Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Treeless Mountain introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and So Yong Kim. Monday February 23, 2009.

HADEN GUEST  0:00  

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank you all for coming tonight, our second evening dedicated to the remarkable work of So Yong Kim. So is here tonight with her husband, her creative partner, Brad Gray, who is producer and co-editor of the film we're going to watch tonight, Treeless Mountain and Sky is here as well, their lovely daughter, and I want to thank them all for coming.

We're going to see a really impressive and important film. This is So Yong Kim's second feature film. So began her career in moving pictures at the Art Institute of Chicago where she made avant-garde and experimental shorts, which are really quite remarkable unto themselves. She followed up with the film we saw last night In Between Days. And in some ways I think Treeless Mountain can be seen as a sort of organic unity with In Between Days. These are two films about very young women in transitional moments both within their own lives and within their families. The lives of the families virtually find themselves. They're both also autobiographically inspired. And they're both formally quite brilliant, deceptively simple is a phrase often used, but I think it's one that rings very true for this film, and for In Between Days. These are films that are distinguished I think for as much by what they leave out as what they show. There’s an elliptical editing style and mise en scène, which I think is very, very powerful. Both films—and I think tonight's film especially—are noted for the extremely strong performances by the non-actors who star in them and the non-professional actresses who star in them. And I'm really so glad that So is here with us tonight to tell us a little bit about this extraordinary and important film. And with no further ado, I'd like to welcome So and Brad up to the podium. We're going to be starting tonight I mentioned the avant-garde shorts we're going to be seeing an early film called A Bunny Rabbit, which So made together with Brad, and together with the really innovative and much-heralded cinematographer Christopher Doyle who is best known for his work with Wong Kar Wai and this is a short film called A Bunny Rabbit. And here to introduce both films, I give you, So Yong Kim and Brad Gray.

[APPLAUSE]

SO YONG KIM  3:01  

Hi, good evening, and it's a great honor to be here and also to be able to show our work. And it's quite embarrassing because of, I don't know, you'll be seeing A Bunny Rabbit and then Treeless Mountain and many years passed between them, too, so I don't know, I hope you'll take a gentler eye on the first one. Thank you for coming. And I hope you'll enjoy the film. And Brad, do you want to add anything? Okay, so talk to you after the screening. Thanks.

[APPLAUSE]

HADEN GUEST  3:38  

So we'll be around for a Q&A with So Yong Kim and Brad after the screening. I want to remind everybody to please turn off your cell phone and please resist the temptation to fiddle with any electronic gadgets of any kind during the screening. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

HADEN GUEST  4:04  

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming back So Yong Kim and Brad Gray. I neglected to thank our sponsors for tonight's evening and for this program, the Korea Institute here at Harvard and the Academy of Korean Studies in Korea. And also to mention that this print that you just saw tonight is now part of the Harvard Film Archive collection—part of a major initiative to build up resources for Korean studies here at Harvard, which we're doing in collaboration with the Korea Institute.

And now just before I open the floor to questions from the audience, I thought I would ask you, begin with a few of my own. And I wanted to start with the end of the film, there's a really poignant moment where we see the grandparents at work in the fields with the two girls and there are these machines, there is this sort of construction work happening up in the top. It almost looks like some road is being built or something and to me, and this is my reading of it, it adds as a sort of poignancy as if marking perhaps pointing towards the end of this space or perhaps this way of life, can you comment on that? Is that in fact what was intended there?

SO YONG KIM  5:28  

Yeah, Brad's feeding me lines. He’s like, “Take credit for it. Take credit for it.”

But actually, you know, the location is my actual hometown and we picked this part of the mountains because it was the quietest part, because the town itself has changed so much. So we were shooting in, you know, the aunt’s location and stuff and then we finally got to the farm and they started building this road over that mountain and it was so loud, it was the loudest location ever. And then we just had to go with it and our DP Anne was like, let's just shoot it and, you know, maybe we could use it, like, okay, and I mean, it was a tough decision for me to keep on shooting there instead of relocating. But at the end, when I was editing the film, it really came together. Okay, so it adds another level to the film, but it was not intended and it wasn't written. It wasn't part of the script.

HADEN GUEST  6:42  

Well, you've spoken of this film as a letter to your mother, as being a very personal and autobiographical project. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about this, how this letter took shape. I mean, it's interesting that even in the earlier film we saw last night, letters are very important, letters being written by the daughter to her father. And so I'm wondering if that's...

SO YONG KIM  7:05  

Yeah, I mean, it's inspired by my own experience of growing up in Korea, but it's not a true autobiographical type of story, but I wanted to just convey certain emotions and feelings of things that happened in my family and then you know, and talk about and communicate that through these two sisters. You know, my family's... actually there are three of us and I have an older brother and stuff like that. So he was cut out because I wanted to just focus on Jin mainly and how she matures through her relationship with her sister actually. So, letter to my mother, kind of yeah, I mean, it's the inspiration, as a starting point when I was writing the script and getting the story together. But now I feel like Jin and Bin are totally separate from my own personal history in a way; although, I feel very connected to them emotionally. And I feel that this film is a personal film.

