story of not getting the funding I wanted to do my next project.’

For Myung-se it’s been a painful succession of projects that have fallen through for one reason or another, including The Days of My Youth, which would have starred Lee Min-ki and Breathless’ lead and director Yang Ik-joon.

‘When I was very young I watched the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and at the time I thought only a true artist is able to make a good film over a long period of time, that’s what it means to be a good director! But much later I read in a book that actually he wanted to make two films a year but it was a matter of funding.’ He laughs, ‘The same story as mine!’

One striking element of all his films is the strong and often unexpected use of music, from classical to dance, even Western rock. It’s obviously a question he gets asked a lot, and the answer is one he will repeat that evening at the screening.

‘To really, really exaggerate, it’s like when God created the universe and declared that it was good in his eyes. It’s the same for me: if I like it and I feel that it’s good, then I use it!’

I ask him about the recurring motif of fights turning into dances, a short visual gag in Nowhere To Hide, it became a distinctive part of Duelist. ‘As a genre, martial arts was only the outer garment of the film, but I wanted to create emotions just through the movement of the actors in the film. And that’s where the idea came about.’

What filmmakers have inspired him most? He holds up his hand. ‘There are only five directors who make what I consider to be proper films: Jacques Tati; Buster Keaton; Charlie Chaplin; Yasujirô Ozu and Federico Fellini. And if I where to recommend a film by each of these directors, it would be: Fellini’s Rome, Open City; Ozu’s Late Spring; Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Keaton’s Cameraman (and Sherlock Jr.!); and lastly Chaplin’s The Circus.’

Armed with such fantastic recommendations, I ask him when we can expect Mr. K. ‘Filming begins in March, and it is due to be released at the end of the year.’ Perhaps with a keen eye on wanting the film to be as successful as possible he adds, ‘You must go and see it!’ I definitely will…

Lee Myung-se was interviewed shortly before the screening and Q&A at the Apollo Cinema on 26 January, 2012. For further reading please see Paul’s interview on Hangol Celluloid and MiNi MiNi MoVie’s interview.

Thanks to Lee Myung-se for his time and the Korean Cultural Centre UK for arranging the interview.

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This entry was published by Andy H on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 11:00 am and is filed under Directors, Features, Interviews, South Korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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