“It was quite crazy, this last week,” he said, his eyes widening as the fresh memories washed across his consciousness. “I was nominated before, in 2002, with Son of the Bride, but we didn’t have this kind of reaction. Maybe it’s like in soccer, when you really believe in the team, you root more for them, because this movie was a huge hit in Argentina. It struck a chord. I don’t know which chord, don’t ask me that. But it definitely struck a chord, because it was the most successful movie in 35 years. People were so ready for it, that I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t won.”

The people of Argentina, and Campanella in particular, have good reason to be proud. Although The Secret in Their Eyes was clearly the Goliath of Argentine cinema this year, becoming the second highest grossing film in the nation’s history (behind 1975’s Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, a perky werewolf picture which remains almost totally obscure in America), it came into the Academy Awards as a David, as everyone with an opinion the matter had conceded the category to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, with Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet as a possible dark horse. Both of those films had been widely circulated among critics, while Campanella’s movie had yet to make the rounds. The jovial director conceded that, at first, he was content simply to earn the nomination, as he felt that he had no chance against such strong competition. However, like those who had dismissed his film’s chances, he admits that he hadn’t examined all the evidence.

“I was sure that The White Ribbon was going to win, even though I haven’t seen it,” he smirked. “That was mostly based on how much I admire Haneke. In fact, if I would have been involved, I would’ve wanted him to win.” But as the big night approached, buzz around the film increased, and Campanella began to confront the fact that his film had a real chance. “Pretty soon, everyone’s talking, talking, talking, and I became a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep anymore! So, when we won, I was surprised, but it didn’t take me out of the blue.”

However, his elation was slightly deflated when he uncovered a dark secret about his new friend Oscar. “Do you know it has no gold in it whatsoever?,” he asked incredulously. “What a disappointment.” Despite the absence of aurum, Campanella has no plans to pawn his newest knick-knack. “They made me sign a paper that says I can’t sell it. I don’t think they want to have one on eBay.”

While Campanella was happy to digress about his award, his eyes and his smile really lit up when the discussion turned to his film, an investigative thriller which masks its profoundly disturbing plot developments with moments of sparkling authenticity, spontaneous laughter, and spectacular cinematic construction. A former investigator named Benjamin Esposito (played by Ricardo Darín, resembling a bleary-eyed mix between Mandy Patinkin and Joe Mantegna) decides that the best way to cure the boredom brought on by his retirement is to write a book about a horrific murder case that still haunts him. The film is based on Eduardo Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes, thus far available only in Spanish), and Campanella co-wrote the script with Sacheri, though the director insisted on making several significant changes and additions, so that the movie is more of a remix than a remake of the book.

“For instance, the character of Irene Hastings (played with smoldering vitality by Soledad Villamil) was not part of the case at all in the novel, and now that relationship is a main part of it,” he explained. “I realized that, if the murder case was the origin of their love, was the trigger of their love, and also the thing that stopped it, then the two stories would be integrated. I told [Sacheri] that this was what we wanted to do, and he liked the idea of riffing with his novel. So we went for it.”

In both the book and the film, the action is split between memory and the present, but Campanella made another crucial change when he shifted the flashback sequences to the year 1974, which allowed him to portray the sinister ambience and tortuous suppression which was then just beginning to saturate and suffocate Argentina, as the country descended into military dictatorship and the “Dirty War.” Campanella was only 15 years old in 1974, and he recalls that no one in Argentina was aware of the horrific actions being initiated to extinguish all opposition to the right-wing government, which eventually resulted in the murder of an estimated 30,000 people, many of whom were accused of terrorism.   

“These things only became known to people when democracy returned in 1983,” he said. “[The military government] had a complete stronghold on TV and print. There was no Internet. We knew exactly what we were told. We knew that there were shootings, but we didn’t know about the torturing and the concentration camps, and the awful, medieval things that happened in that time.”

But rather than placing the events of the film in the late 1970s or early 1980s, which marked the height of the dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla and the social and moral nadir for Argentina, Campanella and company chose to depict the final years of the democracy, when citizens and employees of the Justice Department were still capable of being shocked by the illicit actions of the government. “When it was still a democratic government, there was a perceived threat of terrorism in Argentina,” he recalled. “So they started taking away liberties, one by one. We thought it was more relevant to what’s happening today.”

Despite the film’s direct address of these historical atrocities, and the violence and vengeance which festers at its core, Campanella somehow managed to inject welcome doses of humor throughout the film, mostly by encouraging his cast to simply act natural. “I don’t know how it worked here, but in Argentina, people laughed a lot,” he said excitedly. “And the actors never played for laughs or comedy. For instance, in the scene when the guy accidentally scares [Esposito]…In a film noir, Bogart would probably just snarl or say, ‘Huh?’ But in real life, we were saying that you would jump and hit the ceiling in a situation like that, and I think that people relate to the truth of that moment. When someone scares me like that, I can’t relax, and I keep cursing them and insulting them for at least 10 minutes! People related to the real reactions of the characters. They have a movie premise–because how many of us have actually seen a rape or murder–but they’re not movie reactions to what’s happening.”

Campanella found another source of humor in an even more unexpected place–“The Palace,” which is the regal nickname for the building which is the headquarters for Argentina’s justice system, and serves as the location for much of the film’s action. The novelist Sacheri spent five years working in “The Palace,” and he borrowed liberally from the black humor he witnessed there to infuse his book with levity. Campanella said that when he first he read the book, some of the funniest situations and behaviors, such as the character who tries to convince everyone who calls his phone that they have the wrong number, felt artificial or exaggerated for laughs. So he went to his own inside source to investigate the matter further.

“My sister had worked there from 1979 until 2005, and she still talks to all her retired friends that were there back in the 60s,” he reported. “So I joined them on their next get-together, and I said, OK, start telling me stories. I tell you, there were things that I could never put in a movie, because no one would believe it. They could only happen in reality. There was a judge once who lost a bet, and for three days, he had to take depositions and go to meetings wearing a woman’s wig. He would be very straight-faced, and people would come crying, to talk about crimes and all that, and here he is with a woman’s wig.”

No interview regarding The Secret in Their Eyes would be complete without addressing the showcase scene of the film, an astonishing five-minute sequence which is filmed to look like a continuous shot, beginning with the camera flying over a soccer stadium before descending into the crowd and eventually down into the bowels of the stadium and back out onto the field. Again, the scene sprung from Campanella’s imagination, not from the novel, and he had a mischievous gleam in his eye as he shared his reasoning for the audacious and acrobatic camera maneuver.

“I started with a convention that we all have in our minds, which is the aerial shot of a stadium. But also we have the convention of cutting to the crown at a certain point. So when you’re not cutting and you’re not cutting and you’re not cutting, the people in the theater start to lean forward in their seat, and suddenly it’s like they’re being thrown into the bleachers and they’re a part of the chase. When it comes down it, that scene is a foot chase, which we’ve all seen a thousand times. In Starsky and Hutch, every week they were running after a guy. But now, for the audience, it’s personal, and that makes it more exciting than it would have been if we just had guys chasing after each other. And once you’re committed to that, then you can’t break the point of view ever.”

The choice of having the scene take place at a soccer stadium ties in nicely with one of the primary themes of the film, which is a person’s inability to disguise their passion. Campanella spoke about this human truth, saying “Everything in the movie, even the crime, is motivated by passion. A perverted passion, but it’s motivated by passion. That’s why I wanted to find the guy, not because he left any clues or because of fingerprints or DNA, or anything like that. Just because of his passion.” Certainly, there is no question as to where Campanella’s passions lie, and anyone with a similar enthusiasm for stimulating cinema should feel compelled to seek The Secret in Their Eyes.

