Taekwondo at the Apollo: Lee Myung-se and the Great Safety vs. Cinema Debate

The ‘Year of the 12 Directors’ idea is a wonderful one—what began as a series of film screenings in the Korean Cultural Centre has become, for 2012, a celebratory mini-series of director retrospectives which promises to roll on from now until December. The schedule lists three film nights per month on the Strand, and one guest appearance and Q & A event per month in Piccadilly, for twelve consecutive months—the only break comes in October when director Im Kwon-taek becomes the focus of a bumper retrospective and his run of films cranks up to fifteen. On Thursday night, we spent three engaging hours in the pleasant company of director Lee Myung-se, whose 1999 action/police procedural Nowhere to Hide officially opened the 12 Directors programme over three weeks ago; his showcase concluded this week at the Apollo cinema, where a big crowd of fans and autograph-freaks assembled for a special screening of Duelist (2005) and of course for the all-important question and answer session with Lee Myung-se himself.

Director Lee is a genuinely funny man. From the outset, he shared an obvious rapport with our host, Dr. Daniel Martin—which showed when Martin posed his opening question, “Why do you make films,” and Lee burned him right away, joking through much laughter, “I’ve got to earn a living Daniel, what kind of a foolish question is that?!”—but thereafter, he seemed a little reluctant to speak at great length. Lee was on much finer form, I thought, with his winning brand of humour, which ultimately steered the conversation into some wild places.

It’s always difficult to make confident assessments of a sixty minute screen talk with a non-English speaking director. Much of what is said on the record is articulated by an interpreter—clipped, paraphrased, and reworded—for a non-journalistic, non-academic audience; but when the topic of conversation switches to something as indeterminate and unspecifiable as love then it is just about impossible for an observer or journalist to do anything but stutter and fumble in giggling despair, and from that moment on it’s generally considered good form to avoid seriously objective analysis. One line, though, with faint echoes of Wong Kar-wai, did grab me instantly: “I felt that knowing love was the same as knowing what a film could be ...” The rest of this quote was ambiguous and vaguely rhetorical, but the concept was precise, and evidently the thought so spontaneous, that for a moment we in the non-Korean speaking section of the audience understood him perfectly, and we sensed here an original perspective. Did Lee see film form as an expression of human thought and emotional feeling? Desire, infatuation, dependency, spite, anger—did he see himself channelling this vortex of emotion into form itself? Another response which bamboozled many of us, equally fired our imaginations: “When I’m working with actors they’re always asking me, ‘So what is my character?’ And I say, ‘It’s everything that you are.’ In theatre studies they train actors to figure out what the character feels, who they are, are they sad at times, happy at others, an angel at one point and a devil in another …? Similarly, my film can be different genres at once.” I am still pondering that one too. When I read this quote again in cold blue daylight it seems so pragmatic and sensible that I’m almost disappointed—nothing about it would indicate, for example, that director Lee is some sort of high ranking wizard. But at the time I had certainly formed the distinct impression that he was positioning us all for a healthy dose of poet-philosophy, and the one hasty note I made in my notebook reflects this: “temperament in the fabric of film.” Lee was suggesting, I think, that linear narrative is of far less importance than what film is feeling as it passes through different states of being: a film so vibrant and masochistic and sexy as Duelist is perhaps therefore breaking and rupturing, healing and reviving, daydreaming and reasoning over the course of its own running time … But since director Lee’s style of conversation is so deliberately enigmatic, it is best not to expound on too many of these interest quotes, not at least without the benefit of a one-to-one interview.

No sooner had I written about this in my notebook than Lee was responding to another questioner three rows in front of me, saying “all Korean men who do compulsory military service are a black belt in Taekwondo … So, yes, I am an extremely ruthless and efficient back belt, and not to be trifled with out in the lobby.”

What? What was that? The session had suddenly taken a turn into comedy again and I sat up in my ergonomically perfected medium-soft high-end theatre seat hunting for clues. Black belts, military service … I scorned myself for missing the original question.

Lee went on: “I am a great mover. But if I give a demonstration of Taekwondo here, well, there is a very serious chance that my technique will appear comedic to you. Like it does in my films!”

The audience laughed at that one; they seemed to understand him completely, and I felt I did too. In Q & A sessions of this kind you learn never to press the guest speaker on an issue for the simple fact that they are your guest. This goes doubly if the guest is schooled in Taekwondo and you are not. Either way, I felt his decision not to practice martial arts in the screening room was an excellent one. Outside in the lobby would be fine enough.

Among the dozen or so answers Lee gave over the course of the forum the ones with real, printable information were those in which he discussed his unconventional collaborations with actors. In 1999, for instance, he delighted in taking two actors, Park Joong-hoon, whose comedy work was considered by most Koreans to be basically respectable, and Ahn Sung-kee, by comparison already “a national treasure,” and casting them against type in Nowhere to Hide, overthrowing their established images and in the process subjecting them to the physical stresses of one of the most demanding and inventive action films of the New Korean wave. Yet seven years ago, when preparing for Duelist Lee did just the opposite, foregoing the chance to work around and maybe up-end K-pop singer Rain’s plastic profile, and instead hiring actors Kang Dong-won and Ha Ji-won on the basis that their existing media images—Kang in Romance of Their Own (2004) and Too Beautiful to Lie (2004), Ha in the TV mini-series Damo (Undercover Woman, 2003)—already conformed to the general set and mien he was looking for … From this point on, however, I find it hard to discuss again the rest of his comments on actors in a “straight” fashion. He still has a serious action-junkie sensibility, and I sense that he is only ever knowingly on top form, as the best and the brightest of visual stylists in Korean cinema, when he is cranking up the risks for his performers. The basic truth of this became clear to all when he described the plight of those two poor unsuspecting leads in Duelist. “The actress Ha Ji-won,” he began nervously, “sustained … not a big neck injury, but she broke it … And the actor Kang Dong-won had several leg injuries as well …” Then he trailed off. “You see, I’m always trying to be aware of the health and safety risks. But I find the possibility of injuries difficult in any action film, so I am always debating: do I want a better shot, or do I want to consider the actors’ safety?” By now, Martin was poking him mischievously: “You have to tell us what you do decide. Actors’ safety or getting the shot you need?” A few in the audience giggled. “I should be very diplomatic when answering questions like this,” said Lee. “And because I don’t want all the actors avoiding me in the future I’m going to say: of course, the actors’ safety!” A woman beside me laughed and shook her head wildly: “For a second there I felt sure he was going to say the other thing!” I had doubts myself. Midway through their exchange I had the uncanny feeling that on the back of all this talk about broken bones and necks and terminal conflict about safety vs. cinema, director Lee would grab one of the rolling video cameras and give every actor in Korea strict verbal assurances that his sets were safe and that no one joining his next production would be maimed, twisted, broken or otherwise needlessly hospitalised on an accidental or even forcemajeure basis. Or at least that was the assurance I envisioned him giving.

Later that night, when question time was over and the theatre cleared, Lee Myung-se was still giving autographs and posing for genuinely friendly photographs with about thirty members of his audience in the Apollo’s crazy-blue bar and lobby. I don’t know what his keenest fans, the majority of them young Korean girls, were saying to him as they passed single-file in front of the video camera recording the event, but he was taking it all with a cheerful grin and good grace. And not one person asked for an example of his jumping reverse hook kick.