Interview with Shin Su-won, director of Madonna Internationally acclaimed director Shin Su-won talks to us about her latest film and the current cinematic climate in South Korea.
South Korean director Shin Su-won is one of the special guests invited this year to the Festival do Rio to present her most recent work, Madonna, one of the films shortlisted for Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year. Ex-high school teacher, Su-won began her career as a film director at the age of 42. Since then she has directed six films, both feature-length and shorts, and has won three prizes at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Two of her most acclaimed films are Passerby #3 (2010) and Pluto (2013).
Su-won met us at the festival’s headquarters in Flamengo, to discuss the making of her new film, which was screened for the first time at the festival last night. The film will be screened (with English subtitles) again this week, on Sunday 4th and Tuesday 6th.
How did you come up with the idea behind this film?
A friend of mine, who works at a hospital, told me about a patient that had been in a vegetative state for ages. It was pretty clear that he was not going to wake up and we began discussing whether there was any point of keeping someone like that alive under those conditions. Another friend commented that this patient’s family were very rich. I began to wonder whether there was any link between this determination to keep him alive and the family inheritance, which was basically where the idea came from: I became fascinated with the possible legal implications behind situations like this.
The character Hye-rim is forced to face up to a difficult ethical dilemma in the film. Do you think that these kinds of debates are becoming increasingly unfashionable?
I can’t comment on the current situation in Brazil, but in South Korea we are experiencing a crippling economic crisis. In this financial context, money has become a crucial factor in the decisions we make every day. And many people end up making questionable ones. That was what was at the back of my mind when I positioned Hye-rim in this complicated ethical situation.
Can you tell us a little about the production of the film?
Before making Madonna I did another feature-length, Pluto, which was a pretty budget project. When I started thinking about making a new film, we discussed the possibility of having roughly the same amount to work with. But shooting Madonna was no easy feat, and in the end we had to up our estimated costs a little. I was lucky because many of our financial sponsors liked Pluto and so were willing to invest more. I managed to get 7 million Won [South Korean currency] in total from all our producers, distributors and investors. But nevertheless there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre, so I was forced to reconsider the timeframe. I also drew up new contracts for the actors that stipulated how we would split the profits, so as to give them so kind of minimum guarantee, since we weren’t able to pay them in the conventional way.
In total we spent 24 days on set and five months in production. Our main problem was the hospital. Madonna takes place in the luxury wing of a private hospital and there was no way we could have afforded to actually film inside one. Instead we rented a hotel and equipped it with hospital paraphernalia, which, as you can imagine, was a bit of a logistical nightmare!
What is the climate for Korean film production looking like at the moment?
Korean cinema is becoming more and more commercial. It’s every day more difficult to make art-house or groundbreaking cinema and places to screen this kind of work are few and far between. We have to make an effort to challenge this commercially-driven cinema in Korea, which mainly produces comedies and Hollywood-style blockbusters. Government funding has helped substantially with this, giving opportunities to those projects attempting to break the mould. People are taking action and talking about ways to prevent authentic Korean cinema dying a death. My first film (Passerby #3) dealt with precisely this problem, putting forward ideas about how to find a space for art films and critical cinema in Korean cultural production.
By Fernando Flack, translated by Gill Harris
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original in Portuguese here.
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