Lee Myung-se has garnered an international reputation as a master of cinematic style. His recent films Nowhere to Hide and Duelist put that style in the service of an unconventional police procedural and a swordplay period piece respectively, but his latest film, M, avoids genre to explore dreams, memory and lost love. Superficially a ghost story, M is driven as much by the complex visuals and rapid-fire editing as by the free-form narrative, which follows frustrated writer Minwoo (Jang Don-won) as he is haunted by the memory of his first love, Mimi (Lee Yeon-Hee).

Cinema Strikes Back’s David Austin and Jeff sat down last week with Lee, who was in New York for the presentation of M at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival, to discuss M, the importance of dreams to Lee’s work, and Lee’s next project.

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On the Shooting of M

CSB: Duelist and Nowhere to Hide were genre pieces. Were you worried you would have a problem with M, which seems to be less of a commercial film.

Lee: But I thought it was a very commercial film. I think that about all my films. (laughs)

CSB: Did you have any problems getting financing?

Lee: No, I still don’t have that much trouble getting financing because I am considered an okay director in Korea. But I don’t know about the next film (laughs)

CSB: I understand that M was influenced by your experiences living in New York.

Lee: Actually, I had wanted M to take place in New York. But I could not because it was not easy to gather enough money to do it. So I did it in Korea.

CSB: If M had been shot in New York, what neighborhoods would it have taken place in?

Lee: I don’t know exactly, but I love this area [Greenwich Village] and Chinatown.

CSB: How long was the shooting period for M?

Lee: Fifty days.

CSB: That would be a long time to shoot in New York with a full cast. Did you storyboard M?

Lee: I storyboard everything. My last movie, Duelist, was an action movie. For an action movie, I draw as an aid to shooting. Of course, it is more important to storyboard for an action movie. M is a melodrama. But I always draw something for shooting, if not exactly like full storyboards.

CSB: For M, did you have the entire script created before shooting?

Lee: I did.

CSB: The sound design was also very complex in the dynamic range, going to loud to quiet in startling ways. How closely did you work on the sound design?

Lee: The sound designers also have a very hard time with me when I am working. I am the one who decides where the speakers are and what sound will come from where.

CSB: How involved are you in the editing process?

Lee: I order everything to do with the editing. With this film, because it was so hard to understand visually for the rest of the staff, the assistant director and I laid out the editing beforehand.

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On the Visuals

CSB: Did you work with the same cinematographer for this movie as previously?

Lee: My first two films were by a famous cinematographer named Yu Young-gil, but he passed away. I am really looking for the right match so I have been using different DPs for each film. I am the one who makes the visuals, but I need someone who can do it with me with happiness and enthusiasm. But a lot of DPs, it is very hard work for them, so a lot of them want to stay away.

CSB: How much of the film was shot on set?

Lee: About 90%. We used sound stages. The street scenes, when Mimi is looking for the umbrella man, that was the only place where I used location shooting. That and the beach.

CSB: Obviously, color is very important to the film. Did you primarily achieve the look you wanted by using lighting or set design?

Lee: In this case, it was through the set design. The cinematographers are most interested in lighting up even the darkest places, but what I really wanted was real darkness. So what I did was go ahead and paint the walls black to get as dark a scene as possible. I did this in the alleyways.

CSB: In the bar scene also?

Lee: Actually, the bar I did not paint. What I did was use black cloth.

CSB: Did you ever have to use any CGI for the effects or was it all in-camera?

Lee: In this film I used just the right amount of CGI, but there was quite a bit. Like the street where the coffee shop was, or the alleyways when Mimi was younger. Not really fancy computer graphics, just ordinary computer graphics. I did that in order to keep costs down and to have a quick shooting schedule.

CSB: Did the film evolve at all during the shooting or did you have everything locked in place before you started rolling the camera?

Lee: I build the sets as I am going along. There are thoughts I might have about the film as I am going along but I have to consider the finances.

CSB: What changed as you were going along?

Lee: Some of the first thoughts I had on set design were to make the house look like a labyrinth, but it would have taken too much money so I used a lot of mirrors instead. It was for economic reasons.

CSB: Beyond the set of the apartment, there were a lot of shots that framed people in mirrors, windows, or the windows of doors – was that a budgetary choice, a stylistic choice, or more of thematic choice about people being trapped?

Lee: In this film, in every situation I wanted to make sure the letter “M” was involved. Mirror is “M,” and labyrinth in Korean is “miro.” Also an “M.” My name is Myung-se, also money is with “M,” and the two characters in the film, Mimi and Minwoo, their names both start with an “M.”

CSB: What is the significance of the green room in which Minwoo meets with the agents?

