Shad­ows and Fog: a con­ver­sa­tion with Park Chan-wook

Desire is the dou­ble-edged panacea for lone­li­ness in the cin­e­ma of Kore­an direc­tor Park Chan-wook. It’s seen in Song Kang-ho’s vam­pire preach­er in 2010’s Thirst and the fan­ci­ful, bat­tery-eat­ing patients/​lovers of 2005’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. It’s also in his new film, Deci­sion to Leave, a mea­sured and mas­ter­ful romance cut from the same emo­tion­al­ly charged and desire-obsessed cloth as Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go – the very film that inspired Park to pick up the camera.

Since break­ing out inter­na­tion­al­ly with his laud­ed Vengeance tril­o­gy, Park’s dis­tinc­tive brand of pre­ci­sion-tooled film­mak­ing has been marked by its bloody vio­lence and jet black (some­times very sick) humour. There’s also his love for puz­zle-box plot­lines that tell of the eter­nal­ly wronged who are then dri­ven by their own right­eous code for some kind of exon­er­a­tion or cryp­tic answer.

Deci­sion to Leave is less explo­sive when con­tex­tu­alised by that met­ric, but it is no less affect­ing or force­ful than the director’s pre­vi­ous works. Entrenched in cod­ed exchanges, the film is a fog­gy illu­sion that forces the view­er to deci­pher its mean­ing. That require­ment for a sharp eye is only fit­ting for a sto­ry about a detec­tive, Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), who is inves­ti­gat­ing – and sub­se­quent­ly falling for – his emo­tion­al­ly inscrutable sus­pect, Seo-rae (Tang Wei).

The romances in his films tend to burn slow­ly. Before pick­pock­et Sook-hee and Lady Hideko entan­gle in a fer­vid dis­play of love and lust in The Hand­maid­en, their mutu­al inter­est is com­mu­ni­cat­ed through intense­ly per­son­al exchanges. Care is cap­tured in sen­su­al close-up, as Sook-hee grinds down Hideko’s irri­tat­ing tooth and sweet­ens the pro­ce­dure with a lol­lipop. In Deci­sion to Leave, Hae-joon and Seo-rae’s muta­ble rela­tion­ship is entrapped with­in pro­fes­sion­al bound­aries. Their moments of con­tact by proxy – the dance-like rhythm they fall into as they pack away sushi box­es, or the appli­ca­tion of lip balm – are as inti­mate as any love lan­guage. For Park, it’s all in the details.

LWLies: Com­pared to your pre­vi­ous films, it feels like Deci­sion to Leave moves at a dif­fer­ent pace. What inspired that?

Park: It wasn’t like I planned every­thing in advance. It wasn’t like I decid­ed on the pace or the style of my next film, and then came up with the sto­ry. It’s the oth­er way around. I wrote the sto­ry first, and then it just nat­u­ral­ly comes to me in terms of the style, the rhythm and the pace. That’s just how that hap­pened. As you know, this sto­ry is not told through exhibito­ry expres­sions. These emo­tions that are felt by the two pro­tag­o­nists are not ver­bal­ly expressed.

Some­times the emo­tions are hid­den. They express their emo­tions in a dif­fer­ent way. They kind of beat around the bush. They some­times say it in the com­plete oppo­site way, so it’s very dif­fi­cult for us to real­ly know what is going on inside their heart. And for this rea­son, the audi­ence will have to pay very good atten­tion to all the small details of their facial expres­sions and their ges­tures. And they will have to lis­ten very care­ful­ly to what they say and how they use those words in order to real­ly find out what is going on under­neath every­thing. Because of that, I think this kind of rhythm and the pac­ing kind of came along in a very nat­ur­al way.

If you look real­ly close­ly at the film, you can tell by how it’s edit­ed that no frame was wast­ed. It’s almost like this machine or clock­work that is so tight­ly man­aged. It’s very sharp. That was the type of edit­ing that I real­ly want­ed to realise with this film. So, if you try to look very close­ly, then you will see
there are many jump cuts too.

