KIM Jee-woon

Author

Preface

In the summer of 2008, the talk of Korean cinema was The Good, the Bad and the Weird. In a Korean film industry suffering through a slump in recent years, people were very interested to see what the results would be for this film, which had the biggest production budget in Korean film history. It featured the meeting of three top-level stars in SONG Kang-ho, LEE Byung-hun and JUNG Woo-sung; it was in a genre—the western—that was something highly unaccustomed to in Korean film; its location shooting in China had gone for over 100 days… The film opened within such interest, and, amid somewhat mixed responses, the film moved past the break-even point and attained the 9th highest box office result in Korean film history with approximately 7 million viewers (as of September 26, 2008).

A film that races forward wildly, The Good, the Bad and the Weird resembles the last decade in the life of its director, KIM Jee-woon, who has been constantly racing himself during that time. I feel myself very fortunate personally to have been able to take on a project such as this book that illuminates him in a comprehensive and complete way, through articles and long interviews at this point in time, when a film has come out that is suffused with all of his strengths and weaknesses and that seems like an intermediate reckoning of the past 10 years. As I watched each of his films again three or four times and conducted two spoken and three written interviews, I came to approach KIM’s films in a slightly more concrete way, and I could see that they were far more fascinating and elaborate works than I had previously realized.

KIM Jee-woon is both a talented genre filmmaker and one of the few cineastes in today’s Korean film possessing both skillful storytelling abilities and an original visual style. The greatest virtue of his films is that they are enjoyable. Within stripped-down narratives, the actors’ allures are displayed in their entirety, accompanied by fresh visuals and fitting sound. In addition, his films also feature a distinctive sense of humor. Yet KIM denies being a director who simply makes well-made commercial films. He makes genre films within the mainstream, but at the same time he has authorial ambitions of leaving his own stamp within his works. This may be the reason for the discordant note he continues to strike with Korean critics. With KIM, there is a slightly uneasy coexistence of the virtues of a commercial film director and solitary auteurism; a sense of conscience that demands that he make even entertainment films melancholy; aesthetic judgment that is stinting toward genre film coupled with a director’s dissatisfaction with that situation. These contradictory elements have essentially come together to drive him onto film sets without rest for the past 10 years. He has made new attempts based on external criticism of and personal reflection on his past films and covertly projected his own internal pain, desires and complexes onto his films. And fortunately enough, he has survived commercially in the process to become the director afforded the biggest budget in the history of Korean film with The Good, the Bad and the Weird.

In my analysis of his five feature films and four short films, the greatest emphasis is placed on the seen. In particular, the spaces that he has created form the most important foundation in analyzing his films. Space in his films is not simply a background but a speaker itself, presenting its own story at the viewer. In addition, those spaces faithfully reflect the interiors of the characters. Also, the actors in KIM’s films are camera subjects with a powerful impression. The director strives to draw out a certain essential image possessed by the actor, capturing it on film and bringing it in front of the viewer.

One area that requires a slight degree of caution here is a view that sees his works as purely image-oriented. He obviously believes strongly in the power of the seen, but while that does occasionally reveal itself through unrealistic visuals, he also clearly reflects the essential reality of life within. His films represent a kind of theory of life presented through the conventions of genre film, and the director constantly provides a gaze of compassion toward the characters suffering within his films.

The assessment of a director on a journey is always a careful affair, and so I have tried to keep an open mind as much as possible and avoid conclusive expressions in analyzing his films. If in spite of this there are areas where I have expressed this director on a journey as a director who has completed a journey, I take full responsibility for that. It is my hope that book will not cause any lessening of the fascination in the cinematic microcosm created by KIM Jee-woon.

October, 2008

KIM Hyung-seok

Introduction

Introduction

There are various opinions about how to divide Korean film into periods, but there are likely few film scholars who would offer objection to the statement that its changes and search for new avenues began in the 1980s. The Korean films of this period, however heterogeneous, were passing through a time known as the New Wave. IM Kwon-taek, who until the 1970s had been dependent upon the commercial film system centering around Chungmuro, begin to follow the path of a real auteurist director with Mandara (1980). LEE Jang-ho, who appeared like a shooting star in the 1970s with The Stars’ Heavenly Home (1974) but was forced to leave Chungmuro under pressure from the dictatorship, made his comeback with A Good, Windy Day (1980) and announced the arrival of a new form of Korean film. BAE Chang-ho, who started out as LEE’s assistant director, followed a stable but delicate course between polished commercial film and auteurism.

It would be difficult to group into one the tendencies of the directors leading the new current of the times, but if they had any commonality it would be their concern for the conventions of Korean film. They reconsidered its distinctive dramaturgy and genre clichés. And the late 1980s would see the arrival of JANG Sun-woo and PARK Kwang-su, for whom film was a reflection of reality and an interpretation of the past. They sought to contain with their films the material foundations and historical context in which they were made. What mattered to them was realism.

The influence of the directors who started out this way in the 1980s formed the main aesthetic current in Korean film until the mid-1990s, at which point HONG Sang-soo and KIM Ki-duk appeared on the scene. Debuting in the same year, they brought about a massive disturbance in the aesthetic topography of Korean cinema. HONG’s The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996) raised the topic of the everyday in Korean film. Through a process of dismantling and reassembling life, he revealed a horror and strangeness in the everyday that we had not perceived before. KIM, who made his debut with Crocodile (1996), spoke of a desire for the raw. His protagonists approach the truth of life through suffering.

