interview July JUng
rible way, when in fact it just had a different way of thinking. So that’s how I came up with the girl Dohee and our story. How did Lee Chang-dong come to produce your film and what influence did he have? JJ My school, the Korea National University of Arts, had an industry-university collaboration with CJ [CJ E&M] where it selected five treatments to be in a workshop with Lee Chang-dong as the mentor. Five of us developed our projects with Mr Lee, meeting all together once every two weeks. At the end of it, they selected one project to be produced by CJ. It wasn’t mine. But Mr Lee suggested that his company, Pine House, produce my film. He was helpful every step of the way and encouraged the cast and crew on location. He told me about how he’d directed his films and how to get the outcome you want. July Jung on set
Who’s that girl? July Jung talks to Jean Noh about Un Certain Regard selection A Girl At My Door, including its inspiration and how Lee Chang-dong came to produce
K
orean director July Jung is making her feature debut in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard with the world premiere of A Girl At My Door. Produced by Poetry director Lee Chang-dong and starring Bae Doo-na from Air Doll and The Host as a police chief exiled to a seaside town, the film has Cannes regulars on board as well as young Kim Sae-ron, from hit thriller The Man From Nowhere, playing an abused local girl, and Song Sae-byuk (Sector 7) as the chief ’s visiting lover.
A Girl At My Door
34 Screen International May 17, 2014
How did this project get started? July Jung The idea for the script came from a story I heard somewhere about a cat whose owner loved it a lot, but then got a new cat and stopped loving it. One day, the owner is about to put on their shoes to go to work and is shocked to find a dead mouse inside one. The owner thinks the cat is taking revenge and is frightened. So they give the cat a beating and expect it to have learned its lesson. But the next day, they find a bloody skinned mouse in the shoe. Actually, the unloved cat was trying to give its owner a tasty meal. When it got the beating, the cat thought, “Oh, my owner can’t eat the skin like I do,” and took it off for them the next day. That story stayed with me for a long time. I thought about what it’d be like if it were a child thought to be taking revenge in a hor-
What was the shoot like? JJ We shot from September 8 to November 1, 2013. The main background is a seaside town, so we went to places like Sooncheon and Geumho-do. Moving around to faraway locations was hard, but the biggest restriction was that it is set in the middle of summer and we had limited time to capture the season. We had nothing but a script and belief about how we could get that onto the screen. I’m so thankful to the cast and crew for their trust and the consensus about how to do better to get the film made. How did you cast the film? JJ This was my first feature and it is lowbudget, but I was still looking for the best actors for each character. I saw Bae Doo-na in a recent film and as soon as I saw her first scene, I thought, “Ah, she’s the one!” The film was Ko-ri-a [As One], but it wasn’t because of the table tennis. It was because she looked so different from the image of ‘Bae Doo-na the actress’. She was shooting in London at the time and they told me when they e-mailed her the script. Exactly three hours after that, I was told she’d do it. For the role of young Dohee, I wasn’t in a position to write with a particular actress in mind, but Kim Sae-ron was the first I thought of after I finished the script. As for Song Sae-byuk, there aren’t a lot of actors his age who can manage perfect Jeollado dialect and the role isn’t one of a charming bad guy. I needed an actor who’d look at the whole film and think about the meaning. He was even better than I expected in bringing the character to life. What are your goals as a film-maker? JJ I want to be able to make my next film if at all possible and to keep working steadily. There are some directors who take one thing and dig deep into it, but I think I’m more the kind that will keep changing. I hope I’ll be s able to get better as I change. n
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