HADEN GUEST  8:34  

Well, how about A Bunny Rabbit, the short that we saw. Remember, we saw another film earlier on. And this is a film that you both, I mean, you were collaborating on both films, but I was wondering if you could either or both of you could tell us a little bit more so the backstory perhaps of A Bunny Rabbit, also how Christopher Doyle got involved in that.

SO YONG KIM  8:59  

Yeah. I think Brad could tell you about how he got involved. But A Bunny Rabbit was my first kind of attempt to make something from a script. And I had a script for it really. And it was a story about this guy who becomes obsessed with this woman and he does all this stuff and, at the end, that's what happened. So it's quite experimental and you know, I totally failed at making this short narrative film. That's the fact of it. But Brad could tell you more about working with Christopher Doyle. [LAUGHS]

BRAD GRAY  9:45  

No, we met Christopher Doyle in Rotterdam at a film festival, where one of our shorts was playing at in 2000. And then we must have met him and his girlfriend at the time. And Rotterdam is a really small and intimate festival, so it's really a nice place to meet. You could sit down and talk to people and obviously we're really big fans of his work. And then we ran into his girlfriend on the sidewalk in New York and Chris was in town shooting some movie with Vince Vaughn. And, we were hanging out with her and she was trying to finish her graduate film for her school, which Chris had shot and he needed to edit it. So then we met up and he was like, “Oh, can you edit this thing for Yan?” his girlfriend and we're like, “Okay, can we trade and then you could shoot a day on So Yong’s film?” He's like, “okay,” so that's how it worked out.

HADEN GUEST  10:42  

[INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHS] Let's take some questions from the audience. We have audience mics available on both sides. Please wait for a mic so we can all hear your question or comment. Any questions about Treeless Mountain? Yes, right here in the front. Here comes a mic right here...

AUDIENCE  11:10  

Yes, it is. Hi, your film is absolutely beautiful. I had read that you cast the two young Jin and Bin from just I think it was not a casting but, they were just regular children, correct? And were your adults actors or were they also people, just normal people?

SO YONG KIM  11:38  

Yeah, we spent most of our time casting Jin and Bin. So we had I think a week before we started shooting. I mean, we had a week to cast the rest of the team. So Mom character and also the Big Aunt character were recommended, the actors were recommended by Lee Chang-dong, the Korean director, and he just basically said, “What do you need?” He opened up his address book, saying, “I think she will be good.” And he just opened up his cell phone. “Hey, Soo-ah, you should do this movie.” So that's how we cast the Mom. And then well, I met her and then you know, and then stuff and she was great. And then the same thing with Big Aunt, you know, so he really helped us. I think he did that one night. And we were finished with that. And then with the grandmother, we found her in a market in the location two days before we started shooting her scenes. So we were desperate and out on the streets looking for a grandmother and she was selling this stomach remedy medicine out of a plastic bag on the street. And then I kind of stopped her, and then she came on board. So...

BRAD GRAY 13:05  

And the grandfather too [INAUDIBLE].

SO YONG KIM  13:07  

Yeah, and the grandfather, we saw him working in the field and asked him to be in the movie and he said yes.

AUDIENCE  13:22  

Hi. Quite often the picture we have of directors are the ones who are struggling with the actors with the main characters mainly saying, “No no no, cut. Again! You have to put more emphasis on this or that. You don't really look sad. So let's redo it.” Working with these two little girls, does it become more harder or easier. How was your experience with these two amazing girls here?

SO YONG KIM  13:57  

Overall, it was really fantastic working with them. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of tricky, you know, working with kids, but we tried to keep the crew very small. So it was a very intimate setting. And most of the interior scenes, there were four or five people in the room at the most. And then the rest of the crew were outside. Working with the kids. No, I mean, I couldn't really tell them, be more sad, be more happy. So basically, because I'm a selfish person, you know, making this film, so I would do takes over and over and over again and then they would just break down from repetition and exhaustion, and then I would keep shooting. So that's one of the secrets.

Another thing is we had before we started shooting, we had couple of rules down for the game—game as in like the shooting—and they were just basic. There were the same rules that I gave to my other non-actors from my previous films, which is that "Don't look in the camera. Don't look at me. If I ask you to repeat, say something, say it, but don't look at me when you say it." What else? Yeah, "don't look in the camera. And you can't leave the set unless I say 'cut.'" So [INAUDIBLE] And then I think that's it. And then those were the rules for the game. And they kind of kept tabs on each other as to who broke which rule. So it was quite good between them as well, you know, so. Yeah, that's how I kind of worked with them. And they didn't read the script. They didn't have lines to memorize. They didn’t know the story.