Lee: Whenever I make a film, I pick a certain color. It is very simple to pick the color. Koreans look at a divination every year, it is a little like astrology. When I shot M, green seemed like a very good color symbolically. For Duelist, that year red was my color, so I used red.

CSB: What was the color for Nowhere to Hide?

Lee: Nowhere to Hide was blue. You know, the green room had a psychological meaning. In psychology, you can say that people who like green usually have something imbalanced or something wrong with them psychologically.

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On the Influence of Dreams

CSB: The green room, as a repeating set in the film, I was wondering if that was based on some recurring nightmare or thought of yours?

Lee: A long time ago I had a dream and in that dream I went into a room. That room was completely in green. The feeling I got from that room was like one of Francis Bacon’s paintings.

Those scenes in the green room when they are eating, which was actually a set of a Japanese restaurant, were actually for me the most important scenes in the film. What was important for me is that I wanted to experiment with a space that was real, but very small, and work with movement in that kind of small space. If you look at that scene really carefully, the walls move. The first scene is one shot, one take. In order to give it a certain look, I had the dolly come in while I was zooming out, which created an image of the wall moving. It was very difficult for the actors.

CSB: Did it require a lot of takes to get it exactly the way you wanted?

Lee: Not exactly, we started at 9:00, and it took about twelve hours.

CSB: How much of the film is influenced by Freud and Freudian analysis? I know in Freud, smoking and smoke is central to dream analysis and the oral fixation.

Lee: Rather than Freud, I am influenced by Jung. Freud is very interested in the unconscious, but Jung is more interested in mythology.

CSB: So how did the Jungian interest in mythology affect this film?

Lee: From a long time ago, I have always been interested in dreams. Dreams have always fascinated me. I dream a lot. I had a dream in the year 2000 in which Hitchcock gave me a book, and that book was titled “M.” I said I would look at in a little while, and then I woke up from the dream.

CSB: So you are still a little frustrated about not knowing what is in the book?

Lee: Since then I have chased the meaning of “M” in that dream. I realized that “M” means MacGuffin.

I really like Hitchcock a lot, but as for directors I really like, there are five others. Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini, Jacques Tati, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

CSB: I can see the influence of Fellini in this film, with 8 ½ in particular, but did the other directors influence this film in any way?

Lee: Actually rather than being influenced by these other directors, I was influenced by mythology. If you want to talk about precisely where I got some influences for this film, Edgar Allan Poe, Truman Capote, Francis Bacon, and Gustav Klimt. I used a gold color in the street scenes – that was influenced by Klimt.

I have met three directors in my dreams. Orson Welles, Ozu, and Hitchcock. Ozu gave me a really good talk – he said a lot of good things. I said to Ozu, “I want to make films like you.” And what Ozu said was, no, you should make them in your style.

CSB: Good advice, even in your dreams. Do you keep track of your dreams in a journal?

Lee: Yes. I have been doing that since I was seventeen years old.

CSB: Do you ever review old journals for creative materials?

Lee: Yes.

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On Mimi, Minwoo’s past love

CSB: How did you choose the actress who plays Mimi?

Lee: I wanted to cast a new actress, someone who was not known. And somebody who had pretty eyes.

CSB: Was the bright Technicolor look for the Mimi memory scenes supposed to evoke a bright past?

Lee: In this film, the scenes with the most life are the scenes set in the past, because people when they look back at the past, the past always seems brightest.

CSB: One of the big themes is that Minwoo is obsessed with this girl from his past. Did that come from a dream or a personal experience?

Lee: My experiences and other things in life, it is just all mixed together. You might think the same thing, but every now and then you come to think that life is like a dream.

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On His Next Project

CSB: I know you took a long break from feature films between Nowhere to Hide and Duelist. Why was that?

Lee: I was in the United States. I was flown out to LA by Tony Scott and there was great interest in me shooting a commercial [ed. note - presumably as part of BMW’s “The Hire” series of short film commercials involving a number of prominent international directors]. At that time, there was an actor’s strike. I prepared for it, and then I thought that with the material I had for the commercial I wanted to increase it and make it a feature film. But there were some things that just did not work out. That is why I returned to Korea to make films.

CSB: Do you already have something in the works to follow M or are you still waiting to decide what your next project is?

Lee: I have almost finished a treatment of my next project. It will be a samurai movie set in Japan. I want to shoot in Korea and Japan and have it financed by both countries. It is based on The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. I have almost finished the treatment and will right the screenplay.

CSB: Is this based on the life of Musashi Miyamoto or on his philosophy?

Lee: His philosophy.

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Thanks to Lee Myung-se for taking the time and to Grady Hendrix and the entire Subway Cinema crew for arranging this interview.