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Na Hong-Jin told a Busan International Film Festival masterclass audience that his film “Hope” grew out of a conviction, around 2017, that war was about to break out on the Korean peninsula.
At the time, Na said, news
reports were describing U.S. fighter jets and bombers flying in and out over Pyongyang through the night. He expected fighting to start in early 2018 or soon after the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. That sense of foreboding, he explained, is one of two ingredients he needs before he will commit to a project. The other is the unease he feels around people. He has come to see their words as a mix of truth, distortion and outright lies, regardless of whether any ill intent lies behind them.
The session at the 31st edition of the festival was billed under the title “Na Hong-Jin, A Genre of His Own.” Na planned it as an hour-long walk through his process, followed by half an hour of audience questions. He pitched it at the students he expected in the room.
He described an upbringing that fed directly into his work. His mother read horror novels, mysteries, thrillers and comic books, and sent Na and his brothers to bookstores to buy them, handing the books down once she had finished. His father’s job took him to Japan often. Na had a Walkman before he started preschool, and it kept being replaced each time older neighborhood boys took it from him. Na studied crafts at university, working with wood, metal, dyes and ceramics, because flat, two-dimensional drawing had come to bore him.
Na said he does not go hunting for material. He waits for it to find him while he spends time with all kinds of people. “The Chaser” began on a night out watching football with friends at a local bar, where he ended up drinking all night with a group of detectives at the next table. One of them, drunk, told him that serial killer Yoo Young-chul had once set a fire and escaped after being taken into custody by police in Mapo. Na said he had not known about the incident and was shocked.
“The Yellow Sea” started with reports of a killing a day, in the same place, in Garibong-dong, an area with a dense Korean-Chinese population that police struggled to control. Na’s research took him by plane to Yanbian, where he met a well-known gangster and spent long hours hearing his stories. For “The Wailing,” he grew close to a member of a shaman’s family. He then spent several months living alongside shamans at a mountain hermitage, where he said he came to feel, and even see, various things.
The fishing trips Na took with people he had never met on the east coast of Gangwon province while preparing “Hope” left a mark on the film. He gave one character the name of a friend from those trips, Yang-bae, played by Eum Moon-suk in the film
While building antagonists, Na reads widely for symbolism and metaphor but largely stays away from other people’s films, wary of borrowing from them. He also rarely sees friends in the film industry, preferring to spend free time with people and worlds he does not know.
Before writing a screenplay, Na said, he settles on a genre and, crucially, a rhythm. “Later on, there is no going back, it’s irrevocable,” he said.
Once on set, he sees himself less as an author and more as a supervisor overseeing every element in the frame for a team of 200. Space comes first. On the first day of shooting, he asks actors to arrive early, before the crew and equipment move in, so they can absorb the location. Casting follows from how each character will be framed in that space, and light comes after that.
He warned that preparing too thoroughly can leave a film rigid. Most Korean productions shoot from storyboards, but Na said he did not even look at his on “The Wailing.” Instead, he talked through each day’s shots with his cinematographer in the car every morning, breaking off to film anything striking that appeared. “It was just me and my DOP working without a tight plan,” Na said.
Na reserved his strongest words for post-production, which he believes the Korean industry undervalues and squeezes into too little time. He tells his crews that everything before it exists to serve that phase. “It is the stage that makes or breaks the film, and this is the key moment that we’ve all been working towards,” he said.
Losing control of the schedule, he warned, turns a filmmaker from hunter into prey. He added that he believes each film is born with its own fate, which often reveals itself through near-miraculous moments of weather and nature during shooting.
Na said “The Wailing” was meant to tell audiences that the misfortunes they suffer, large and small, have causes and outcomes that have nothing to do with them. He hoped they would blame themselves less and carry those burdens a little more lightly. His films have so far ended in darkness, offering only the belief that light might exist somewhere ahead. As he gets older, he said, he increasingly wants to let audiences see that light.
He has not decided how much of it his next ending will reveal.
Asked by an audience member how he would define himself as a genre, given the title of the masterclass, Na said that anyone who met him up close would find him unlike anyone they had encountered before, and that people tend to either warm to him or not. He said he used to struggle to read what lay behind people’s words, but has become more relaxed, trusting that true intentions surface eventually.
“I can tell you that I’m not an easy person to be around,” he said.
