Lee Chang-dong: ​‘Today we are liv­ing in Murakami’s world’

A new film by the South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong is an event. He only makes bangers, and it’s been eight long years since he graced us with the mag­is­te­r­i­al Poet­ry. LWLies met the writer/​director on the occa­sion of his tri­umphant return with Burn­ing, a strange and intense three-han­der encom­pass­ing roman­tic and class-dri­ven jeal­ousy, adapt­ed from a short sto­ry by Haru­ki Muraka­mi which was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the New Yorker.

LWLies: The Muraka­mi sto­ry is very spare. Was there ever any con­sid­er­a­tion towards find­ing a cin­e­mat­ic style that matched that of Murakami’s prose?

Lee: When you read the Muraka­mi, it’s quite slight in terms of its mys­ter­ies. It’s only about why the barns were burnt, and why the girl went miss­ing. I was real­ly drawn in by the fact that we didn’t know the end­ing. Usu­al­ly with mys­tery sto­ries, every­thing is revealed at the end, but this one was dif­fer­ent. So I want­ed to explore its small mys­ter­ies, expand­ing them into big ones. That was the main direc­tion I was heading.

Muraka­mi took on Faulkn­er, a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent styl­ist, as inspi­ra­tion for his sto­ry. Do you think the cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage, or even per­spec­tive, of Burn­ing shows any spe­cif­ic affin­i­ty to one over the other?

It’s a very good ques­tion. Of course, Muraka­mi and Faulkn­er are com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, they’re at dif­fer­ent ends of the spec­trum. But it’s not a ques­tion of style, it’s about a gaze, about a way of liv­ing. These are two dif­fer­ent authors with dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing, dif­fer­ent ways of liv­ing. Today we are liv­ing in Murakami’s world; not in terms of a lit­er­ary world, but the actu­al one we’re liv­ing in. Muraka­mi is a post­mod­ernist, and we’re liv­ing in a post­mod­ern world. Faulkner’s world was very dif­fer­ent, but you could describe Burn­ing as a Faulkn­er sto­ry set in Murakami’s world.

How does your world, or gaze, sep­a­rate or con­verge with those of Faulkn­er and Murakami?

I’m clos­est to Faulkn­er. My atti­tude towards life, towards see­ing the world, is clos­est to Faulkner’s, but I’m liv­ing in Murakami’s world, which is a lim­i­ta­tion. I’m see­ing the world as Faulkn­er sees it, but nowa­days audi­ences don’t want to see things that way because they’re clos­er to the Muraka­mi expe­ri­ence. The world is chang­ing rapid­ly, and nobody wants to be seri­ous. Ques­tion­ing some­thing isn’t seen as being cool.

Jong-su is actu­al­ly read­ing Faulkn­er in the film. Giv­en what you just said about affini­ties in world­view, does that mean you feel clos­er to his per­spec­tive on the film’s events? Was that dif­fer­ent to your writ­ing part­ner, Jung-mi Oh?

Faulkner’s lit­er­a­ture always speaks of hard­ship, and when he won the Nobel Prize, he spoke of want­i­ng to rep­re­sent peo­ple who endured this hard­ship. That’s his atti­tude. I think lit­er­a­ture can help peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing, it can res­cue them. Read­ers’ taste is chang­ing, and the world is chang­ing, because peo­ple don’t like being seri­ous, they pre­fer Murakami’s light­ness of exis­tence. Jong-su sees the world like Faulkn­er, but my life, as far as oth­ers might see it on the sur­face, appears clos­er to Ben’s. Lots of young audi­ences in Korea can’t relate to Jong-su, because they’re liv­ing in Ben’s world too. Jung-mi was clos­er to Hae-mi; her fem­i­nin­i­ty, her ques­tion­ing the mean­ing of life, her freedom.

When you’re writ­ing a nar­ra­tive or metaphor­i­cal mys­tery like Burn­ing, do you have your own set of answers to the film’s ques­tions? Were they dif­fer­ent to those of your co-writer?

I don’t have any answers. Burn­ing is only super­fi­cial­ly a mys­tery-thriller, the mys­tery ele­ments lead us into the mys­ter­ies of our lives, our pol­i­tics, our econ­o­my and soci­ol­o­gy. It also makes us ques­tion what we see and what we don’t see, what exists and doesn’t exist. It asks what is metaphor, what is sto­ry­telling? What is film, what is even film­mak­ing? I don’t have any answers for these ques­tions, and I’m not hid­ing any­thing, but I do need to share the con­cept of what’s imme­di­ate­ly there with the crew and actors. With actors, though, you can’t car­ry on like this, because they’re bring­ing some­thing from inside them­selves. For exam­ple, with Steven [Yeun], I gave him the respon­si­bil­i­ty of who Ben is. So he might have had some answers of his own, in order to deliv­er him, but I didn’t.

What were the spe­cif­ic qual­i­ties you were look­ing for in each of the actors when it came to casting?

Ah-in Yoo, who played Jong-su, is very big and famous in Korea. He’s well known for deliv­er­ing strong char­ac­ters on screen. In con­trast to that, Jong-su is a very pas­sive char­ac­ter, who’s not good at show­ing his emo­tions, so I thought it would be good to have an actor who could keep every­thing inside before blow­ing up at the end. I thought it would be very inter­est­ing to see that tran­si­tion from his pre­vi­ous work. With Hae-mi, the actress had no expe­ri­ence in films, no shoot expe­ri­ence what­so­ev­er. I picked her out from an audi­tion, think­ing she had this pure qual­i­ty, but also a dou­ble side to her per­son­al­i­ty that I thought I could use.

What do you mean by dou­ble side?

She came across like a pure school girl, almost like a blank can­vas, but I was won­der­ing, ​“Is that all she’s got? It looks like there’s some­thing underneath.”

Muraka­mi is a lot more damn­ing of the char­ac­ter, as far as she relates to men. Did you want to soft­en that more unfor­giv­ing qual­i­ty when it came to Hae-mi?

Hae-mi dis­ap­pears in the mid­dle of the film. This kind of sto­ry has been around for many years, but it’s always about find­ing the woman. My sto­ry is about the woman who is miss­ing. I didn’t want to repeat the old sto­ry type, I want­ed to find who she real­ly is, which is the core of the film as well. We don’t know whether she’s lying to peo­ple or not. She leaves suf­fer­ing as she dances, while she’s look­ing for the mean­ing of life. Oth­ers might think she’s use­less, but in look­ing for the mean­ing of life, maybe she’s the only one who’s seri­ous about it. Who Hae-mi is is the core of the film, and the core ques­tion of the film.

Burn­ing is released 1 Feb­ru­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.