The director of A Bittersweet Life and A Tale Of Two Sisters talks about his latest movie, a homage to Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly…
It’s an exceptionally mild November day, though you wouldn’t know it to look at Kim Jee-woon. In London to attend a premiere of his latest film The Good, The Bad, The Weird at the London Korean Film Festival, Kim initially appears rugged up in hat and scarf behind a pair of sunglasses.
Due for theatrical release in the UK on 6 February, audiences around the world are lapping up this enjoyable yarn about a thief, a merciless assassin and a bounty hunter (not to mention bandits and the Japanese army) racing across 1930s Manchuria to find a supposed treasure. His most ambitious film to date, its as much a celebration of filmmaking craft as a homage to Spaghetti Western auteur Sergio Leone, the old-fashioned thrill of real stunts and epic landscapes that came before an over reliance on CGI. (Rather the way the last Indiana Jones film should have been…!)
Kim Jee-woon’s debut feature in 1998, The Quiet Family, was one of the first to get South Korea truly noticed in the international film scene, joining the likes of Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish, Lee Myung-se’s Nowhere To Hide and Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri. An offbeat comedy about a family’s disastrous attempt to run a lodge in a remote area, particularly as their clientele keep dying, you might know it better as Takeshi Miike’s (very) loose remake The Happiness of the Katakuris, though it also inspired a Hong Kong version.
(Ironically Miike’s Spaghetti – or as the Japanese would have it, Macaroni – Western inspired film Sukiyaki Western Django is released on DVD the same week as Kim’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird opens at cinemas.)
And as if launching his own career and helping put Korean filmmakers on the map wasn’t enough, perhaps his shrewdest move must have been casting future Korean superstars Song Kang-ho (The Host, Memories Of Murder, Sympathy For Mr Vengeance) and Choi Min-sik (Old Boy, Chihwaseon, Failan).
Since then Kim may not have been as prolific as some of his peers, producing just three feature-length movies (and two shorts) in the interim, but has brought an intelligence and excellence to all that he has produced. Far more than write his own scripts, Kim involves himself heavily at every level, from set to props to wardrobe. It accounts for why each project takes a significant amount of time to make it to the big screen. (Or it could just be he’s a control freak?)
I look again at Kim, remembering what Lee Byung-hun told me about how he’s all about the details, and notice how meticulously picked out his clothes seem. From the slapstick wrestling comedy The Foul King, which also starred Song Kang-ho, to the horror-driven A Tale Of Two Sisters (also to be remade, this time by Hollywood as The Uninvited) his films show that keen attention to detail. Indeed the set design helps turn the house the sisters live in – covered in beautiful but deliberately overpowering flock wallpaper designs – into a character in its own right. His last movie A Bittersweet Life, starring Lee Byung-hun as a mob enforcer who makes the mistake of betraying his boss, also contained a high level of set design, including a stunningly designed bar called ‘La Dolce Vita’ (‘The Sweet Life’ being a more literal translation of the original Korean title).
The Good, The Bad, The Weird reunites Kim with Lee and Kong Sang-ho. Its had a mixed reception back in Korea, perhaps because it superficially seems less complex than much of his work, its unashamedly popcorn fodder. So why did he decide on the more traditional narrative approach of a Western in the first place?
As Kim points out, the Western may be a familiar genre for a Western audience, but not for Koreans. He was concerned that his core Korean audience should feel comfortable with it, so gave it a more traditional narrative despite the twist in location and characters. But he was also concerned about making what for many is an outdated genre, so he considered how he could make it more entertaining and appeal to modern audiences. He wanted to put in much more action than a normal Western film, he saw it as more of a spectacle, with grand action sequences, and between those he placed more humour – he wanted to create a balance with the pace and order of the film, a rhythm.
So did that make it an ‘Oriental Western’? He first coined the phrase after becoming frustrated trying to explain what his next film would be. He’d say it was a Manchurian action film and no one would understand, so instead he started calling it an ‘Oriental Western’, and that worked. He also thinks it reflects the dynamic aspects of the film, and that in turn reflects the Korean people.
Once he heard Korea described to the South America of East Asia, people are so passionate and emotional, and in that way they are lively too.
It’s strange to hear him get caught up discussing a genre. From the ‘gore comedy’ of The Quiet Family to the psychological horror of A Tale Of Two Sisters, and now a Western, Kim has managed to defying getting stuck on any genre during his career. A rare luxury for any director – imagine a young Martin Scorsese without gangsters or Hitchcock without a falsely accused man. And it’s true even in Korea, where even creative directors like Park Chan-wook can find it easy to get caught up in a series vengeance films. Indeed, perhaps only Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, The Isle, 3-Iron) has experienced the same freedom.
Kim modestly replies it’s because he didn’t know what he was best at. Also working with such a wide, uninhibited range of genres gives him a cinematic energy and often inspires him. So far he hasn’t a thriller, spy or a sci-fi film, so those are genres he’s considering next. Having said that, this year he was knocked out by two American films, the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men and David Finch’s Zodiac – so now he’s thinking about how he could revisit a genre in a more, as he puts it, macho way.
Does he think there’s any recurring theme in these movies? ‘I don’t know!’ he replies in English. He admits that all his lead characters tend to be naïve or simplistic. The other recurring aspect? The wind. It often plays a part in his films, though not directly referenced it’s very important to him. But if you ask him why, he doesn’t know.
So what about the films obvious homage to Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly? He had always liked American Westerns, the classics like High Noon, Rio Bravo, Gunfight At OK Coral, but found they always included too many American values and ideology. It didn’t relate to a young Korean growing up in Asia. Then along came Sergio Leone and turned the Western on its head. He was amazed by how unconventional it was. He found it quite shocking, and that feeling was something he wanted to translate to this film.
At that time one of the strangest things was that no one is actually the good guy, they’re all a muddy grey, at best, even the main character. He believes it’s why people say that after him things became so much more realistic.
His spin on The Good, The Bad & The Ugly is to have the Ugly (or in Kim’s case Weird) lead the story rather then the good, which he thought would make the film more interesting.
One important influence Kim is keen to point out is a little known Korean Western he discovered while filming, a 1971 film by Lee Man-hui called Break The Chain. Some of his other influences come from surprising references. The chase scenes recall Mad Max (also known as The Road Warrior) and even Ben Hur. For the multicultural, multinational settlements in Manchuria he looked to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
In fact when he was preparing the film, he showed the cast and crew Mad Max, telling them they were going to make a faster, better, more exciting film. Unsurprisingly they began to ask, what kind of film are we making?
And just how difficult was the film to shoot? The worst thing was the heat. They filmed in August, when the temperature got as high as 40 degrees Celsius, so subsequently they all got sick. The extended chase scene at the end with all the horses and trucks also caused some problems, in the end they ended up having to actually build a new road of 30 km for the horse riding! It didn’t help that the budget was raised during filming, but that only made him happier with how the film came out in the end, so he’s very pleased with it.
As a parting shot I ask him about the Hollywood remake of A Tale Of Two Sisters, The Uninvited, having had so much involvement in the original was he asked for any input into the new film? Not at all, and he feels it’s probably better that they exist as two completely separate films. He even heard they actually made a good job of it (hard to believe!) but some of it he feels would have been hard to translate, not just in cultural references but in a sensibility that fear can’t explain. He wanted to show how following ones desire can change people, and how that desire can lead to craziness.
The Good, The Bad, The Weird is released on UK DVD and Blu-ray by Icon Home Entertainment on 1 June 2009.
Thanks to Chris Lawrence of Icon Film Distribution and Paul Smith of The Associates for setting up the interview, and of course Kim Jee-woon for his time.
