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Lee Jeong-beom interview: Boy’s own stuff
[06/11/2010]
Director Lee Jeong-beom what’s to make films that unashamedly cater for blokes, and it looks like he’s going about it the right way with The Man From Nowhere…
Downstairs at the Korean Cultural Centre the film’s producer Lee Tae-hun is explaining how much he is enjoying being in London again. It’s his first time in 10 years, and then only as a tourist for a week. But he can’t quite get the hang of closing times in London. ‘Everything seems to close at 10pm, in Korea that’s when we’re just going out.’ And don’t mention the fact you can’t smoke in British pubs and restaurants either.
Lee Jeong-beom arrives exactly on schedule, to the second almost. He seems calm and relaxed, and to be equally enjoying his time in London. Though Jeong-beom is relatively new on the scene, having had one other movie under his belt, the crime drama Cruel Winter Blues, his latest film has become the highest grossing movie in South Korea this year. What does he put that success down to?
‘Won Bin!’, he exclaims. Casting Korea’s most popular and beloved actor in the lead is something of golden ticket in box office terms, he explains modestly. For male audiences, there’s the action element. Then the final scene builds to a gratifying conclusion, which is quite cathartic – that could also be a lot of the films appeal.
So how did he manage to get Won Bin the first place? Probably best known (in the West at least) for his role as the son in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, Jeong-beom is keen to point out that Won has some form in that genre, having been inspired to make a step into movies from the film Terrorist, his debut film role was in Jang Jin’s action comedy Guns & Talks.
He explains that in Korea, it’s generally the case that film production companies tend to send out the scripts to actors, but in this case Won Bin came across the script himself and contacted him directly. Normally he would avoid such stellar names, preferring actors who have a great amount of potential but much less profile, but he’s been blown away by the passion and dedication with which Won has thrown himself into the role. In preparation for the role he trained intensively for three months with martial artists. ‘It was extremely impressive’, Jeong-beom says, and proved without doubt Won can be an action star.
So where did the idea come from for the movie? ‘At first I saw the beginning and ending sequences in my head’, he tells me. That mixed with films such as The Bourne Ultimatum and Taken, these really fast-paced action films were a big inspiration for him. For him, it was those faster developing Western plots that he wanted to have to create a very different style of Korean action film.
The main structure was evolved from discussing and consulting with other people, creating the journey from the beginning and end. As Jeong-beom puts it, if you were a director on a 007 movie (and I’m starting to get the feeling that he’d like to be) then you’d know that audiences would be excited to see what all the new gadgets, new weapons and new car are. Now rather than sit at your desk and try and brainstorm all that, you would consult with tech gurus and weapons experts and so on. He feels this process works really well for him as a way to give something fresh and new to audiences.
In this sense some of the more serious topics thrown up in the context of the film, such as human trafficking, organ harvesting and drug smuggling, are really just tools to place our lead protagonist in life threatening situations. There’s no social commentary intended, though he recognises these things go on all through South East Asia, outside of Korea.
So what of the challenges of making an action film, they are so notoriously difficult? Well, it’s expensive, but also really time consuming. For instance, in Korea when you film gun shooting scenes you have to imbed the receiving end of the bullet for the actual effect – which can take up to 30 minutes for each individual bullet. Then, as is typical for a Korean action movie, there are lot of elaborate moves and things that involve a lot of wires, and that takes training and a lot of preparation.
So did anything go wrong? Well, there’s one incident that could been disastrous. There’s a scene in the film where Won Bin’s character uses a towel to disarm a knife that’s being thrust towards him, but in reality the move sent the knife flying past the crew and just past their heads.
Won was also involved in another incident. During one scene he was on the receiving end of some bullets so had to wear a vest, but in the process of reacting to the impact the noise was so loud it left him partially hearing impaired for some time afterward.
The film itself turns out to be everything Jeong-beom described: a solid, well made rollercoaster ride of an action film with a little something for everyone. Particularly for the female Korean audience at the LKFF screening, who visibly (well audibly at least!) swoon at the sight of Won Bin with his shirt off. Jeong-beom later admits at the Q&A after the screening that he’s found it rather difficult appearing at press conferences next to a man who even he finds attractive – it doesn’t really do anything for him!
When I try to draw him on whether there are any moments he’s particularly proud of in the film, there’s a rather modest reply of ‘No’. But there was one scene were he took inspiration from The Bourne Ultimatum, where Matt Damon jumps through a window and the camera follows him, and when he smashes through another camera receives him on the other side. He wanted to take that further so the same camera shows him penetrating the window and landing, so he had to negotiate how that would work with the CG and martial arts team. But a lot of effort went into that scene and he thinks it will go down very positively with audiences.
He feels the action sequences in particular he feels are very real: you hit, you block, the blood, everything. It’s much more grounded and realistic in the grizzly consequences of such scenes than you’d find in a Western equivalent, and he’s quite happy about the way it’s been expressed on screen. He’s keen to point out that despite what people might think, Korea doesn’t have the same heritage of martial arts, so taking elements from Western action films to really create something new in Korean cinema.
He personally feels Korean action films have a tendency to be quite static, almost still, in comparison. I know what he means, there are plenty of great scenes, but these tend to be brooding, the camera more likely to hang uncomfortably while the action unfolds than to cut and move on. These ideas of fusing East and West are important to him, referring to Akira Kurosawa as someone who brought both Japanese and Western elements successfully to world wide audience, and as someone in whose footsteps he’d like to follow.
So had any other filmmakers influenced him? He explains he was never one of those movie kids who buried themselves in films, but he always genuinely enjoyed watching good movies. He name checks like Michael Mann and Takeshi Kitano, as well as the Die Hard series. He also reveals that because of his generation he grew up watching a lot of John Woo movies (me too!) and that undoubtedly had an influence on him. For all his rejection of being a film geek, it’s pretty obvious he’s been making mental notes along the way.
With such an obvious interest in action films, does he plan to stick with the genre or try something else, like a romantic comedy?
‘No romantic comedies!’, he laughs. He want to concentrate on making movies that appeal more to male than female audiences, bloke films. He wants to make films that concentrate on male friendship, the bonding you might have between peers committing a crime, rather like the relationship between the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro characters in Mann’s Heat. What the Chinese refer to as ‘yanggang’, it’s an extremely common theme of Hong Kong action movies by directors like Woo, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To.
So has he any plans for his next movie? Jeong-beom talks about wanting to make a film about a terrorist. He thinks it would be an interesting idea to reverse the roles, have the terrorist as the lead protagonist rather than the guy who everyone cheers about when they die at the end. He’s quite excited about trying to make a very new kind of terrorist genre film.
He’s then a bit uncomfortable about having brought it up, realising that as London is one of those cities where terrorism does occur perhaps he’s making too flippant of it. (He also divulges later at the Q&A that he’s thinking about making a prequel to The Man From Nowhere.)
But whatever Jeong-beom turns his hand to next, you can bet it’s going to be a ripping good yarn, a real ‘blokes’ movie.
Source: www.easternkicks.com |
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发表于 2010-11-9 09:31
阿扎西包场 
