Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema

10 An Interview with Im Kwon-Taek

s i i t i • i t • i t • i i i • • i CHAPTER IO An Interview with Im Kwon-Taek Interviewers: During the last ten years, following the controversial popularity of Sopyonje, you emerged as the most prominent film director in Korea. There was the Munich retrospective of your films and now the retrospective here. How has this recognition affected your sensibility as a filmmaker?1 Im Kwon-Taek: Since the 1980s, I have been considering my films with these matters in mind. Before the mid-1970s, I produced films that pursued only cheap entertainment values. Then I became aware that I would not survive as a director if I continued to pursue mere entertainment, like American films do, because I realized that in every aspect—power, technology, and human resources— competing with American films was impossible. I began to think, "How can I survive as a film director?" At the time, I was also getting old. Realizing that my life is connected to my films, I had been thinking of myself critically: "How can I spend my whole life so degraded?" "What could I possibly lose from making serious 247 248 INTERVIEW WITH IM KWON-TAEK films?" Since films can in some ways be connected to our lives, I realized that I could move beyond the lies, and deal truly with the serious issues of our lives. With this in mind, I made The Deserted Widow (Chapch^o) in 1973 that featured a woman whose life had incredible resilience despite the fact that she was constantly being stepped on like wild grass. This character was developed from my own experience of interacting with some Korean women around me, our motherfigures,who had resilience in life. I could continue dealing with these issues in my films because after all there was the need that Korean films should travel abroad and be seen by foreigners. Interviewers: When did this happen? Im Kwon-Taek: Toward the end of the 1970s, around the time of The Genealogy and The Hidden Hero, these issues were identified. After all, it is true that Koreanfilmpackaging technology and production talents cannot match those of the United States, Europe, Japan, and other nations. But I reached the conclusion that if we could capture the look of Korea as a specific region, along with the people and culture that grow out of that regional condition, and send them outside, then people all over the world could have a strong sense of the unique characteristics of Korea. I also realized that films I wanted to send abroad required topics from the period in our history that I myself have experienced. I went to elementary school during the Japanese colonial period, at a time when the "name change order" was initiated.2 I experienced the turbulent period that soon followed—the liberation, the left/right conflict, the Korean War, the military dictatorship, the military politics, the April 19th Revolution [of i960]. All of these became the subjects of my films. After all, I grew up in an environment that obliged me to react to this period sensitively. During the postliberation period and the left/right conflict, our family participated in the leftist movement. As a child, I experienced the leftist movement and the subsequent oppression: the arrests like the unannounced break-in at night when the police took my father away. INTERVIEW WITH IM KWON-TAEK 249 Interviewers: Would you then say that the characters in The Taebaek Mountains, Yom Sang-jin and Sang-ku, are reflections of the people you knew in real lifer1 Im Kwon-Taek: Of course, those characters are based on the novel by Cho Chong-nae, but theywere also people who could be easily seen within my circle offamily and friends, and in incidents that happened around me. But there were also many people who had nothing to do with those tumultuous times. If you were living in an ordinary household and were not affiliated with the left, or if you were in the position of the assailants, then you could not have felt the same land of pain as I did. In my case, my family members were leftists who were defeated during the Korean War. As you know, in South Korea, the rightists acquired power—and the setback was acutely felt. Although I was young, as a member of a family that suffered from oppression, these pains impacted me psychologically. When...