Before I even had a chance to shake Jia Zhangke’s hand, he was apologizing for his sunglasses. The man who had been voted “the best filmmaker of the decade” in a recent Film Comment poll wished to assure me that his indoor shades were not due to an inflated ego, but to the severe eyestrain he had suffered during the editing of his next feature, I Wish I Knew. Since normally stoic pillars of film criticism like David Denby (“a master filmmaker without a motor”) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (“a poetic prophet of the 21^st century”) tend to start gushing like pre-teens on a Twilight fan site when they discuss Jia’s work, the news that his eyes are threatened may cause the reclusive sect of global cinephiles to descend into bedlam. Rest assured, my fellow connoisseurs of celluloid, Jia’s ocular condition is temporary, and we can look forward to many more years of relishing his vision.

Those weaned on Hollywood blockbusters often complain that Jia’s movies, with their proliferation of stationary camera set-ups and extended takes, are “slow,” but it might be more useful to think of them as accelerated snapshots. His static scenes of seemingly mundane moments often descend into transcendence, as a random chorus of street noises or an inadvertent gesture might trigger a sense of the absent arrangement of our existence, which often evaporates back into static when threatened with enunciation. Part of Jia’s genius lies in evoking perception as the fluttering conjunction between sheer duration and space, as he provides viewers with the jagged focus necessary to transform an ephemeral glimpse into a hint of certainty. Because of their stringent address of specific spaces and situations in China, each of his films emerges as an endlessly extendable microcosm for a nation, a planet, a universe, a life, wherein a symphony of trivial grace and beauty drowns amidst the clamorous racket of humanity hammering out its definition of development. He has consistently dazzled Western film critics with his preeminent examinations of the corporeal collateral damage which has been wrought by China’s prodigious push towards progress.

Jia’s debut feature, 1997’s Xiao Wu (English title: Pickpocket), might qualify as the greatest home movie ever made. Shot in 16mm on a miniscule budget, the film follows the apathetic adventures of the title character, a menial thief who has neither the skills nor the will power to escape his stagnant life in his rural hometown. The true star of the film is the town itself, the southern city of Fenyang, a labyrinth of derelict roads and grim brick walls where Jia grew up and lived a life similar to the main character before he was finally accepted into the Beijing Film Academy on his third try. Jia filled his cast with the ordinary people of Fenyang and had them speak in the local dialect, which was not only unprecedented, it was actually outlawed by the Chinese government at the time. Because of this transgression and the film’s supposedly unflattering portrayal of extreme poverty and petty crime in China, Jia was officially banned from making films in China and Xiao Wu could only be screened illegally at film clubs and universities.

According to Jia, Xiao Wu, despite its bargain aesthetics, still ranks among his most successful films. He told me, “[I]t seems like it should be fairly easy for a film to document ordinary life and ordinary people, but it’s actually very difficult. For many years the Chinese government tried to document the lives of ordinary Chinese, and dictated which things could be filmed or shown, but the films they produced were far from the ordinary life I knew. So I made it my mission to document those people in the most realistic way possible. Of all my films, I think Xiao Wu is still the most quintessential in this regard.”

Luckily for Jia, and the rest of the planet, the government ban preventing him from making films was basically unenforceable, and he was able to surreptitiously scour up enough money and equipment to release his second film in 2000, Platform, which is considered by many to be his masterpiece. The film documents the rampant changes which swept through Fenyang during the 1980s, as exemplified by a group of young musical performers who start off singing communist anthems and Maoist odes before embracing Western-style pop music. But this is no simple progression from the perceived repression of the 1970s to the liberation of the 1980s and 1990s—the characters find that, even as certain parameters of their independence shift and expand, their sense of alienation remains constant. Platform is notable for firmly establishing Jia’s abiding concern with laobaixing (Mandarin for “ordinary people”), but I was somewhat taken aback by his declaration of the film’s most memorable aspect.

“In Platform, the key theme is those city walls,” he said. “That movie is about young people roaming around, going out of the city, but they always come back. So the walls represent containment, but they also form a place that you could leave, but always return to, just like I have done. Whether I travel to New York or to Cannes or wherever, I always go back [to Fenyang], because that is where I’m from. We have to go back to the places where we’re from.”

For his third feature, 2002’s Unknown Pleasures, Jia (temporarily) left Fenyang to depict the lonely lives of the “One Child” generation growing up in Datong. The film probably serves as the best entry point to Jia’s oeuvre for mainstream Western audiences, as it features some familiar Hollywood tropes, such as a gangster who enacts control through violence and an unforgettable botched bank robbery. After having spearheaded the independent film movement which is currently thriving in China, in 2004 Jia took the controversial step of agreeing to work within the confines of the Chinese distribution system by submitting his next film, The World, for official approval prior to its release. Some current practitioners of Chinese independent cinema, who likely owe their careers to Jia, have now turned their back on him, and he is routinely asked to explain his decision, whether he is at home or abroad. His answer is worth quoting at length:

“Anyone who watches my films can see that there’s absolutely no compromise in my subject matter or my depictions of hardships in China, even though I now choose to work with the government in order to gain distribution. This is the only way to get my films played in China, so they can be seen by the average people whom the films are for and about. Besides, if you’re going to try to change the system, then it’s essential to have someone work within that system, to keep testing and expanding the limits of what they’ll allow. I definitely think it’s possible to maintain an independent spirit without being marginalized. And the truth is that it’s very hard, almost impossible, to make an impact on the mainstream from the margins. Anyway, what good is it to simply declare myself an independent filmmaker? I want people to see my films, and then they can decide for themselves whether or not I’m independent.”

Ironically, despite some Western critics’ continued fascination with the repressive gaze of government censorship in China, Jia said that open suppression of topics or themes is rarely an issue. “Actually, the bureaucracy of the government is a much bigger problem than censorship,” he said. “It’s important to remember that, in China, whatever censorship we face is almost never systematic in terms of what we can or can’t show. Rather than following a set of explicit rules or laws, the individual censors speculate about whether the material is appropriate to be shown or not. It’s a guessing game for them, and for me too. It requires a lot of effort and energy and patience to go through that process to have your films shown, but I’m definitely willing to do it because I want people in China to be able to see my films.”

Jia’s next feature film was 2006’s Still Life, which follows a husband and a wife (of different spouses) trying to find their respective partners amidst the accumulating rubble of the Fengjie area, which is scheduled to be submerged by the massive Three Gorges dam. Still Life was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and became Jia’s biggest box office “hit,” with a modest $2.5 million worldwide gross, but he has very different reasons for considering the film one of his biggest successes. The searching husband in the film is played by Jia’s cousin, Han Sanming, who had spent most of his adult life toiling in the coal mines of Fenyang before Jia gave him small parts in Platform and The World. Jia reported that, thanks to the success of Still Life, Sanming escaped the carcinogenic caverns and gained steady employment as a television actor.

24 City, Jia’s most recent feature, reveals the intimate history of a group of garment workers who have spent the better part of their lives ensnared in a symbiotic relationship with their all-encompassing factory, which is now being torn down and replaced with luxury apartments. The film represents a double departure for him, as it is the first of his films to openly combine elements of fiction and documentary, and the first time he has moved out of the contemporary to interpret events of the past, which he says his audience should expect more of in the future. He told me, “When I was younger, I was only concerned with showing life in the present, because there was so much happening with the overwhelming transformation of China. But my mindset has changed over time, and I think that now it’s more important to recollect the history of today’s people before it disappears. That’s what I’m trying to do in my latest films, 24 City and I Wish I Knew.”

