How 'Possible Love' Got Its Wind: Crew Shook the Trees

Crew members tied ropes to trees and shook them by hand to create the wind that the script of Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" demanded for its emotional climax. Cinematographer Kim Ji-yong revealed the detail during a masterclass titled "Cinematography of Possible Love: Quiet, Yet Deeper" at Netflix's Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival.

Kim, whose credits include "Decision to Leave" and "Squid Game" Season 2, said the film's forest-by-the-beach climax called for wind that Korean summer storms refused to deliver on cue. He asked Lee Chang-dong to change the scene's setup. The solution: everyone on set except the five or six crew members needed to shoot went into the woods, grabbed the ropes and shook the trees.

"The film ghost did not appear. But our staff ghosts on set created this," Kim said, calling it one of the most memorable moments of his more than 20 years in film.

The "film ghost" was Lee's running joke. The director monitors a favorite weather YouTube channel, and every time a windy day was forecast, he invoked it. "And every time, the director would say, 'There is such a thing as a film ghost,'" Kim told the audience. "But that ghost only appears and helps once we have prepared thoroughly past 100% and put in all our effort."

How much planning went into the 'natural' look?

Almost nothing in the film was left to chance. "Ultimately, the balance was centered on supporting natural light, using film fixtures only to assist," Kim said. Day scenes used film lights only where natural light fell short; night scenes relied as much as possible on existing streetlights and lamps.

The team even built a house around the light. Lee found the site of rich husband Sang-woo's vacation home on a real estate YouTube channel, and the crew constructed the house during two months of pre-production, calibrating the direction and size of every window.

"To create that kind of result requires an enormous amount of calculation, planning and preparation," Kim said. "Compared to any film I've worked on, this is the one where we worried, debated and planned the most to make it appear that way."

Kim, who also shot the effects-heavy "Ashfall," said he deliberately set aside his habits for this project. "Being human, a certain style inevitably emerges," he said. "For this project, I wanted to strip those away."

Why one handheld camera — and blurred boundaries?

The production shot handheld with a single camera, except for two dialogue scenes. Kim described the camera's distance from the characters as a matter of precision: "If it's too close, it feels exaggerated, and if it's too far, it feels like we are cropping, cutting up the frame and peeping in."

The story centers on a documentary by Ye-ji, one of the film's four protagonists, which raised the question of separating her footage from Lee's. Kim declined to draw a hard line. "Is making that distinction really necessary?" he said. "So we decided not to set it in stone."

"I wanted to blur that boundary," he said of the shots from the documentary team's cameras and his own, which grow harder to tell apart as the film goes on. "The reason is hard to explain in words, but it was an intuitive sense that it felt right."

"Possible Love" won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice last month and is South Korea's submission for the international feature Oscar. It screens in BIFF's Icons section and reaches Netflix on Nov. 6. The drama follows two married couples from opposite ends of the economic ladder: Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

As for the forest, Kim has not given up on the film ghost. "If I get another chance to work with the director in the future, I hope we can definitely meet it then," he said.