Jump­ing off what you said about the small details, you do have to home in on these sub­tle but charged moments between the char­ac­ters. How did you approach cre­at­ing inti­ma­cy in those chaste exchanges?

If you look at the sit­u­a­tions these two pro­tag­o­nists are in – this mar­ried man who is the detec­tive and this woman who is being inves­ti­gat­ed as a pos­si­ble sus­pect, and things become more com­pli­cat­ed from there – they can only express their love for each oth­er in a very sub­tle and restrained way. I had this prin­ci­ple to begin with that all the expres­sions should be restrained so you can find it in the way those actors per­form, the music and the cam­era. In the first half of the movie, the cam­era move­ment is very restrained, and so every­thing had to fol­low that prin­ci­ple of show­ing restraint.

What effect did you want to cre­ate with that prin­ci­ple of restraint?

I want­ed the audi­ence to intense­ly con­cen­trate on every lit­tle thing that they see and hear dur­ing this film, so that if any small things hap­pen, that would be a big event that would have an emo­tion­al impact on the audi­ence. For exam­ple, the man says to the woman to throw the cell phone into the ocean. That sen­tence is kind of dry, it doesn’t car­ry any strong emo­tion in and of itself. But that is the most pow­er­ful expres­sion that the man can say to this woman. It’s a con­fes­sion, a very strong one. It’s even stronger than say­ing ​“I love you” 100 times. In the sec­ond half of the film, Seo-rae says to him, ​“The phone that you found at the bot­tom of the ocean, you have to throw it back even deep­er into the ocean. So, it’s like she’s giv­ing the love back to him, but now this time she’s say­ing, ​“I love you even more than you love me.”

Deci­sion to Leave feels like a clas­sic genre film in terms of how it pulls from police pro­ce­du­rals and melo­dra­ma, but it’s also ele­vat­ed. How do you inno­vate with­in the para­me­ters of genre?

To be hon­est with you, I tried not to label the film as a film noir. I didn’t want it to be labelled that way. I’m not say­ing that kind of labelling or def­i­n­i­tion is wrong. But once that label is on this film, that means this strong woman char­ac­ter auto­mat­i­cal­ly becomes a femme fatale. Dur­ing the first half of the movie, yes, I under­stand that the woman can come across as a femme fatale, and the first half of my movie can be seen to have those tra­di­tion­al film noir ele­ments in it. But I inten­tion­al­ly mis­lead the audi­ence to see the first half of the film that way. In the sec­ond half, it starts to break away from those genre con­ven­tions. There’s a great line that Seo-rae says that real­ly sum­maris­es what I mean. She says in Chi­nese, ​“When you said you love me, my love end­ed, and when your love end­ed, my love start­ed.” I think that’s a great line because that means the noir genre film has come to an end, and now a new type of melo­dra­ma and roman­tic film starts. That’s what we can trans­late from that Chi­nese line.

That’s inter­est­ing because sev­er­al crit­ics have called Seo-rae a femme fatale. I’m curi­ous about your per­spec­tive on that arche­type. Do you think it’s out­dat­ed or has a place today?

It depends on what kind of sto­ry you want to tell. If a writer or direc­tor wants to bring to life this clas­sic femme fatale char­ac­ter and express her on that medi­um then, why not? And it is pos­si­ble that in our real world, or the world that’s cre­at­ed by the writer and the direc­tor, that type of woman can exist. How­ev­er, in my opin­ion that is not so inter­est­ing. To me, in the mod­ern world that we’re liv­ing, this for­mu­la of the femme fatale seduc­ing the man into his demise is not so inter­est­ing. The jux­ta­po­si­tion between the man and the woman, the sub­ver­sion of the roles in that for­mu­la would be a lot more refreshing.

What was the deci­sion behind cast­ing Tang Wei as Seo-rae?