But the chronicle of these directors met with a new set of circumstances in the late 1990s: the directors of the so-called film fanatic generation. They were different from their predecessors; while JANG Sun-woo and PARK Kwang-su concerned themselves with the relationship of tension between reality and film, the new generation pondered film through film and regarded cinematic reality as more important than realistic cinema. The late 1990s in particular represented a very important period in Korean film, as KANG Je-kyu’s Shiri marked the beginning of a commercial expansion in which the foundation for production expanded and improved and the concept of a market for Korean film, which had collapsed after reaching its peak in the 1960s, began to be reformulated. While each of them has a different orientation, the new group of directors appearing in this situation meet with one another both in their ability to combine the commercial with the authorial and in their great interest in genre film. The leading figures appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s and bringing about such changes in Korean film included PARK Chan-wook, RYOO Seung-wan, BONG Joon-ho, JANG Joon-hwan, YIM Pil-sung and CHOI Dong-hoon, and it is also possible to view the subject of this book, KIM Jee-woon, as falling within the same current.

Considering that PARK Chan-wook stepped forward as a real mainstream director with 2000’s JSA: Joint Security Area, even though he debuted back in 1992 with The Moon Is What the Sun Dreams of, the film announcing the beginning of a new generation may be KIM Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family, which came out in 1998. His arrival was something unprecedented. He was almost completely unconnected with the apprenticeship system at Chungmuro, which, though it has disappeared in some aspects recently, at the time was the most ordinary method for producing directors. He became interested in film as a child, under the influence of his father, and spent his teenage years and 20s as a film fanatic, but had scant cinematic experience before becoming a director. He dipped his foot in the waters at Chungmuro as a junior production staff member on 1984’s Milky Way in Blue Sky, in which his older sister KIM Ji-sook had a leading part, but it was nearly at the level of an intern. After that, his only experience on a film set was the drafting of storyboards for Young Lover (1994) and Man (1995). He worked in theater as an actor and director, but that was not something that occurred because of any professional vision he had. Literally by chance, the musical Guys and Dolls came to the stage and he came to direct a play starring his sister. For KIM Jee-woon, the profession of film director was never something that urgent. Before becoming a director, he went through a relatively peaceful slacker decade. If he hadn’t gotten into an accident with his old car; if he hadn’t therefore needed a substantial amount of money; if he hadn’t submitted two scripts to an open screenwriting competition; if one of them, The Quiet Family, had not been made into a film; and if the production company hadn’t handed the director’s megaphone to this man with zero directing experience, he might not be a film director today.

The Quiet Family, 1998

The director decade he entered after passing through his slacker decade was a prolific period for KIM Jee-woon. Except for KIM Ki-duk, there is no director at Chungmuro who has made as many films over the past ten years as KIM Jee-woon. KIM Jee-won has directed five feature films and four shorts, and if one considers the fact that his most recent film, The Good, the Bad and the Weird (2008), cost three times as much as the average Korean film does and took three times as long to make, it could be said that he really has raced forward without resting since becoming a director. Furthermore, if KIM Ki-duk’s decade was a homogeneous period in which he developed his own authorial vision with a consistent tone and thematic awareness, KIM Jee-woon, for his part, has made some truly diverse films.

After coining a new term, comic theater of cruelty, by mixing black humor and horrific style in his debut The Quiet Family, he combined the comedy and the sports film genres in his second feature film, The Foul King (2000). In the Internet-release short Coming Out (2000), he combined the mockumentary, vampire movie and comedy, and he showed a very dry form of horror, representing a 180-degree turn from his previous humorous tone, with Memories, his episode in the Korea/Hong Kong/Thailand omnibus horror film Three (2002). A variation on and expansion of this episode, A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) was a sentimental and sad horror film based on a Korean folk narrative. After this, he would combine humorous romance with a simple format in The Power of Love (2003), a little-known digital short, while A Bittersweet Life (2005) was a film noir featuring hot action and chilly spaces. In Heavenly Creature, his episode in The Human Extinction Report, an (unreleased) omnibus project with directors YIM Pil-sung and HAN Jae-rim, KIM tells of Buddhist enlightenment within the sci-fi genre. And his most recent film, The Good, the Bad and the Weird, is a western in the genre of fighting action, a style absent from Korean film for close to 30 years. Even when explained simply in terms of genre and concept, KIM’s filmography is dazzling, diverse and even spectacular.

It may not yet be the time to give any rash assessment, but KIM Jee-woon is closer to a genre filmmaker than an auteur adhering to a consistent thematic consciousness and style. The box office outcome of The Good, the Bad and the Weird, as of this writing (August, 2008) playing in the theaters of Korea, is not yet clear, but the four feature films he made prior to it all exceeded the break-even point, some profiting quite respectably. However, his films are somewhat too heterogeneous to classify under the general concept of polished commercial film. He clearly makes genre films, and the director himself is fascinated with elements of genre film, but his films have subversive aspects. This is realized not at an ideological level but