Hong’s sets are becoming smaller and smaller, and the shooting days fewer and fewer. Do you think this elusive shooting period comes with a certain freedom?
Yes, because everything is so unusual. Hong is trying to make films in fewer and fewer days. Our first film together was shot in thirteen days, the second in nine and we shot this one in just six days. There is no script, no character, not even a story. When I joined, all I knew was that I was going to play a very special teacher, certainly not a traditional schoolteacher, but he didn’t say much else to me. I love that. Doing a movie, by definition, is always jumping into the unknown, even if you have a full script and know all your dialogue. For me, it doesn’t make a difference. Films are exaggerations anyway—it’s about doing things for the first time, and each time you do it—even if you know the lines—it’s improvisation by definition. Films are an experience, not a theorem.
Do you think an experience like this bleeds into your next project?
No, I wouldn’t say that. I think each experience is something in itself and stays contained in itself. I don’t connect a work to something that comes next because everything is so unique by definition. Every director, story and set is unique. When it’s over, it’s over. If anything, it just gives me the wish and the willingness to do another film like it.
There is a certain giddiness to Iris that I feel is the opposite of the severity and tension of a lot of your most notorious characters. I love how she giggles so freely and prances around her emotions. How was it to embody that youthful giddiness?
I love this moment with the husband because it is completely unexpected, and it comes from Hong’s huge talent to create situations with dialogue. All of a sudden, everything becomes so funny. In that scene, when we are all sitting on the couches, I am speaking about drinking two bottles of makgeolli and we are getting a little drunk. Then suddenly in the next scene, you find me on top of the terrace, lonely and melancholic. These situations are loaded with so much meaning, so much reasoning, just like in music. You resent everything.
