![]() I wanted to show a couple who really love each other dearly, and are supportive of each other like best friends. Because I was about to marry my sweetheart, I didn’t want to portray marriage that way. “Usually, in films about marriage, I find that the central conflict usually is derived from the husband or wife making some kind of irredeemable mistake, or one of them simply falling out of love. “I was preparing to marry my longtime girlfriend, and because I was on the cusp of that, I think I unconsciously wanted to present a less typical portrait of marriage,” he says. But while he was writing the screenplay more personal elements seeped into the story. Yu says his initial, surface-level goal was to simply create a fun, mystery horror film. Overwhelmed with anxiety that he may hurt himself or their young family - including their unborn child - the wife gradually becomes more and more consumed by an irrational fear that poses its own dangers. Starring Lee Sun-kyun (the wealthy patriarch of Bong’s Parasite) and Jung Yu-mi ( Train to Busan and a regular muse of Hong Sang-soo), Sleep follows a happy pair of newlyweds whose domestic bliss is disrupted when the husband begins speaking in his sleep - repeatedly stating, “Someone’s inside.” Soon he begins transforming into someone else entirely during increasingly belligerent bouts of sleepwalking. The film is both a slickly realized genre exercise and a film of subtle personal intention. One could argue that Yu’s debut, Sleep, bears some traces of both of these influences. I learned from director Lee that a director should think very deeply about their intentions - and have full confidence in those choices.” I found that so inspiring, because all of the other directors I had worked with were adamant that all of the dialog sound very colloquial, American and clear. He continues: “It would be rude of me to call him ‘brave,’ because he is my senior and one of our greatest artists, but he even asked me - after lots of discussion - to make some of the English dialog sound deliberately more unnatural and grammatically incorrect, because in Korean he intended some lines to sound strange, or ambiguous. ![]() “But director Lee, even though he doesn’t speak much English, he wanted to discuss the intention behind every piece of dialog and to review every translated word to know why I chose it.” “Usually when doing subtitles, I didn’t really interact with the directors much - I just delivered the final translated product,” Yu remembers. By that point, Yu had subtitled a number of major Korean films, but he had never encountered a filmmaker with such an obsessive attention to detail as Lee, who famously began his career as an acclaimed literary novelist. ![]() and is bilingual, was hired by Lee Chang-dong to translate and write the English subtitles for the Korean auteur’s now-classic existential thriller Burning, winner of Cannes’ FIPRESCI international critics’ prize in 2018. Not long after Okja, Yu, who grew up partially in the U.K. Why Japan Is on the Precipice of a Content Boom But while I was making Sleep, I realized that I was desperately trying to mimic, consciously or unconsciously, everything director Bong did - during preproduction, during production, in the way that I talked to the actors, and even during post-production and promotion.” “I was just trying to pull my own weight and not ruin the film. “I wasn’t really conscious of what I was observing at the time, because I wasn’t there to learn,” he remembers. Yu credits the experience with teaching him “almost everything” he knows about filmmaking. Among the aspiring director’s first industry jobs after graduating from a university in Seoul was an assistant director gig on Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix sci-fi adventure drama Okja, which premiered at Cannes in 2017. ![]() First-time filmmaker Jason Yu, whose horror drama Sleep premieres in Cannes‘ Critics’ Week on May 21, honed his craft under the tutelage of South Korea’s very finest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |