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Eight years after “Burning,” Lee Chang-dong is preparing to return with Venice competition title “Possible Love,” but the acclaimed Korean filmmaker says the long gap was never about stepping away from cinema.
Speaking
with Variety at the Malaysia International Film Festival (MIFFest), where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award, Lee says the years since “Burning” have changed him both personally and creatively.
“I’ve loved stories since I was young,” he says. “I’ve tried to understand life through stories. It’s also how I communicate with audiences. Just as I’m looking for stories, I’m also looking for meaning in life.”
Receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award has not prompted Lee to look back on his career. “It’s not an achievement. It’s more like encouragement that makes me want to make better films in the future.”
“Today, directors are judged by the box office and evaluated by the industry,” he adds. “But the key reason I keep making films is the audience – their facial expressions, their encounters with the film. Thanks to cinema, I feel connected to something much bigger.”
Lee also cites Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1983 classic “The Boys From Fengkuei” as one of the films that most profoundly shaped him. He first saw the film on VHS with English subtitles and later met Hou during a retrospective in South Korea.
“When I first saw it, I felt as if I had lived that life,” Lee says. “It was as if I had made the film myself.”
Lee, who is also a novelist, adds: “Literature is completed when it reaches the reader. Once someone reads a sentence in a novel, they create their own imagination.”
Asked about the growing international influence of Korean cinema, Lee says: “It’s very exciting that Korean cinema is receiving so much attention. But I also wonder whether younger filmmakers will be able to sustain this creative energy in the future. I think that’s something all filmmakers should continue thinking about.”
