For “Broker,” you also collaborated with South Korean actors like Song Kang-ho, IU, and Gang Dong-won. What can you say about working with these actors to find their characters?
All the actors have different approaches to performance. Song Kang-ho is someone I had very detailed communication with; every day, he would want to discuss his performance in detail. Gang Dong-won, on the other hand, after I gave him the script, went away and did his own research at children’s homes, for example. IU wasn’t someone who asked many questions, but I gave her about eight A4 pages’ worth of background on her character and how she ended up abandoning her baby in the form of a police statement that she gave after she was arrested. That was what she based her performance on, and she got it just right, I think. There was some small direction that I gave her regarding nuances of expression on set, but that was all she needed for the performance.
To ask also about Bae Doona, with whom you last worked on “Air Doll,” to what do you attribute the strength of that collaboration?
She’s the one who most understands what I’m trying to do, so she’s a very reassuring presence for me. With the character of Soo-jin, she hit every beat. I think she played that part perfectly. Before we started filming, we went through the whole script together. It took about four hours, and we went through everything in comparing the Japanese to the Korean translation. She wanted to make sure that nothing had been lost in the translation, that nothing had been added in the translation. She spotted that there were some [ellipses] in Japanese that weren’t there in Korean, and she asked me what it was that I was trying to express with these [ellipses.] When we finished that process, she said that she understood the character of Soo-jin, so I think it was really important that we did that. The way that character feels at the beginning of the film, her feelings towards the mother and child, and the way those feelings change by the end of the film, are really central to the whole film. So, it was important that she got that right, and I’m very grateful to her.
One memorable sequence in “Broker” sees Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, So-young, the baby Woo-sung, and the orphan Hae-jin go through the car wash. Hae-jin playfully opens the window. I found it so moving to have the outside world enter the contained space of the car in such a lighthearted way, and to me it’s one of the moments at which these characters first feel like a family.
As you say, the car wash scene is where they become a family. Once their journey together is over and they go their separate ways, when they hear the word “family” for the rest of their life, I think that is the moment they will remember. That moment gives rise to a sense of unity between them. And it’s water that brings that about. I really wanted to show that.
The Ferris wheel sequence, as well, is gorgeous in how it places the characters inside passenger cars — So-young, Dong-soo, and Woo-sung in one, Sang-hyeon and Hae-jin in another — and allows us to imagine other kinds of family structures they could fit into.
The Ferris wheel [scene] was a bit different but, as you say, by splitting them up — into a father and son, and a couple — that conversation [between So-young and Dong-soo] is something those two wouldn’t have been able to have, had Sang-hyeon been there or had the child been there. They needed to be alone together in order to have that conversation.
The chosen families you follow in both “Shoplifters” and “Broker” are together for only a short while. Given that you’ve explored ideas of family throughout your career, what specifically appealed about exploring the link between families and time, the ephemerality of family structure?
I think of my film “Still Walking” as the first time I really dealt with the theme of family. And I made that after I lost my mother. Then, I went on to have a child myself and become a father. I realized that family really isn’t a fixed entity. My role had changed. All roles change with the passing of time, and my approach changed with that. I had been a son, and now I was a father. As I say, family is not a fixed entity. It’s never the same. It’s constantly changing. People die, people are born, and that happens over and over. We see a family at one moment in time. And so it all began there. with my own life experience. And I was thinking along the same lines with this film. Whether related by blood or not, these people are a family for as long as they are in this van together. And later, when they separate, they will probably go on to play different roles as part of different groups.
“Broker” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, expanding on January 13.