AUDIENCE  16:09  

It's interesting that you mentioned Lee Chang-dong, this film reminded me quite a bit of Secret Sunshine in terms of the mother character and the sort of ability to fall through the cracks in society. And also, Nobody Knows, the Japanese film. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about your influences? I'm not sure exactly when this was made. So I don't know the exact sequence but.

[SKY TALKING]

SO YONG KIM 16:33  

She likes to say "hi." Nobody Knows is a huge influence for me because I wrote this story, but I didn't really understand or have the tools to make the film. I thought working with kids would be nearly impossible and terribly challenging. But I read interviews with Koreeda on the internet and I did some research on how other directors before me worked with kids and stuff. So it was really helpful. And, you know, I actually studied Nobody Knows to see how he positioned the camera at certain times to get certain intimacy and of course, Ozu is also a huge influence also. And Ponette. Yeah, so those films I try to watch and study how the previous directors worked with children. So yeah, Lee Chang-dong is a great director. His film Oasis is a huge, huge influence for me, as a Korean filmmaker, what have you, because I think that's like one of the best Korean films ever. So yeah.

AUDIENCE  17:59  

My name is Soo, I have a quick question. You not only directed the film, but you wrote the script, right? So do you have something close to your childhood memories that is shown in the film?

SO YONG KIM  18:16

In this film? Yeah, yeah, it's, based on my childhood in Korea.

AUDIENCE  18:22 

So you had a sister?

SO YONG KIM  18:24

I have a sister. Yeah.

AUDIENCE 18:30  

One more question. So when did you come here?

SO YONG KIM  18:32  

When I was 12.

AUDIENCE  18:42  

I thought the film was extraordinarily beautiful. And you've mentioned several times that you worked from the script and I'm curious to know how much you deviated from the script as you began shooting and so many things seem so spontaneous and poetically uncontrolled. And in my imagination, I'm thinking, you know, you're there, you get an idea for a moment that can happen in this particular building. And you film it, you weren't really expecting to. But is that true or not true?

SO YONG KIM  19:15  

I'm sorry, what's true or not true?

AUDIENCE  19:18  

That you allowed, that you filmed things that you had not expected to film day by day because of the setting and because of ideas that you got watching the children?

SO YONG KIM  19:29  

Yeah, I mean, definitely. I shot a lot of stuff that was not in the script. And a lot of the film is actually made up of moments that we found, you know, when the kids are playing or some moments when they're arguing and when Bin is coloring in the piggy’s eyes. That just happened because you know, the kids were handling the piggy so much the eyes fell out and we decided, oh, she should color this in, but that was not written in the script, that’s supposed to happen. [INAUDIBLE] And then what I had to have is a plan for the day, because I couldn't automatically expect something to happen with these kids, because they had their own moods and they had their own sense of what they wanted, so I had to give them some structure and that structure was based on the script that I had. And what I would try to do is okay, today we're going to do these, these, these scenes, so that the crew would know what scenes we are supposed to be shooting, and then we would set up for that and then when they show up, you know, if Bin is in a bad mood or something, then we have to switch to a different type of scene, you know, but still use the same setting but change the intention of the scene a bit. So it was constantly changing. But what I tried to get and what I needed to get on those scenes was the dialogue that they would say, or, you know, I would force them to say these lines to each other, so I make sure that I have the lines covered. So I don't know if I'm making sense, so there was a lot of improvisation but I had to also have some sort of structure to balance that.

AUDIENCE  21:51  

I was just wondering how you think the children, the two girls understood what was going on? Like how did they understand the process? Did they, or…?

SO YONG KIM  22:03

Yeah, I think they had this overall sense that we're making a movie, but they really didn't grasp what the story was until they saw the film in September. And then, when they were watching the film, they were kind of like giggling and talking to each other. “But hey, you did that. Yeah. Remember you did that and you made me cry.” And then yeah, at the end of the screening, the little one was like, “Oh, it's kind of sad.” So I think she got it.

AUDIENCE  22:40  

Are they sisters?

SO YONG KIM  22:42

No, they're not sisters, no.

AUDIENCE  22:44

And how did you find them?

SO YONG KIM  22:46

The older one, we were in Korea, casting and we got permission to go into schools, which took a while because you have to know somebody who works in the school or a teacher or something who could do the introduction. And then we had to get permission from parents and stuff to interview them on video. So we did school visits and talked to them. So, Hee-Yeon was in one of those schools. She was amazing from the very beginning. Yeah. And then I did a couple of video interviews with her where I knew that she was very strong and centered to be able to handle the role. And then after that, we had to get permission from her parents and school to pull her out of school for 29 days. That's how long the shoot took. And then the little one Song Hee was, I had an assistant in Korea who was going to university and she was doing volunteer work for her school where they visit orphanages around Seoul suburbs and Song Hee is in foster care in one of those homes.

HADEN GUEST  24:08  

Are there any other questions, comments? If not, then I think we'll thank So Yong Kim and Brad for coming. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

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