Lee Myung-se
BIOGRAPHY
Born 21 August 1957 in Seoul. He became interested in film while in high school and completed a two-year course in film-making at Seoul Arts College before entering the film industry as a writer and assistant director. He worked most notably on a number of films for director Bae Chang-Ho (including Hwang Jin-I [1986], Our Sweet Days of Youth [1988], and Dream [1990]), who repaid the compliment by co-starring in Lee's debut feature in 1988. His second feature consolidated his career as a director, winning numerous domestic awards and launching the 'sex-war comedy' genre that has since dominated Korean cinema. His third feature has proved more controversial, and was not a box-office success in Korea; but a growing number of critics consider it one of the greatest Korean films ever made.
INTERVIEW
I knew I wanted to be a film director in 1974, when I was 17. Until then, I'd never really found my own way forward; I'd always been a follower. But I suddenly started thinking about life in general and my own life in particular, and knew I wanted to make films. It is a bit odd, because I wasn't even a film fan at the time. I didn't start looking at a lot of films until after I'd made my big decision. Anyhow, that led me to study film for a couple of years, and then to work as an assistant director in the industry. As an assistant, I think I made most contributions to the films I did with Bae Chang-Ho. Bae allowed his assistants a lot of space to work, and so I was able to work some of my own 'flavour' into the films. You're probably right that Our Sweet Days of Youth is the one that's closest to what I went on to direct myself.
Gagman represents the sum of ten years thinking about cinema while working in the industry. I can't say I went into it with any concrete intentions; I simply executed a stryline that came into my mind more or less fully formed one day. The central couple, played by Ahn Son-Gi and Bae Chang-Ho, were inspired by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And I put a lot of autobiographical material into the script - not just things that had happened to me, but things that I remembered thinking too. My idea of realism is not limited to things that can be seen and reported; it includes thoughts, dreams and fantasies too, all of which are perfectly real to us as we experience them. The scene on the beach in Gagman in which Ahn Song-Gi monologues about his own past is more or less autobiographical. What he says is what I felt.
If Gagman reflects my thinking about cinema, then My Love, My Bride reflects my thinking about the relationship between our lives and our culture. Everything I'd read, all the poetry and literature, all the music I'd listened to get distilled into that film. No, I don't make any distinction between Korean and Western culture; I've never seen them as being different, really. My only interest is people, and Eastern and Western people are the same. Take an W-ray and you wouldn't know the difference. Equally, I don't get hung up on distinctions between high art and popular culture. And I'm not embarrassed about borrowing from other artists. After all, Prometheus stole fire! Actually, both Gagman and My Love, My Bride are rather tragic at heart, but they're both disguised as comedies. Humour is a good vehicle for communicating ideas quickly and efficiently. Commercial calculation doesn't really come into it, but I can't deny that audiences find comedy a lot more palatable than tragedy.
It always takes me a long time to write a script, but no script has ever taken me longer than First Love. I agonized over it for months. Falling in love for the first time is, of course, a universal experience, but there's no universal consensus on what that experience actually means. Thinking about it over many years, I came to the conclusion that first love has something to do with unlocking the secret of time - that is, becoming conscious of time passing for the first time, and thus opening the mind to an awareness of mortality. I realise that this must sound horribly pretentious, but if it was something I could describe easily I wouldn't have bothered to make the film. The thing is, it's something every one of us has experienced but all of us find hard to ratioanlise or describe. Anyhow, once I'd arrived at my own rationalisation, I decided that the whole film should be shot in the studio, not on location. I needed the kind of control of the images you can only get in a studio. This time I wanted something different from either comedy or tragedy. I want a general sense of life flowing on.
I chose to make the protagonist a young woman because women are more openly sensitive than men. I agree that men have the same feelings, but they find it much harder to express them - and I'm sure that's a problem not only here in Korea. You're right to observe that my films have been shifting from a male point-of-view (in Gagman) to the female point-of-view here; in that sense, My Love, My Bride was an exact mid point, because it gave equal time to the point-of-view of the man and the woman. I'm conscious of that shift, and it's pretty much what I intended.
I have several screenplays and outlines ready, but there's always a problem getting producers to accept them. I don't feel tied to emotional or philosophical subjects; I just want to make films that are close to real life and real experience. I hope I'll always be flexible, but I'm never going to put the box-office first.