Twenty-one years in the industry, directing six films, Li Cangdong's works are treasures to the audience. In South Korea, he has the title of "film poet", and Kim Ki-duk commented that he is "the first Korean director".
In 1997, at the age of 43, Lee Cang-dong released his debut film "Green Fish", followed by "Mints" and "Oasis", and the birth of the "Green Trilogy" established his position in the Korean directorial world and opened up his popularity abroad. His directorial work "Miyang" once sent Quan Duyan to the throne of cannes film queen, and in 2010, he won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival for "Poetry".
After eight years, South Korean director Lee Cangdong once again competed in the Cannes Film Festival with his new work "Burning", and won 3.8 points in one fell swoop, with a full score of 4 points, becoming the highest score in the history of Cannes!
"Eight years is indeed a long wait for film fans, and Li Cangdong himself is a cultivation." During this period, Li Cangdong kept looking for new ways to communicate with the audience, and he found that there was "anger" in any country regardless of race, crowd, and culture.
"Burning" is like the final form of anger in Li Cangdong's eyes, it seems to be a silent echo but it is colder than "Poetry", more violent than the "Green Trilogy", "Green Fish", "Mints" and "Oasis".
"Burning" is adapted from Haruki Murakami's short suspense novel "Burning Barn", combined with William Faulkner's "Burning Horse Shed", Li Cangdong once said that this is a good story he found for 7 or 8 years.
"Burning" tells the story of three young Koreans who have different experiences: Jong-so, Ben, and Hye-mi meet, and they have an entangled love story. The overall seemingly simple story is not simple at all, the film is full of mystery, and there is no specific theme, which is also what director Li Cangdong wants to express - to explore mystery, the mystery of life.
Like Haruki Murakami's "Burning Barn", Li Cangdong left a lot of questions in the film. For example, "Does Emi's cat really exist?" Where did she disappear in the end? Is the murderer Ben? What burned the barn"? In the movie, Li Cangdong did not use the lens to intuitively explain these plots, but left a large number of questions for the audience to imagine.
Li Cangdong is good at metaphors, symbols, blanks, and documentaries, and some people say that his works are not like movies, but more like literary works. "In Li Cangdong's view, metaphor is the carrier of art to express the true heart in general, and it can accurately convey subjective thoughts to the audience."
"Green Fish" is mixed with the young man Mak-dong who has fallen victim to the underworld ethics and the laws of survival, Jin Yonghao, who became a brutal policeman and embarked on the road to destruction after being discharged from the army in "Mints", and Hong Zhongdu, who was unable to adapt to social life after his brother was released from prison after he was released from prison. Then in "Burning", I longed to become a writer, but after graduating from college, I couldn't even find a job and could only ship Lee Jong-so. "Most of Li Cangdong's films explore the realistic life of marginalized characters in society, which is cruel but highly restorive to reality."
It can be seen that Li Cangdong is a director who is obsessed with excavating the true meaning of life, and the themes of his works focus on "people" themselves. Li Cangdong in Korea, a bit like Jia Zhangke in China, Kore-eda and In Japan, all have special significance. It's just that Jia Zhangke is a recorder of the times, Kore-eda who infiltrates the family, while Li Cangdong is good at seeing through human nature and digging into the bloody real life that makes people's backs chill.
【Interview transcript of director Li Cangdong】
Reporter: What do you think are the similarities between China's social reality films and South Korea in the past two years, or the different directions of development?
Li Cangdong: First of all, it is more difficult to define the theme of realism. By connecting the film to some real-life problems, and then triggering thinking, I think that film is to play a role that reflects reality.
There are not many Korean realist films, and it is a little difficult to compare Korean and Chinese realist films.
Reporter: What does metaphor mean for a novel and a film? The ending of the "Burning" movie is different from the ending of Haruki Murakami's "Burning Barn". It adds the scene where Zhong Xiu kills Ben, is it a metaphor, or is it reality?
Li Cangdong: In fact, whether it is a film or other art form, a lot of metaphors will be used, and art will generally adopt metaphors to express the heart or a subjective thought. Through the movie "Burning", I want to leave a space for everyone's imagination, such as where some of the connections between the movie and reality are, I want to provoke everyone to think about these issues.
Reporter: Hunger, anger, and loneliness are mentioned in "Burning", representing the young people in the city or a group with a relatively large gap between rich and poor. How does the director connect the film with the real world?
Li Cangdong: Not only in "Burning", but also in China or the whole world. Although people's lives in the world have indeed improved, and everyone's living conditions are much better than before, in fact, the differences between rich and poor are constantly being amplified, and they were more obvious in the past, but now they do not feel so obvious.
For many young people now, they are very powerless against reality. They want to struggle, to fight, and they don't know who to fight with, so they have this inner feeling of powerlessness and anger, because they don't know how to fight, which is the same as some of the problems in the movie. For example, is Ben in "Burning" a murderer in the end? Hyemi in the movie, is she really there? From the movie, it can be extended to some problems in the real society.
Reporter: Is this sense of powerlessness confined to young people, or is it all? Do you have this emotion yourself?