After his eyes recover well enough for him to finish editing I Wish I Knew, Jia is scheduled to embark on a another exploration of the past which has his fans and his critics abuzz with trepidacious chatter. Zai Qing Chao (literal English translation “In Qing Dynasty”) will be Jia’s first entry into the martial arts film genre, though he aims to actively disappoint anyone with visions of Jet Li pirouetting through the rain or Chow Yun-Fat dancing on bamboo trees. “I’m going to make a completely different kind of martial arts film,” he said. “In almost every martial arts film that I’ve seen, the underlying message is about submitting, and gaining power by following a given system of belief or practice. The hero is rebellious at first, but he eventually learns the discipline and the rules of the martial arts system, and becomes powerful. But I want to reverse that to show how conforming to a system usually makes you weaker, and then see what happens when someone decides to rebel against the system.” 

Despite nurturing this newfound attention to the past, Jia remains somewhat reluctant to discuss or depict some of the more seminal events of his own personal history, including his own family’s problems during the Cultural Revolution. The trouble can be traced back to Jia’s paternal grandfather, who studied medicine in Germany and became a successful pharmacist in Tianjin before he died. Unfortunately, his limited prosperity had dire repercussions for his descendents in the years to come. After the Japanese invaded and took control of Fenyang in the 1940s, Chinese resistors in the town took advantage of the aforementioned elaborate system of walls in Fenyang to stage guerrilla attacks against the invaders. However, someone betrayed the location of the resistance, allowing the Japanese to eliminate them with a poison gas attack. Years later, when the Red Guard swept into Fenyang during the Cultural Revolution, this incident was revisited, and due to the family’s relative wealth and status, Jia’s uncle (his father’s older brother) was rumored to be the detested spy. The shame caused Jia’s uncle to attempt suicide twice, but he survived both tries and, despite a dearth of evidence, was eventually sentenced to prison for treason. Because of the scandal, Jia was born with the name Zhang Zhang Ke, as his parents elected to use his mother’s family name for several years until the ill-deserved reputation of his father’s family dissipated.  

Another troubling episode of Jia’s biography came to light during his weekend in New York, when he acknowledged a dark period in the eighties when he openly explored an alternative avenue of artistic expression–breakdancing. That admission brought a hearty laugh from the sold-out crowd at the Museum of Modern Art, which had brought Jia to New York to participate in the first ever complete retrospective of his films in the United States, which included all six of his features, eight of his rarely seen short films and documentaries, and a sneak peek at I Wish I Knew, which he is hoping to have ready for the Cannes Film Festival this summer. This was the first such celebration of a Chinese filmmaker that MoMA had offered in more than twenty years, further evidence of Jia’s elevated status in the international film community.

Thanks to fortuitous luck or ingenious scheduling, the event overlapped with the museum’s wildly popular Tim Burton exhibit, so that patrons hoping to absorb some contemplative Chinese cinema were forced to parade past posters of Beetlejuice and Pee-Wee Herman. At first, it’s difficult to conceive of two more divergent filmmakers on the planet, though the odd couple can be connected by the fact that they have both made a film which prominently features a cartoonish space ship (Jia’s Still Life and Burton’s Mars Attacks!). But astonishingly enough, Burton is actually better known in China than Jia, or at least his films certainly are. Despite his hallowed status among most Western critics, Jia, “one of the world’s most important filmmakers” (Manohla Dargis), remains largely unknown in his own country. He acknowledged that it is difficult to compete with films like Burton’s blockbuster Alice in Wonderland in China, because “Most people there have only been watching films for a short time, so all they know are the big-budget movies from Hong Kong and Hollywood. For the most part, they aren’t all that interested in our quiet little films. We still need to work very hard to cultivate that audience, and try to pull them away from those artificial films onto something more relevant to them.”

When I asked him if it was getting harder to address social problems in China due to the rising affluence there, he thought about his answer for a few moments before replying, “There’s definitely an active voice of protest among the artistic community, so the message is there, but there’s also a growing number of people who are only concerned with materialism and their own comfort, so it can be a challenge to generate an echo from those voices of protest. One of the strategies that the government has used has been to focus solely on the economic growth, because a lot of people have benefited from that one-way street of economic advancement, and those people are obviously more reluctant to rock the boat and join the more subversive sector of the population who is still complaining about the problems with our society.”

In his professional career, Jia has witnessed a lot of problems and a lot of progress, which in turn has created more problems. But with his precise portraits of subdued dissension and remembrance, and with his production company (Xstream Pictures) extending his legacy to a fresh set of filmmakers, he continues to preside over some of the possible solutions. Since we were gathered on the occasion of a retrospective, in closing I asked him to retrospect and tell us whether it was easier to make a film like Xiao Wu, with no resources and no expectations, or I Wish I Knew, with an excess of both. After some consideration, he did his best impression of a true Hollywood luminary, by grinning from behind the cover of his shades and dodging the question with an answer rife with ambiguity–“I’ve made a lot of films, and the challenge is always to maintain the creative freedom that I once had, and to keep finding new ways to express myself.” Who knows? After revolutionizing the martial arts film, perhaps Jia can resurrect another long neglected genre which is desperately in need of an update. How about Breakin’ 3 – Top Rock Down in Shanxi?

Winstone occupies the driver’s seat as Colin Diamond, the cuckolded husband, whose reaction to his wife’s announcement that she has been having an affair is the essence of innovation—he calls her a slut (and worse) and punches her repeatedly in the mouth. When Diamond’s cronies are alerted to the situation, they corral the perpetrator of the affair, a handsome young waiter, and confine him to a cupboard until poor Colin can collect himself long enough to enact the necessary vengeance on the lad. A pseudo-trial ensues, as Colin’s chums casually insist that the situation calls for murder, while Colin weeps and wallows in copious doses of self-pity, often expressed in tedious, tearful monologues wherein he repeatedly wonders whether he might have loved his wife too much. Although the actors and filmmakers do an admirable job of trying to rachet up the tension, their efforts are diffused by the fact that the screenwriters have somehow forgotten to entice us to care about the main character, who is never portrayed as anything but a sobbing, self-indulgent sap. When he bemoans having to tell his children about the situation, the audience is surprised to learn that he has children at all, since they have never been mentioned before. In fact, details about all of the characters are few and far between. They apparently have no responsibilities in the real world, allowing them to spend days on end lounging around an abandoned apartment building, sucking down cigarettes and ruminating about a man’s right to violence. 

The film is watchable thanks to splendid performances by Ian McShane, as a gay Lothario who has inexorably severed all of his emotional attachments, and John Hurt, who repeatedly commits scene larceny as the glowering patriarch of the group who sporadically bursts forth with lyrical rants of profanity. But the central conflict of 44 Inch Chest never threatens to captivate the audience, making it another forgettable flash of traffic on the very crowded highway of films that have wasted our time trying to complicate the utterly simplistic nature of machismo.

After establishing his credentials and his eagerness to learn the true essence of the shamanic practices, Barker finally convinces another Korean master drummer, Kim Dong-Won, to serve as a somewhat reluctant guide on the quest. Part of the joy of the film is observing as the interactions between these two kindred musicians evolve from tentative to affectionate, as Kim Dong-Won is gradually won over by Barker’s mix of genuine enthusiasm and reverence for Korean music and culture.  Word comes early that Kim Seok-Chul is in poor health, thus jeopardizing the realization of the mission, but the intrepid pair does not let the bad news impede their excursion. Kim Dong-Won introduces Barker to a series of unforgettable musicians and performers, each of whom exemplify various aspects of Korean traditional music, which abhors constant or regular rhythmic patterns, seeking instead to mimic the more erratic fluctuations inherent to the natural world. Foremost among these dazzling artists is a Pansori singer named Bae Il-Dong, who perfected his exceptionally intense singing technique by spending more than seven years living in a hut next to a waterfall, spending every day bellowing over the roaring splash of the cascading water. As Bae and other masters share some of the secrets of their craft, the film’s impact causes ripples which progressively encompass drums, music, art, and life. Several moments are guaranteed to produce chills, such as when Bae serenades the sunset with  a vociferous cry from a mountain top or when a female drum master abandons herself to an addictive rhythm. By the time Bae and Kim Dong-Won join Barker and his band for a terrific impromptu performance at a local park, the film has succeeded well beyond its origins as an eclectic road documentary. However, the best is yet to come, and though it would be imprudent to reveal the nature of the resolution to Barker’s original mission, suffice to say that it serves as the most fitting final movement to this remarkable cinematic symphony, at once surprising and inevitable. Regardless of its title, Intangible Asset #82 promises to reward the audience with numerous tangible pleasures.

