Na Hong-Jin told the Busan International Film Festival master class audience that the film “Hope” was born from a conviction that war was about to break out on the Korean peninsula around 2017.
News at the time described US warplanes and bombers flying in and out of Pyongyang throughout the night, Na said. He expected the fight to begin in early 2018 or just after the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. He explained that this sense of foreboding is one of the two ingredients he needs before embarking on a project. The other is the discomfort he feels around people. He began to view their words as a mixture of truth, distortions, and outright lies, regardless of whether there was any malicious intent behind them.
The session at the 31st edition of the festival was announced under the title “Na Hong-Jin, A Genre of Its Own”. Na planned this as an hour-long walk through his process, followed by a half-hour of audience questions. He threw this to the students he was waiting in the room.
He described an upbringing that directly fed into his work. Her mother read horror novels, mysteries, thrillers, and comics, and she would send Na and her siblings to bookstores to buy them and give them the books to her when she finished them. His father’s work took him to Japan frequently. Na had a Walkman before she started kindergarten, and it was replaced every time the older kids in the neighborhood picked it up. Na studied crafts at university, working with wood, metal, paints, and ceramics because flat, two-dimensional drawings were starting to bore him.
Na said he didn’t go out looking for supplies. While spending time with all kinds of people, he expects her to find him. “The Chaser” began with a night spent watching football with friends at a local bar, and ended up drinking all night with a group of detectives at the next table. One of them, who was drunk, told him that serial killer Yoo Young-chul once started a fire and escaped after being detained by the police in Mapo. Na said he was unaware of the incident and was shocked.
The “Yellow Sea” began with news that a murder was being committed every day in the same place, Garibong-dong, where the Korean-Chinese population was dense and the police had difficulty controlling it. Na’s research took him to Yanbian by plane; Here he met a well-known gangster and spent long hours listening to his stories. For “The Wailing,” he became close to a member of a shaman family. He then lived with shamans at a mountain retreat for several months, where he said he came to feel and even see various things.
While preparing “Hope”, Na’s fishing trips with strangers on the east coast of Gangwon province left their mark on the film. He named a character after a friend from these trips, played by Eum Moon-suk in the film: Yang-bae.
Na reads widely for symbolism and metaphor when creating antagonists, but he largely stays away from other people’s films and is wary of borrowing from them. He also rarely sees his friends in the film industry, preferring to spend his free time with people and worlds he doesn’t know.
Na said that before writing a script, he decided on a genre and, most importantly, a rhythm. “There is no going back after that, there is no going back,” he said.
On set, he sees himself less as a writer and more as a supervisor, overseeing every element of the frame for a crew of 200 people. The field comes first. On the first day of shooting, he asks the actors to arrive early, before the crew and equipment move in, so they can get a feel for the location. Casting follows how each character will be framed in that space, and lighting comes next.
He warned that preparing too carefully could leave the film stiff. Most Korean productions shoot from storyboards, but Na said he didn’t even look at his own on “The Wailing.” Instead, he talked to the cinematographer in the car every morning about each day’s shooting, taking breaks to film whatever striking emerged. “It was just me and my DOP working without a strict plan,” Na said.
Na reserved his strongest words for post-production, which he believes the Korean industry underestimates and squeezes into a very short time. He tells his crew that everything that exists exists to serve this stage. “It’s the scene that makes and breaks the movie, and it’s the most important moment we’ve all been working towards,” he said.
He warned that losing control of the schedule would turn a filmmaker from hunter to prey. He stated that he believes that every film is born with its own destiny, and that this destiny is often revealed by almost miraculous moments of weather and nature during shooting.
Na said “Don’t Cry” aims to tell viewers that the big and small misfortunes they experience have causes and consequences that have nothing to do with them. He hoped they would blame themselves less and carry these burdens a little lighter. His films have thus far resulted in darkness and only offered the belief that light might exist somewhere ahead. As he got older, he said, he increasingly wanted audiences to see that light.
He hasn’t decided how much of his ending he’ll reveal next.
When asked by an audience member how he would describe himself as a genre, considering the name of his masterclass, Na said that anyone who meets him closely will find him different from those they have encountered before, and whether people will either warm up to him or not. He said he has trouble reading what lies behind people’s words, but he feels more at ease, trusting that true intentions will eventually come out.
“I can tell you that I am not an easy person to be around,” he said.