Na Hong-Jin Says War Fears, Shamans and Bar Tales Shaped His Films

Director Na Hong-Jin told a Busan International Film Festival masterclass that his upcoming film "Hope" grew out of a conviction, around 2017, that war was about to break out on the Korean peninsula.

At the time, Na said, news reports described U.S. fighter jets and bombers flying in and out over Pyongyang through the night. He expected fighting to start in early 2018, soon after the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. That foreboding, he explained, is one of two ingredients he requires before committing to a project. The other is his unease around people — he has come to see their words as a mix of truth, distortion and outright lies, regardless of whether ill intent lies behind them.

The session, billed "Na Hong-Jin, A Genre of His Own" at the festival's 31st edition, ran as an hour-long walk through his process plus half an hour of audience questions. Na pitched it at the students he expected in the room.

Where do his stories come from?

Na said he does not hunt for material. He waits for it to find him while spending time with all kinds of people.

• "The Chaser" began on a night out watching football at a local bar, where he drank all night with detectives at the next table. One of them, drunk, told him serial killer Yoo Young-chul had once set a fire and escaped after being taken into custody by police in Mapo. Na said he had not known about the incident and was shocked.
• "The Yellow Sea" started with reports of a killing a day in Garibong-dong, an area with a dense Korean-Chinese population that police struggled to control. His research took him by plane to Yanbian, where he met a well-known gangster and spent long hours hearing his stories.
• "The Wailing" followed his closeness to a member of a shaman's family and several months living alongside shamans at a mountain hermitage, where he said he came to feel, and even see, various things.
• "Hope" drew on fishing trips with strangers on the east coast of Gangwon province. He named one character, played by Eum Moon-suk, after a friend from those trips: Yang-bae.

His upbringing fed the work. His mother read horror novels, mysteries, thrillers and comic books, sending Na and his brothers to bookstores and passing the books down. His father's job took him often to Japan. Na had a Walkman before preschool, replaced each time older neighborhood boys took it. He studied crafts at university — wood, metal, dyes, ceramics — because flat, two-dimensional drawing had bored him.

While building antagonists, Na reads widely for symbolism and metaphor but largely avoids other people's films, wary of borrowing. He also rarely sees friends in the film industry.

How does he work on set?

Before writing a screenplay, he settles on a genre and, crucially, a rhythm. "Later on, there is no going back, it's irrevocable," he said.

On set he sees himself less as an author than a supervisor overseeing every element for a team of 200. Space comes first. On day one, he asks actors to arrive before the crew and equipment so they can absorb the location. Casting follows from how each character will be framed in that space; light comes after.

He warned that preparing too thoroughly can leave a film rigid. Most Korean productions shoot from storyboards, but Na did not even look at his on "The Wailing." Instead, he talked through each day's shots with his cinematographer in the car every morning. "It was just me and my DOP working without a tight plan," Na said.

He reserved his strongest words for post-production, which he believes the Korean industry undervalues and squeezes into too little time. "It is the stage that makes or breaks the film, and this is the key moment that we've all been working towards," he said. Losing control of the schedule, he warned, turns a filmmaker from hunter into prey.

Na said "The Wailing" was meant to tell audiences that their misfortunes have causes and outcomes that have nothing to do with them, and that he hoped they would blame themselves less. His films have so far ended in darkness, offering only the belief that light might exist somewhere ahead. As he gets older, he increasingly wants to let audiences see that light. He has not decided how much of it his next ending will reveal.

Asked how he would define himself as a genre, Na said anyone who met him up close would find him unlike anyone they had encountered before. "I can tell you that I'm not an easy person to be around," he said.