Entering the career in 1998, synchronous with the prolific Korean new wave, ten feature films under the belt, Kim Jee-woon, 59 years old, is a director who reworks the major genres of cinema, in a calibrated cocktail of humor and violence. It is today, with It’s filming in Seoul!at the helm of a colorful comedy which takes place in Seoul in 1970, while La Cinémathèque française pays tribute to him until November 10.
Why, evoking the setbacks of a director during his filming, set the action of your film in 1970?
Because we were coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, which greatly affected Korean cinema, and I seemed to find a sort of equivalence between the two eras, from the point of view of the difficulty of making films in all case. Korean cinema, which had experienced a sort of renaissance in the 1960s, was at that time the victim of increased censorship by the military dictatorship. It was a dark moment, but at the same time this censorship was applied in such a brutal and stupid way that there was a certain comic, even satirical, potential there.
Did you draw inspiration from specific people or stories to write this screenplay?
I imagined, for the character, a sort of typical director of the time, who could have artistic ambitions in a context like this. As for the film that this character is making, we will find influences from Kim Ki-young, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Alfred Hitchcock.
Your main character is a director named Kim. This suggests an autobiographical temptation, but at the same time, as a filmmaker, you share none of his conditions…
It’s true, we don’t share anything a priori. Kim, unlike me, creates in historical and artistic conditions which make it very difficult for him to exercise his freedom. And yet, you see, I have instilled twenty-five years of professional experience into this character. Reflections that were made to me, thoughts that crossed my mind, moments of terrible doubt. There is, I believe, one thing in common among all directors: it is the great solitude into which the creative process plunges you. It was Steven Spielberg who said that the worst moments of his life were those when he got out of the car to enter a film set.
Kim is also, and perhaps above all, the story of an impossible emancipation. He spends his time trying to escape the aura of his master in cinema and never succeeds…
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