The film’s relation to its predecessor, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, is never quite clear, other than the presence of a police protagonist with a penchant for cheap sex, expensive drugs, and gambling on sports. Cage hobbles through the title role of Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, like a crackhead Quasimoto, ingesting a chemical mélange of substances to stave off the pain of a chronic back injury as he tries to solve the brutal slaying of a Senegalese family in New Orleans. Cage visibly sheds charisma as the film progresses, devolving from a cocky showboat cop into a squawking dope who desperately projects false bravado and periodically erupts with awkward bursts of incoherent jibberish. Herzog gleefully feeds his scene-chewing star, adding to the already hallucinatory atmosphere of New Orleans with some incongruous iguanas, one alligator carcass and always arresting presence of Brad Dourif. Val Kilmer confirms rumors of his continued existence with an appearance, and Eva Mendes smolders quite adequately as McDonagh’s requisite prostitute/girlfriend.

Herzog rides the preposterous plot off the rails early, and then begins discarding seemingly essential narrative elements like ballast from a sinking ship. For instance, while McDonagh is in the midst of a heated interrogation, trying to locate an elusive suspect, the wanted man simply walks into the police station and surrenders. Later, a key witness to the crime vanishes from McDonagh’s custody, and is quickly forgotten. Herzog shreds the potboiler drama like wrapping paper, unveiling absurd little gifts like a twitching close-up of the aforementioned iguanas, an obnoxious arcade machine which mechanically chants “Insert more coins! Insert more coins!,” and 2009’s most quotable movie line—“Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing.” As the convoluted delta of assorted plotlines empty into a glimmering gulf of a finale, Herzog manages to skewer both the Hollywood happy ending and the Bush administration’s response to Katrina. If Herzog’s goal was to craft a compelling police drama, then he failed miserably, but if he intended to create a magnificent cinematic mess, then mission accomplished!

The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently acquired and debuted a newly restored 35mm print of World on a Wire, a two-part miniseries that Fassbinder made for German television in 1973, in which he indulges in a wholly fictional universe for the first and only time in his career. Based on the 1964 novel Simulacron-3, by American sci-fi writer Daniel Galouye (which also served as the source material for the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor), World on a Wire conjures a peculiar future where humans have created a computer program capable of exactly fabricating the conditions of existence, complete with virtual citizens who are unaware of their status as simulations.

To say that this is a significant cinematic event is the essence of understatement. Even if the film had been directed by a Hollywood hack, it would hold plenty of fascination purely as an archaeological sci-fi artifact which prefigures the paranoiac and recursive conceits of Blade Runner, The Truman Show, and The Matrix. Even if the film had been merely another of Fassbinder’s morose depictions of estrangement and alienation, it would enhance, damage, or at least further complicate his prominent place in film history. The fact that World on a Wire combines the best of both these descriptions, and a great deal more, is simply unprecedented. This is not Fassbinder’s best work, but after marinating for 37 years, it can certainly be called his most entertaining film, as its extended absence has allowed its artistic blemishes and enthusiastic eccentricities to mutate into an aura of humorous exuberance which enhances its allegorical address of our commodified, tech-crazed culture.

It is indeed rare when a film simultaneously succeeds at the level of story, aesthetics, theme, and relevance, but World on a Wire hits all four targets in tight proximity to the bullseye. The narrative drive of the story, in which computer scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) struggles to determine whether his world is “real” or an artificial simulation, is now probably the least intriguing aspect of the film, as the novelty of this concept has been irreparably eroded by numerous subsequent depictions in movies, books, and video games. But Fassbinder’s creation of a future which can best be described as “analog fantastic” is consistently a joy to behold, and probably holds greater resonance today than when the film was made, due to present concerns surrounding the proliferation of disposable devices and the viral spread of technology. In lieu of special effects, Fassbinder enacts a future of sheer accumulation, by stuffing every set full of gauche objects, faux affluence, plastic plants and technological detritus, letting the sumptuous clutter suggest both the culmination of our rampant consumerism and the ephemerality of fad and fashion. Although the film is meant to depict an unspecified future, our discerning contemporary sensibilities detect antiquation and inelegance in every scene–plaid jackets, chest hair, elbow patches, extra buckles, polyester leopard prints, DOS graphics, conspicuous ashtrays, egg-shaped chairs, taxidermy, phones with big plastic buttons, cars like tanks, festering webs of electrical cords, video monitors striped by poor reception, men with ominous charm and aggressive facial hair.

The film exemplifies the cycle of “camp,” wherein elements of the production which reflect audacity and earnestness eventually come to seem humorously naïve to future generations. This plane of entertainment thrives on the audience’s ability and willingness to convince themselves that they are privy to an order of knowledge which is somehow superior to either the producers of the text or to certain fellow members of the audience. For example, while getting dressed the morning after bedding his secretary Gloria Fromm (the ever-voluptuous Barbara Valentin), Stiller eyes her seductively as he methodically draws up the zipper of his pants (which are pulled halfway up his chest). Today’s viewers ostensibly believe that, given the sophistication we’ve supposedly acquired over the last 40 years, we recognize the incongruity and prurience of this silly display of virility better than the actors who performed it, which amplifies the amusement of an already bizarre antic.

To fuel another type of camp response, Fassbinder filled the bit parts of his cast with members of the German film community and once-prominent actors whose stardom had considerably waned, allowing his extant audience to savor the subtle thrill of recognizing an obscure though familiar face amidst the otherwise anonymous extras. Most of these cameos, including an appearance by the recently deceased director Werner Schroeter, will be understandably overlooked today, with the distinct exception of Eddie Constantine, the French actor who is best known for his starring role in Jean-Luc Godard’s single exploration of the sci-fi genre, Alphaville. It is safe to say that most people who are drawn to World on a Wire will have some familiarity with that film, and will thus derive an auxiliary flush of satisfaction from making the connection. Whereas camp reception of a film is commonly diminished as shallow and superficial, here it definitely carries some critical relevance, in that it relies on an illusory hierarchy of awareness, which is the very subject the film is exploring. Just as Stiller comes to realize that his perceived ascendancy over the synthetic entities within his computer is inherently false, those of us delighting in our ironic enjoyment of archaic or artistically inferior texts need to realize that our own tendencies and trends will soon enough be the subject of similar derision from our descendents.       

Fassbinder challenged his masterful cinematographer Michael Ballhaus by constantly obstructing the camera’s line of sight with doors, windows, lamps, curtains, fishbowls, or whatever other knick-knacks happened to be at hand, and by layering his sets with as many reflective surfaces as possible. This motif allowed them to extend, distort, and fracture the frame at their discretion, adding to the atmosphere of skewed normality, and also let them get playful with their compositions, as when a character’s head bloats like a balloon when it is shot through a convex vase. Fassbinder’s fetish for visual echoes lends each scene aesthetic complexity and depth, but it also extends the themes of the multiplicity, ethereality, and artifice of our existence. This depiction of a sterile, counterfeit world strewn with useless accessories and antique advancements might just resonate through our reception of the film and out into our more immediate perceptions, polluting our minds with a whit of ambiguity and doubt as we return to our own immersion in a virtual universe of avatars, downloads, ear buds, feature creep, megapixels, txt msgs, cloud computing, fiscal equity, ATM receipts, and the persistent sprawl of the world wide web.

