Lee Chang-dong on Possible Love, Filmmaking Ethics, and Characters as Mirrors

Lee Chang-dong has never been in a hurry. The novelist-turned-filmmaker (and one-time South Korean minister of culture) has made just seven features in nearly thirty years; Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine, and Burning among the most celebrated, each a patient, piercing portrait of ordinary people pushed to the edge. Needless to say, the eight years since Burning have felt like a long time to wait for another. Now, Lee is back with Possible Love, featuring an immersive quartet of characters and an ethical puzzle only he could jigsaw together so effectively. The film premiered in Venice in September, where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize (and FIPRESCI Prize) 24 years after Oasis earned Lee the Silver Lion for Best Director.

The setup is simple: two couples on opposite sides of a class divide, brought together by the making of a documentary. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) is a factory worker who was laid off after a labor strike came to a brutal end, the story loosely based on the 2009 Ssangyong Motor layoffs. Meanwhile, his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), tries to hold their family together in the aftermath. At a funeral, they meet Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a filmmaker making a documentary about the injustices of the labor movement, and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). Of course, Ye-ji sees Ho-seok as the perfect subject, and soon the situation starts to get muddy.

Over nearly three hours, the two couples become entangled as suppressed feelings, professional ambitions (or the severe lack thereof), and hidden desires surface. Lee, for his part, makes no secret that these are questions he’s asking of himself, too. On the heels of the film’s Netflix release, we sat down with the acclaimed writer-director to talk about the ethics of the camera’s gaze, the subject’s relationship to the storyteller, and the potential for union and solidarity between art and labor.

The Film Stage: I want to start by asking you about the role of a filmmaker in a subject’s life, because that’s such a big part of this film. The winding ethics of that situation serve as the dramatic thrust of the film. So what do you think is the role of a documentary filmmaker documenting a subject’s life?

Lee Chang-dong: While this film shows a character who’s a documentary filmmaker and tells the story partly about the attitude, the ethics, and the distance between the documentary filmmaker and her subject, it’s also a question that I want to raise through the story. Documentary filmmakers, more so than feature filmmakers, are more sensitive to this line of ethics, I think. And that’s because they are closer to the subject that they’re portraying. You know, depending on what kind of person they’re portraying, what kind of pain they’re capturing, how deep the wounds are, and the other elements at play. Of course, the ethics or the distance or attitude would be different.

However, this is something that feature filmmakers are a part of as well, and they tend to be less sensitive to this issue. With the material that they deal with—stories of war, refugees, victims of violence or marginalized people—oftentimes these subjects just become sheer material or, you know, consumed for entertainment and even, at times, they go so far as to be exploited. And so in this film I wanted to discuss and raise questions about the gaze of the camera and the distance between the camera and its subjects.

Have you ever wanted to make a documentary? And regardless of whether you have or haven’t, in what ways do you see yourself as the documentary filmmaker in Possible Love?

There were a couple times that I wanted to shoot a documentary, but it never got made. And this character Ye-ji, she has a very wealthy husband. She is married to a power of capital. Despite that, she wants to be independent from it and tries to find her own identity as a filmmaker. In that sense, while I am a feature filmmaker, I think our positions can be connected and be quite similar. As a filmmaker, I cannot make films without leaning on capital, and Netflix, with whom I worked together for Possible Love, could be part of that huge capital. And maybe you could say that I’m also married to wealth in that sense as well, and I have my own efforts of maintaining my own independent voice, and in that sense I think Ye-ji and myself, we are like mirrors that reflect one another.

Photo by Godlis, courtesy of the 64th New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center

Do you find Ye-ji’s presence in her subject’s life intrusive? I ask this because at the beginning and through early stages of the film, it seems like, for lack of a better term, she’s a villain or that there’s something wrong about the way she’s approaching the film and her subjects. As the story goes on, it becomes much more involved and complex than that. And there’s not this hero-villain, good-bad duality. But, in all of that, is getting the interview a force for good in the subjects’ lives or invasive? 

In the beginning, you see the scene in the funeral where Ye-ji is trying to do a sketch with her camera. When Mi-ok and Ho-seok get into this quarrel that feels very out of place in a grave funeral setting, she holds her camera up to them. And when Ho-seok resists and sort of yells at her, saying, “Is this amusing for you?” she immediately responds, “I’m sorry, I’ll turn it off.” And with that scene, I wanted to show not only Ye-ji’s personality as a character, but also the true nature of a documentary filmmaker, and, even further, the true nature of the camera. This is not an aggressiveness that’s unique to her as a character, but it’s really connected to the nature of the camera. 

The camera is bound to be drawn to anything that is more entertaining, more dramatic, or more provocative. At times that nature of the camera is much like its power dynamic, where the one holding the camera is given power and, depending on how that power is used, it shapes the ethics of the camera’s perspective. After that, you know, Ye-ji tries to get deeper into the lives and pains of these people, and through these things I wanted to raise the question and bring the audience to think about these various different layers of gazes: the gaze of the documentary filmmaker, the gaze of us as we look into others’ lives, and even the gaze of the audience as they watch the film. I wanted them to be aware of all of these different gazes altogether.

Do you think there’s a tension between the labor movement, the economic crisis that’s borne it, and working in the arts? I don’t necessarily mean a documentary filmmaker, but just anyone working in the arts. Let’s say a crew member on a film, for example: do you think there’s a conflict of interest between the subject in the film, who is prey to this terrible crisis, and the people who are trying to make art about it to make a living? Or perhaps a union between them?

I think there could be a union between them. At least when the actual strike took place, there was a sense of union and solidarity between the ones taking part in the strike and those, like the documentary filmmakers at the time, who wanted to tell their story to the world. I think, fundamentally, between art and pain and struggle, a union or solidarity is bound to take place.

Of course it’s a different issue to discuss when we consider the ethics of the camera or the fundamental dynamics between the two. However, I still think that—not only for documentary filmmakers but also feature filmmakers like myself—when it comes to art or artists, they are somewhere in between a laborer and capital, right? So at times you could say that they’re neutral. In another sense, you could say that they’re cowardly. However, I still believe that the goal of art is to tell their story.

Possible Love is now on Netflix.