Li Cangdong: Yes, I will feel this way too.
Reporter: How to deal with it?
Li Cangdong: Of course, it can only be expressed through the movie.
Reporter: In real life, what will you be angry about?
Li Cangdong: A lot, sometimes when you watch the news, you feel very angry.
Reporter: You once said that you prefer the work of post-editing and do not like the process of shooting, do you think that this shooting process is very painful for you, which is the main reason why your work is now relatively small? Including "Burning", which itself expresses angry emotions, is the filming process a very painful process?
Li Cangdong: I myself am not saying that I don't like shooting, or I prefer the work of editing, but in terms of these jobs themselves, the most difficult thing is to write a script, because writing a script requires an inspiration, and at the same time you need to constantly conceive your characters and events. Why is the process of shooting also difficult? It's because shooting it's actually like writing a script, constantly creating new things.
The reason why I like the work of editing is because editing is equivalent to a cleaning process, which is to further simplify and optimize the material that has been collected, and organize it on the basis of the existing ones, unlike the script or shooting, which needs to be constantly recreated. It's not that I don't like shooting or writing scripts, it's just that the process has that nature.
Reporter: It's very difficult to write the script, but there are some pictures that are very beautiful, such as the scene where Emi is dancing in "Burning". Was this written at the stage of writing the script or was it arranged on the spot according to some improvisation?
Li Cangdong: First, the scene where Emi dances was before the film was made, I had such an idea, and it is because of this scene that I am more convinced of making such a movie. The dance in Burning looks like an improvisational performance, but there is a lot of preparation in the early stages. In order to show Emi's free and unrestrained state, I gave a lot of consideration to the dancing scene at that time.
Second, the dance itself contains tango, which is already there at the stage of writing the script. The screenwriter himself prefers to dance and has also done some research. At that time, when filming this dance, I also practiced some ideas with the actors a lot, and only then did I have a scene in the movie. She seems to be more improvised, but there is a lot of preparatory work.
Reporter: The film "Burning" shifts the perspective to young people, and you mentioned earlier that young people have a sense of powerlessness, or the gap between rich and poor. Some young people in China are dealing with society with a more Buddhist attitude, so how do young people in South Korea deal with this problem?
Li Cangdong: Which country has a stronger sense of powerlessness among young people? I'm not very judgmental and don't know very well. But this sense of powerlessness should be stronger among young South Koreans. Maybe China is now in a phase of rapid development, while South Korea was already experiencing it a decade ago, when the pace of life was so fast that there was no time to appreciate the feeling of powerlessness.
As far as I'm concerned, I used to have no need to worry about not being able to find a job when I was young, and I had things to do everywhere, but now it's different. Young people in South Korea will also feel very powerless because of real problems, not the personal problems of Young Koreans, but the crux of an era. Why focus this on you young people? Because the problem of young people is important, it is not a problem of youth, but a problem of the whole world.
But in fact, the problems existing in young people are not obvious, and the trend of the whole world is now moving in a better direction. Everyone's life has been improved, and the quality of life has been significantly improved. Take a young Korean man, he can't find a job to go to a convenience store to do a part-time job, do odd jobs, earn new time, go out of the convenience store can also buy brand-name sneakers, drink very expensive coffee, this is actually a problem.
The mysteries shown in the movies will also happen in life. People don't know why they live like this, so through the connection between film and life, I hope to cause more people to think.
Reporter: Your style is not to just open up the problem and then come up with a solution. Do you want the audience or the young people to see your work and do something?
Li Cangdong: My films are indeed more accustomed to asking the audience all kinds of questions, and I personally do not have the luxury of letting the audience find the answer to life quickly through this one- or two-hour movie, which is not very realistic. What I hope is that the audience can watch the movie, go out of the movie theater, and be able to observe the movie from a new perspective, and the content of the movie can be better extended into the audience's life.
Reporter: Why is the image of the father absent from your work? With the exception of Miyang, most of the works are from a male perspective, including Burning. There may be some more radical feminists who will feel that the image of Emi is relatively shallow, how do you respond?
Li Cangdong: "Poetry" is female, and "Oasis" is two people. There is a reason for the lack of a father's role in my work, but it is more complicated to explain. From the current society, fathers are relatively absent in family life.
In my films, there are actually women's perspectives, such as Emi in "Burning", who looks like a victim of a crime, but her meaning is not like that. In the scene where Emi dances, there are two men, one is the mysterious Ben, and you don't know if he is a murderer or a kind-hearted rich second generation. The second is that zhong xiu, a volunteer student who is struggling in life, has been in a state of wandering.
Emi is different, she is the only character with her own subjectivity. Emi's life is hard, but she is always looking for the meaning of life, and she is such an image that she goes to Africa in search of the meaning of tango. In this movie, she has also been pursuing what is the meaning of life?
So Emi can be said to be the core of the movie "Burning", and I actually want to ask you through her: Where did Emi go? Does Emi really exist? What is her final destination? In fact, I also want to provoke everyone's thinking through such questions.