With his black leather jacket, black jeans, baseball hat and long black hair, Korean director Jeon Soo-il looked right at home in New York’s East Village, where we met for this interview. To that point, I only knew the man from a few pixilated photographs and a pair of meticulous and visually sublime art films (With a Girl of Black Soil and Himalaya, Where the Wind Dwells) which he’d directed. Thus, I had been expecting someone a little more like Hou Hsiao-hsien, and a little less like Joey Ramone. But as we settled into our conversation, Jeon left no doubt that his aggressively casual attire belied a superior film intellect and a passion for introspection, as he consistently answered my questions with thoughtful, reflective responses which simultaneously enlightened and offered new paths of inquiry, the same dual formula which makes his films such a pleasure to experience.   

First, a bit of biographical information: Jeon was born and raised in Sokcho, a city which lies on the coast of the East Sea in the northern part of South Korea. He has been studying film for his entire adult life, first at Kyungsung University in Pusan, which is on the Southern coast of Korea, and then in Paris, where he got his Ph.D. in Film Science at Paris-Diderot University. He returned to Pusan to teach film at Kyungsung and began putting his knowledge to work with the short film Wind Echoing in My Being, which played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. Jeon’s debut feature, The Bird Who Stops in the Air, is an (almost) uncomfortably autobiographical account of a film professor who drinks heavily and struggles to communicate with his students or his sporadic girlfriend as he becomes increasingly obsessed with making a film about birds in flight.

Jeon explained, “A better translation of the title is probably ‘Birds fly within a looped curve.’ It means that birds are not as free as we imagine them to be. They look free, but their path of flight is basically a closed circle, and they don’t veer out of that pre-determined loop. The protagonist gradually realizes that his ideal of freedom is unobtainable.”  

Jeon first entered the radar of most international film critics with his masterful 2007 film With the Girl of Black Soil, a devastating account of a nine-year-old girl who must quickly learn to care for herself and her disabled brother after her single father loses his job at the local mine and descends into alcoholism. The performance of little Yoo Yeon-mi in the title role is nothing short of astonishing, and everyone who sees the film leaves with the (literally) gut-wrenching ending forever etched into their cinematic consciousness. But the film is perhaps more notable for capturing the crippled lives of the miners, whose existence has been reduced to indentured servitude. The girl’s father, played splendidly by Jo Yeong-jin, whom Korean film fans will remember as the creepy killer from Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, contracts a lung disease from his lifelong job in the mines, at which point he is told by the company that they will not cover his health costs unless he develops one of the specific complications from an abbreviated list. Needless to say, this egregious practice is too absurd to be fictitious–Jeon based this portion of the story on real events.

In Himalaya, Where the Wind Dwells, Jeon’s most recent film to reach America, he sends Choi Min-sik, the maniacal protagonist from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (returning from a three-year hiatus from film), on an arduous trek through the world’s tallest mountains to return the ashes of a Nepalese worker who died at his brother’s factory in Korea. The Himalayan landscape provides Jeon with a spectacular canvas on which to showcase his stunning cinematic craftsmanship, as he enhances the aching visual beauty of the peaks with a magnificent organic soundtrack. Though there is little dialogue, as Choi’s character can only communicate by using broken English with the young son of his host family, the atmosphere of imposing splendor and danger refutes silence, as the fluctuating rush of the wind constantly evokes the presence of powers which preceded us.      

Like his fellow Korean Kim Ki-duk, or China’s Jia Zhangke, or Taiwan’s Tsai Mingliang, Jeon is actually better known in the West than he is in his own country, where independent films have always struggled to gain a foothold among audiences raised on big-budget blockbusters. I began our exchange by seeking his thoughts on his somewhat purgatorial status as an artistic filmmaker.

AMG – You’ve been labeled as a “festival” director so far in your career. I know you once said, “I don’t make my movies according to film festival standards per se,’’ but your films clearly aren’t aimed at the mainstream audience. Do you consider the audience when you’re conceiving or creating a film? 

Jeon – It’s not been my intention to make only “festival films”. I want to make movies which interest me, and for me, that means questions of identity, emotion, and my own psychological journey. In my films, narrative is never as important as space, ambience, or sound–the atmosphere surrounding the person, and how all they interact with it. But I think my movies belong to the “road movie” genre. When someone goes to a new place, and they interact with a new surrounding, then they begin to understand another way of life. But I would still like to get a bigger audience, of course.

AMG – But you know that most mainstream audiences go to the theater for entertainment, and to escape from their reality, which is not what you’re doing…

I know, but there’s only so much I can do. Although I would like to reach a bigger audience, our distribution system [in Korea] keeps my works from being seen by the larger public. I’m not left with many options. For one, I can keep going to film festivals, trying to release my work in foreign countries, and then hopefully import them back to Korea. Or, two, I can rely on the 20 or so art theaters in Korea, which is where my works will always have a better chance to be seen. With the Girl of Black Soil was shown in about 15 theaters, and we barely had any money for P.R. or advertising, so, as you can guess, not many people saw it.

AMG – But that film won many awards. People in Korea didn’t see it?

A very limited number of people, mostly critics or in film schools. It did much better in France though, about 100,000 people.

AMG – In With the Girl of Black Soil, you depicted the working conditions in the mines and the desolation of the town in Gangwon-do so vividly, and that subject is quite rare in contemporary Korean cinema. How have other audiences, particularly in Korea, responded to those scenes?  

Many positive responses, of course (laughs). In France, the critics all talked about the purity and the simplicity of the film, in both narrative and style. They said there was no surplus, and everything in the film was necessary, almost minimalistic. It’s a bit like Chinese brush painting, in that way. Every brushstroke should convey absolute simplicity, in order to leave room for the audience to explore and interpret. They really liked that. And the little girl’s acting! In Korea, though, the same simplicity led to mixed responses. They liked the movie, but some people told me that addressing this powerful subject in such a subdued, minimalistic way took away a lot of the impact. They thought I should’ve done more to solicit the audience’s sympathy and sentiment. But I don’t agree! You could handle it a million different ways, but the way I handled it was the most appropriate to me.

AMG – I know that you grew up in the northeast part of South Korea, where the film takes place, and that the vast majority of people and families in that area of South Korea were actually from North Korea, and they were stranded in the south after the war began. You’ve returned to that area to make several films. Can you talk about the significance of your hometown, in both a personal and a historical context?

My father, who passed away, came from what is now North Korea, so I’m very much familiar with and interested in those people’s concerns. There’s a sense of displacement among them, as if they’ve lost their home, and they’re constantly searching and trying to regain what they’ve lost. That theme is present in all my films. For example, my latest film, I Came from Pusan, is about a young girl who goes to France to try to retrieve the baby she gave up for adoption, because she couldn’t bear the sense of loss.

AMG – I read an interesting quotation from one of your earlier interviews (with Lee Hyo-won, from Korea Times, 6-17-2009), talking about why you make films. You said, “Perhaps cinema is the process of translating your inner self on film. Or perhaps it’s a way of pursuing a different way of life.” To me, these seem like two very different ideas—one is abstract, trying to express yourself through film, and one is very concrete, trying to live a lifestyle which gives you satisfaction.

To me those things are not separate. I don’t think the attempt to translate the inner self is abstract or metaphysical, because the inner self is who we really are, who I am. Asking who I am is inseparable from my identity, and where I’m from–my hometown. Thus, translation of my inner self involved revisiting my hometown, both mentally and physically. And when I went back there, I found that many things were gone or different from how I remembered them. That led to the larger themes of loss and longing.

AMG – The great editor Walter Murch wrote that there are two types of filmmaker–those who have the whole film visualized in their head before they even start shooting, and those who improvise on set and try to take advantage of spontaneity and “happy accidents.” Which one are you?