We already had Tang Wei in mind when we were cre­at­ing that char­ac­ter. What I mean by that is that we did not define our Seo-rae to be a Chi­nese woman liv­ing in Korea from the very begin­ning. After watch­ing Lust, Cau­tion, my co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong and I always want­ed to work with her, but then in my pre­vi­ous films, we did not cre­ate a Chi­nese woman char­ac­ter, so we just didn’t have that oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer to her. But this time around we start­ed from a clean slate, just one white page, so that’s how it hap­pened. After we decid­ed to have Tang Wei come on board, we thought, okay, now what can she do? She can speak Chi­nese and her Kore­an won’t be that good, so she will be the Chi­nese woman whose Kore­an is not that good.

What did she bring to the character?

I would say dig­ni­ty. This char­ac­ter is not well off. She has this occu­pa­tion that is not so well-respect­ed, not welle­d­u­cat­ed. After all, she is a mur­der­er, and she is mad­ly in love with some­one and her love is big­ger than the man’s love for her. But then, despite all of this, because it was Tang Wei who played the role, this char­ac­ter was nev­er low in any way. This char­ac­ter was not depict­ed as a pathet­ic per­son, so it was real­ly all thanks to Tang Wei.

Your films are quite well-known for their dark humour, and that’s still present in this film but it’s per­haps more sub­dued. What role does humour play in your work?

It’s true that the type of humour in this film is dif­fer­ent. I would say that’s because in my pre­vi­ous films, the humour was pre­sent­ed in a sit­u­a­tion where there’s vio­lence, which means rage or fear. Those kinds of emo­tions are linked to what makes the sit­u­a­tion, or what fol­lows right after, fun­ny. This time around, too, there is some humour like that, but I think dif­fer­ent attempts were made because this time humour is linked to this feel­ing of love. Per­haps this time, the audi­ence will feel their heart warm­ing after see­ing these fun­ny scenes.

Busan is also real­ly cen­tral to the sto­ry. What was it about the city that made it well-suit­ed as the setting? 

I like Busan, and actu­al­ly, I have shot many of my films in Busan even though that loca­tion was not so exposed. But this time around, Busan is at the core of the sto­ry. It’s a very impor­tant back­drop. There’s this Busan-ness that you can feel through­out this film, and Busan is a very nice city to make a film in. It’s a big city, it has diverse dimen­sions to it. It has very dif­fer­ent faces, because it’s got the moun­tains and also the ocean. And as you know, Hae-joon is from Seoul, but he loves the ocean so much that he even chose to go serve in the Navy. All the Kore­an men have to do manda­to­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice, so he chose the Navy because he loves the ocean. It was ful­ly intend­ed that he would be doing the detec­tive job in Busan.

If we can divide peo­ple into ocean species and moun­tain species, Hae-joon is def­i­nite­ly ocean species, but Ki Do-soo, the first hus­band of Seo-rae, is def­i­nite­ly moun­tain species. And that was why it was his fate to die while climb­ing the moun­tain. Also, in order for that inci­dent to be allo­cat­ed to Hae-joon, it had to hap­pen in Busan, where there are moun­tains and the ocean. Busan is just a great city, because it has all these fas­ci­nat­ing facets.

That idea of the moun­tain species and ocean species is real­ly inter­est­ing to me, because one of the images that stood out to me was the wall­pa­per in Seo-rae’s house. You can’t real­ly tell if it’s sup­posed to be an illus­tra­tion of moun­tains or waves. Per­haps what you’re imply­ing is that it sym­bol­is­es both.

You’re absolute­ly right. That apart­ment is inhab­it­ed by Seo-rae and Ki Do-soo, so that whole design of the wall­pa­per was ful­ly intend­ed. At one glance, it kind of looks like a moun­tain range. At anoth­er glance, it looks like waves in the ocean. Also, the colour is a kind of bluish green, and there’s a line that says the colour some­times looks blue and some­times looks green. It’s a very ambigu­ous colour that will throw you off and will puz­zle you. That con­cept is also con­nect­ed to the mist, because Ipo always has mist and fog. So that means because of the fog, things will be very hazy. You won’t be able to real­ly dis­tin­guish the objects, which also trans­lates to the emo­tion­al state of the char­ac­ters, and how we won’t be able to accu­rate­ly pin­point what emo­tion is being felt. It’s very much a hazy and puz­zling feeling.