I’m both, I guess. There’s only a fine line between the two. I don’t rely on spontaneity on the set, but as a low-budget indie director, I have a lot of time for preparation. I usually start off with a story, which is basically an incomplete screenplay, and then during the long preproduction phase I scout for locations. Inevitably, I get inspired by the spaces I visit, and make changes to the script. So I do get spontaneous on set, but usually before the shooting has even begun.

AMG – Your films often have very little dialogue–how do you represent silence in your screenplay? Do you describe the mood, or setting, or camera position?

I rely on the space for all of that. I write a very minimal script at first–no more than 20 pages. The details come from being in the locations, and trying to imagine how the protagonist would feel and think in that particular space. That explains why visual elements are so important in my films. When you’re in a certain space, the light, shadow, color contrast or the sound can fill in the space and the silence left from the minimal dialog.

AMG – Are there certain rules of acting that you dictate to your actors/actresses?

The most important rule which I tell all my actors is–don’t act! I absolutely don’t want that conspicuous display of thinking and feeling that most people consider acting. My belief is that, when you show less, people perceive more and it’s more powerful.

AMG – That sounds like Robert Bresson. Like Bresson, you don’t seem to have a lot of comedy in your films. Or maybe I’m missing the humor. Do you find moments of humor in your films?

I want to incorporate comedy more, but to be honest with you, I don’t really have a sense of humor (laughs). But I think just showing the perspective of a child, in With the Girl of Black Soil, hopefully provides some humor, like when she sings and dances with the TV while she’s eating or when she disciplines the chicken.

AMG – You seem to be quite interested in the interactions between people and animals.

Yes, I guess all my movies have animal characters which are pretty important. For the protagonist in The Bird Who Stops in the Air, the birds symbolize his ideal of freedom, but the birds are never actually seen in the film. In Himalaya, Where the Wind Dwells, the protagonist has a strange encounter with a white horse, which represents a mystical and mysterious being. Animals are a wonderful way to blur the border between reality and fantasy. I think children do that too.

AMG – What did you discover the first time you visited Nepal? Were you hoping to find a film there, or something else?

Like the protagonist, I was feeling stifled in Korea and I needed to get away from the stress. One day, I was feeling really suffocated, because one of my film projects was at a dead end, and some other things were happening, so I just grabbed my passport and went to Bangkok. While I was there, I saw a brochure for a tourist package that was going to Kathmandu, so I went along. Then once I got there, I started trekking through the Himalayas. I liked it there very much, so I went back with my camera and made a video diary. I was aware that there are many Southeast Asian immigrant workers who are living in Korea, and I wondered, if one of them dies here, who will bring the person back to his family? That’s how that film started.

AMG – Your own residential and working space is in Pusan. Like most other things, the filmmaking scene in Korea is highly concentrated in Seoul. What do you gain by basing yourself in Pusan?

I don’t really like Seoul. Everyone there is so business-minded. There are definitely benefits to being there, but it was never my thing. I’m from Sokcho, so I need to be close to the ocean, and Pusan also has more natural wilderness in its vicinity than Seoul. And it might sound ironic, but sometimes your mood and spirit can be heightened when you don’t have resources or a strong infrastructure. Living in Pusan has widened my perspective, and nurtured better stories, so I think I enjoy more benefits there. 

Luckily for the rest of us, Jeon Soo-il has thus far been quite generous in sharing those benefits through his captivating films. Let’s hope that more audiences return the favor and begin to seek out and take notice of one of the world’s most interesting and least heralded directors.

Although Director Bong is relatively fluent in English, we used a translator for the interview, which pretty much killed my attempt at a joke. The shaggy-haired, spectacled director, who was in the midst of a 48-hour-long gauntlet of interviews promoting the American release of Mother, his fourth film, simply regarded me with a mix of perplexity and contempt while I stuttered to explain myself. The Host, Bong’s smash-hit film from 2006, was about to be toppled as Korea’s number one all-time box office champion by a certain Hollywood import about blue aliens and divine trees, and I was wondering if he was in a grievous mood.

That brought a smile to his face, as he quickly replied, “I’ve been telling everyone, whenever I had a chance, that I want that record to be broken as soon as possible. I have felt pretty uncomfortable being the director of the biggest box office hit. I’m glad that it will be broken soon.” In fact, Bong admitted that he was so anxious to surrender the title that he helped contribute to his own downfall. “I myself saw Avatar twice, and I found it very interesting. I don’t think that its success was only due to its 3D technology. The film itself has many strengths, without the special effects. It definitely provided me with an almost sensual, and sensorial film-watching experience. It’s no surprise at all that it will hold the record, since it is breaking records all over the world.” [Note--Avatar did indeed officially pass The Host that weekend].

In the past, Bong has discussed his own discomfort with his experience at the helm of a big-budget, effects-driven studio film, so I asked whether he had any qualms about conceding his record to the biggest-budget, most effects-driven film ever produced.  He shook his head and said, “I don’t feel bad at all, because it was only possible to produce Avatar within the American film industry, in terms of the size, system, manpower, mobilization, etc. I don’t think that even if a Korean director was given the same budget, that they would make a movie like that. It could only have come from the Hollywood system.” Then he laughed and added, “Plus a super megalomaniac, all-controlling, and also genius director.” We both chuckled and nervously shifted our eyes, as if expecting James Cameron to come storming through the walls at the mention of his name, like the Kool-Aid Man.

Anxious to change the subject, I asked Bong to describe how he selected Mother as his post-Host project, and whether he felt any pressure to follow up the most popular film in his nation’s history. He replied, “The success did put pressure on me, but as a matter of fact, both Mother and [my next project] Snow Piercer [based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige] were decided as my future projects even before I started shooting The Host. I started writing Mother back in 2004.”

Actually, Bong had a secret weapon in store for audiences who were anxious to see what he would do to top the hideous beast which rose from the depths of the Han River in The Host. For Mother, he unleashed an equally fierce creature in Kim Hye-ja, a legendary Korean TV icon, who runs rampant through a tiny suburb of Seoul as she desperately tries to prove that her mentally-ill son is innocent of murder. Kim is so familiar to Korean audiences for her roles as a mother on TV dramas that she has become the national symbol for motherhood, a status which Bong gleefully exploited in this outstanding suspense thriller.

“[Kim] is the symbolic Mom in Korea, but I always felt this perverse darkness around her,” he said, “which I guess can be applied to all mothers. This film is about how hard it is to really know or trust another person. We see a son through the mother’s eyes, and she thinks she knows everything about him, but in the end she realizes that she barely knows him at all. I think that’s really true, because sometimes I don’t even really know myself, so how can I know another person?”

Bong has always relished the chance to place familiar actors in surprising roles, and his two leads in this film are no exception. In addition to Kim’s delightfully disturbing turn in the title role, Bong cast the dashing model Won Bin as Do-joon, the main character’s mentally defective son, who is accused of murdering a teenage girl. Both actors perform very well, but Kim has all the show-stopping moments as her character subsidizes her income by practicing black market acupuncture, haggles with a hilariously pretentious lawyer, stealthily negotiates a bottle-strewn bedroom with the possible murder weapon, and dutifully re-applies her lipstick after crashing the murder victim’s funeral to declare her son’s innocence.

In Korea, Bong’s intense attention to seemingly innocuous details like these has taken on mythic proportions, with stories circulating about how he fretted over which actor’s hands he should use to portray the hands of the unseen killer in his masterful second film, Memories of Murder.  Because of his perfectionist reputation, the Korean press has dubbed him “Bong Tail,” (a play on “detail”), and he smirked when I mentioned the rather unfortunate moniker. When I commented on the apparent paradox between his rigorous preparation and execution, and the magnificent confusion and ambiguity which makes his characters so genuine and memorable, he enthusiastically remarked that, “in order to deliver ambiguity clearly, you need to control many details.”

Indeed, Bong commands the screen in all of his films, which are impeccably shot and composed like cinematic symphonies. Nearly every sequence has a satisfying trajectory of its own, so that the scenes act like fractals of the larger whole. In one particularly memorable moment of Mother, a humiliated Kim stalks out of the police station into a downpour, refusing one officer’s offer of an umbrella, but once she is out of sight of the building, she secretly snatches an umbrella from the passing cart of a peddler. Ninety-nine percent of film directors and screenwriters would be content with such an imaginative cinematic moment, which shimmers with creative authenticity, but Bong extends the sequence until Kim surrenders to her conscience and chases down the aged peddler to pay him for the umbrella. She thrusts a pair of crinkled bills into his face, to which he cocks his head and carefully pulls just one bill from her hand, asserting his own honesty in the face of her abbreviated deceit. This is a wonderful moment, certainly, but also a purposeful one, which pays off again later in the film.

Bong uses his script elements and onscreen space with the same utter efficiency Native Americans once applied to a slaughtered buffalo–nothing goes to waste. In Mother, minor details like golf balls, apples, and plastic gloves are introduced apparently as comedic props, but they eventually acquire a purpose and a progression which rewards attentive viewing. Moments which, in inferior films, would be singular and played purely for entertainment, such as when Do-joon’s friend spontaneously breaks off a car’s side mirror with an impressive flying kick, have real consequences, as they would for real people.

Like the homicide investigation from Memories of Murder, which was based directly on a notorious case from the 1980s, the crime in Mother also had its genesis in real life, though this was a much more loose interpretation of an actual event. I asked him if he was consciously trying to address the victimization of women in Korean society, and he said, “Until recently I hadn’t realized that, in all three of my previous films, school girls were murdered or hurt. Like what happened in my movies, I think children and women in Korean society indeed have been victimized and hurt too often. It is really sad. You might say that it reflects my intention to protect them, but at the same time, it reflects the reality.”

However, Bong firmly eschewed the notion that he was pursuing any political agenda with his films. “In Korea, they give everyone the day off from work on election day, but I usually go to the movies instead.”

My special thanks to Ernest Woo and Myoungsook Park for their translation for this interview.

Our conversation soon revealed that this was in fact the cinematic Superman who had almost single-handedly produced Breathless, but he was still shaking off the effects of a 18-hour dose of that universal Kryptonite—jetlag. Remarkably, more than 18 months after Breathless (Korean title: Ddongpari) debuted at the 2008 Pusan Film Festival, Yang was still making the global circuit in support of the film, and, on this day, those duties included flying from Seoul to New York (36 hours round trip) for one day (about 8 hours) of meetings with distributors and a single screening of the film (2.5 hours). You do the math.

The fact that Yang was visibly jetlagged, though constantly jovial, belied the fact that he had in fact used a jet, not a cape, to make his flight to New York, but in terms of energy and stamina, he certainly qualifies as having super powers of global promotional. A few of his stops so far have included Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Queensland (Australia), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Deauville (France), Karlovy (Czech Republic), New York (in 2009), Las Palmas (Spain), Montreal, Buenos Aires, Austin (Texas), and New York (2010). Almost all of those trips paid off with some film festival hardware, but despite his abundance of frequent flyer miles and cumbersome bronze knick-knacks, Yang has yet to score the ultimate prize—a U.S. distribution contract.    

1. I read somewhere that you still get nervous when you do an audience Q&A for this film. You’re not nervous now, are you?

Nervous? I don’t know where you read that. I enjoy getting in front of an audience who has seen the movie, because I can be more honest and candid with them. I made this movie because I wanted to express the problems and issues I had encountered with my family, my friends, and my own life. When I share those emotions and thoughts, the audience can reflect on something similar they’ve experienced in their lives. That kind of sharing makes me feel connected with them.

2. Your film is named Ddongpari, which is a derogatory term for the most unwanted people in society, those who can only exist at the margins. Isn’t it ironic that such a film has been embraced by people all over the world, many of whom have never had to experience such hostility or poverty?

Actually, I myself did not experience what you see in the film. I came from the low-middle class, but the characters in my movie are from an even lower class than mine. But those people were my friends and lived in my neighborhood, so I had a chance to witness their lives, especially during my middle-school years when I hung out with many friends like that. I experienced and I saw a lot of violence that was done to them and that they did to others. The movie isn’t about whether they are in a lower class or not, it is about the violence they were exposed to in their everyday lives, from their own families. Now that I can look back on it, I realize that it was not just my personal life, but the whole social atmosphere of Korea at the time, which was extremely volatile and imbued with violence. Of course, those years coincide with the final years of the military dictatorship, when protests for democracy were the most active.

3. At traditional Korean funerals, a shaman acts as a bridge to the passed spirit, which allows the mourning family to pour out all their emotion and experience a cleansing catharsis. Has this film somewhat served that role for you?  

By putting it out there, I did get some satisfaction from it. However, it hasn’t gone away. It’s not like it’s gone completely, and I am done with it. There is definitely more inside me. I think that’s because the movie has been following me since it opened, about 18 months ago, and because I had so many jobs on this film. If I was just the director, then after a while, I can say that this is done, and I am moving on. But I was involved with almost every aspect of the production, so that hasn’t happened yet, even though I started this project four years ago. It is like a mom trying to take care of her children after they are fully grown.

 4.   I know that the shamanic ritual at a funeral is an intensely private affair for the family and the loved ones of the deceased, but you have chosen to share your ritual with thousands of people all over the world. What has that been like?

Exhausting! I completed this movie two years ago, and then it debuted at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2008. I might have thought that it would not go much further than that, but it has, and I’m thankful for that, but it’s hard too. My distribution company told me that they had nothing to advertise or promote the movie except for…me! Because of that, I have probably done about 1000 interviews for the film. You can only brag so much about your child. Actually, at this point, I’m no longer even sure what this movie is about. Sometimes I did 15 or more interviews per day. As a director, you need to be able to detach yourself from the work in order to really evaluate it, but I haven’t been able to do that yet. But in terms of the ritual, I do think that we need to be more open about our secrets, that they must be shared, examined, and looked at. If you let secrets build up inside you for too long, particularly in Korea, those secrets can distort your sensibility and your personality. So I wanted to let at least a small portion out, and share it with everybody.

5. What have you learned about your film from these 1000 interviews?

I honestly don’t have a sense of politics, and I didn’t make this movie intending to address any particular social issues. The movie came out more instinctively, simply as a product of what I saw and what I experienced, rather than a critique of some social problem. So I have been impressed with how audiences have interpreted the movie as a more complicated critique of Korean society. It is really interesting to observe the contrast between the lack of agenda on my part as a director, and the immediate political reading from the audience. I’ve learned so much about my movie from the audience’s reading. I’ve found some blogs written by people who have seen the film, and when I read their reflection on how the movie relates their lives, I find myself crying, because what they experienced and what they read from the movie is totally new and touching. It’s something I never would have imagined someone would get out of my movie, about my experience. I still learn things about the film to this day.

6. Your movie reminded me of two other very important debuts by Korean directors, Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish (1996) and Ryu Seung-wan’s Die Bad (2000). In those films and yours, violence is a way of life. It is almost like the air the characters breathe, and eventually it suffocates them. Can you say something about the lineage?

Honestly, I don’t have much to comment on that. A few other people mentioned it, but I think it’s merely accidental. In hindsight, after hearing those comments, I started to think about the connection between my work and some of those in the past. Actually, some time ago, I saw a movie which was shown entirely through a young girl’s point of view. She witnessed murders and other tragedies, and even though she couldn’t comprehend these horrible things, I could, and the rest of the audience could. So it became a very touching film, because even though it is seen by a young girl, we can empathize with her. I think my movie is like that. Ddongpari describes a reality which the characters, and even myself, can’t completely understand, but it still connects with viewers, and helps them to better understand themselves and their own lives better. Going back to shamanic rituals…it wasn’t a movie made for the audience. I needed to find my way to go on and live my life, and find a way to prevent myself from suffocation. Letting out the frustration piling up. I had to find a breathing hole somehow. That’s where the title came from.

7. You’re an actor, first and foremost. After doing so many interviews, do you ever feel like your answers are another form of performance?

I do sometimes find myself repeating the same answers I have said before, or even saying something that I’ve read in an interview with myself that sounds better than what I really might have said at the time. When I find myself doing that, I know I’ve been rehearsing too much. Ever since my first short film, I’ve never had a rehearsal or insisted that my cast rehearse. In fact, I always tell my actors not to read the script too much, to try to keep it fresh.

8.  Many people have discussed how you had so many jobs on this film, and it seems ironic to me that your amazing performance is almost overlooked in that discussion. Do you think that has been the case?  

I have been in the film industry for about 10 years, mostly as an actor. I have mostly done small parts in many various films, so most people don’t recognize me. I think that turned out to be a blessing because it made my acting in my first feature and my first starring role look fresh. Prior to this film, people didn’t have any impression of me.

9. I can say with confidence that they have a very definite impression now. You must have known it would be a tremendous challenge to be the director, producer, screenwriter, and star of the film. Was it easier or harder than you thought it would be?  

I don’t know the answer to that, but I can say that one of the benefits of acting while I was directing was that I was able to stand on a more equal footing with the other actors and staff. Usually, the director tends to be held in a somewhat elevated position, which can make it harder to communicate with the actors. On the other hand, because of so much multi-tasking, I often had a lot of trouble remembering my lines, even though they were my own lines that I had written!  Many times, I said “Shoot” as a director, and then moments later, I would say “Sorry, what is my line?” as an actor. (Chuckles) Oh well… Everything worked out because I never encourage actors to memorize their lines perfectly anyway. I really think a glimpse at the script is enough to allow for freer, more natural acting, even if it means that some lines might be wrong or missing. In the bigger picture, restricting yourself or your actors to a written script is not a method I would ever recommend. Life itself is the best teacher for my acting.

10. That’s probably all right for this film anyway, since the main character, Sang-hoon, curses so much. If you forget a line, you can just say…?

Shibbal! (시발!) But please don’t learn that word, actually that is the last thing you should learn in the Korean language. But since it is such an awful word, and it gets repeated so many times in the movie, people seem to be feel a sense of liberation, like they are conquering a social taboo.  At many screenings, younger people and even middle-aged women have asked me to say that word again. I think perhaps young people and women are the ones most affected by those social censorships. It is also funny when non-Korean journalists greet me with “Shibbal!” at various film festivals, always with a big smile and friendly manner. Seeing the word used in such a completely different context is just so interesting.

11. Cursing and violence are the only ways that Sang-hoon can communicate for much of the film. You have talked about how the characters are suffocating (hence, the English title Breathless), but can you talk about their inability to talk to one another?

His family fell apart so early in his life that he had to develop his cursing and violence as a defense, in order to protect himself from all the dangers around him. Violence and cursing can be the most immediate tools of communication, almost like when an animal instinctively growls as a sign of aggression, but also as a defense. This is what makes Sang-hoon a sympathetic character, in spite of everything else. When he sees his dad, maybe he could have said “Dad, why did you do that back then? Why couldn’t you have been good to us?” But no one ever taught him that, so he had to learn a different way. He could never express himself, so all those pent-up emotions left him with nothing except cursing, beating, kicking, throwing. The movie made a real impact with a lot of male viewers because they can identify most with the situation where you can’t express sufficiently in words. It still happens, and a lot of people can connect to that.

12. It’s ironic that you made this movie about the circle of masculine violence in Korea, which often gets passed from father to son, but you had to borrow money from your dad in order to finance the film. But I’m actually interested in your mother? What was her response to the film?

Actually, she lent me money too. At first, she didn’t like it, because she thought that she had lost face since I had borrowed a lot of material from my own family. She said that it doesn’t do any good to display your dirty laundry to others. However, like I said earlier, about the shamanic ritual, I think that by uncovering a repressive family secret, which was deemed to be exclusively private, I hopefully contributed to better communication and a better relationship with her. Once my family let things out, to a certain extent, by watching my movie, they seem to think more about what they really want and what they really mean to each other. This movie not only made my life more bearable, but also my mother’s. I can’t say it has resolved all the issues, but it definitely initiated a healthier communication in my family.

13. What role do you think that the mandatory military service for Korean men plays in this cycle of violence you depict?

Again, that’s not something that I ever thought about when I was making the film, but some people have asked about it since then, which made me think about it for the first time, and I think it does play a role. Of course, the main connection in the film is Yeon-hee’s father, who fought in Vietnam and is now mentally disabled. That character is based on my friends’ father, who went to Vietnam, and came back with mental problems. He would spend all day drinking makgeolli (a sweet, milky wine made from rice) and smoking, until finally his daughter was worried that he would suffer from malnutrition. She replaced his wine with soy milk, but he was so far gone that he didn’t even notice the difference. Looking back, I feel very sad that my dad’s generation was only taught about responsibility, which meant either his responsibility to his family as a breadwinner, or to his country as a loyal patriot. Those two major responsibilities were so embedded into every man that whatever they were as an individual before was lost. During the 60s and 70s, their participation in the Vietnam War was seen as a service which they owed to their country, because Korea received a lot of economic compensation from the U.S. for helping them. Again, those men didn’t learn how to love, or how to communicate, or how to think about what they want as an individual. I don’t like what they have become because of it, and yet feel I have to be sympathetic at the same time. It’s very complicated. And I believe it’s the same for many viewers when they see the distorted relationship between Sang-hoon and his dad.  As for the scenes of him beating his father, many people—not only sons, but also daughters and moms—felt somewhat liberated and even exhilarated from watching those scenes, without the accompanying pain.

14. Have you gotten any feedback about the film from people who are still living like Sang-hoon today?

Well, we did get the chance to meet some real gangsters while we were shooting. When we were setting up two street food vendor carts for one of the last scenes, the real thugs in the neighborhood saw what we were doing, and thought that we were actually new vendors setting up on their turf without asking them for a “permit,” or giving them their cut. They were really upset and the encounter was pretty intense. Even though, in the film, I play the most ruthless and violent character, I was no match for those guys. (Laughs) I shrunk myself down and whimpered, “We’re only making a movie.”

15. I read that the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien was a big influence on you, especially his quote that “thinking is like writing on the water, and making films is like carving on rocks.” Has it occurred to you that you are now in a position to influence people the way he influenced you?

That story has been somewhat misinterpreted. Hou Hsiao-hsien taught a Master film class at the Pusan Film Festival in 2005, but I never attended the class. I only read his quote in the newspaper, but it did partially inspire me to start making my movie, even though I knew I didn’t have enough money to make it. Then, four years later, I actually did meet Director Hou at the Taipei Film Festival in 2009. I told him I wanted to meet him, and once he saw my movie, he canceled his schedule for me, and took me out for a drink. While we were drinking, he shouted “Shibbal!” While we joking and cursing each other, I felt so honored, like a dream had come true. Even now, for me to make a movie and receive numerous awards seems like a dream. It still seems unreal to me now. Because of what he said, I was inspired to make a movie. Honestly, I never really had a goal in my life, or someone to look up to, but he became a direct influence just because of that quote I happened to read.

16. What will your next project be?

I let out so much frustration through this film that I’m not strongly motivated to make another film yet. I have to deal with some private issues first, like love, family, having a relationship. Those things were postponed and neglected because I couldn’t focus on anything else while I made Ddongpari. Right now, it’s more important for me to go back to my normal life and forget about filmmaking for a while.