[INTERVIEW] Director Park Jung-bum - Part 1

Park Jung-bum [Beck Una]

There are people who, as much happiness they have brought into this world, leave as much to be resolved. Jeon Seung-chul was such a friend for director Park Jung-bum of "The Journals of Musan" which opened in theaters on April 14. He was a defector, a close friend, and now no longer exists in this world after ending his short-lived life, but to Park he is also a painful yet must-be resolved issue. Like Park has put it, it may be "fate" that for his debut film, he came to depict on how a man named Seung-chul defects from North Korea and tried to adjust to South Korean society. But the virtue of "The Journals of Musan" lies in the fact that it does not excessively analyze or dramatically package Jeon Seung-chul's life of which he remembers quite fondly of, more so because it probably contains many personal memories. His calm reminiscence may probably be the most sincere cinematic courtesy he has shown for this man he has spent a part of his life with.

10: Your schedule has been tough to follow through after your New Currents Award win at last year’s Busan International Film Festival, have had to go to international fests including Rotterdam, Deuville, Hong Kong and with Copenhagen, Tribecca and San Francisco still on the way. Oh, I also heard that you won the top prize at the Off Plus Camera International Festival of Independent Cinema in Poland and received 100,000 dollars worth of prize money for it. You must be happy. Congratulations.
Park Jung-bum: Thank you. But I wish I could have had more sessions with the audience ? I couldn’t do too many on the week my movie was released because of schedule overseas. I need to work really hard to catch up to “Re-encounter” and “Bleak Night.” (sighs and laughs)

10: You majored in physical education and opened your eyes to movies later on in your life?
Park: I was an idiot. Someone who thinks he needs to run as soon as he opens his eyes in the morning. I exercised eight hours a day. And I got ignored a lot when taking compulsory classes at the college I went to in order to become a physical education teacher. (laugh) So out of spite, I went to the library and started reading whatever I could get my hands on including liberal arts, society, magazines and comic books. Then it was when I was in the army that I decided to do movies, thinking that I may have some sort of talent in the field, but in the end, I ended up living like a beggar for seven years. (laugh) But rather than thinking that I should give up right away, I told myself that I’d take a shot at doing a couple short films and then quit after that if I needed to. I had set 40 as my limit but I got lucky and got to shoot a film a few years before I hit it. And now I’m doing interviews like this. (laugh)

10: I heard that “The Journals of Musan” is about your actual defector friend Jeon Seung-chul?
Park: Yes, I started writing the movie quite naturally while thinking of him. It wasn’t a movie that I started on with a grandiose consciousness regarding society. It was just a look at this person. This is how he changes. Whose fault is this. That’s why I think of “The Journals of Musan” as a ‘social novel.’ A personal record yet one that needs to mention society to tell the story. I tried not to make this movie become something that people could mistake as a movie of a particular subject because the main character is a defector. I was also thinking that if Seung-chul got to watch this movie, I wouldn’t want him to feel like I’ve used him. That’s how I ended up writing a movie in the format of a journal.

10: What’s the most memorable response you’ve gotten from your audience?
Park: I was leaving the film fest in Rotterdam when an old man came to me, held my hand, and led me somewhere saying he has something to tell me. He then said, “I immigrated here in the 1970s. I’m from Turkey. I lived a life that’s like the character’s from the movie but I’ve settled in. This movie is about my past.” That’s when I realized that this story isn’t just about Korean defectors but could be about the various immigrants of each country.

10: The Seung-chul I saw from an audience’s point-of-view was someone who is completely hunched up from trying to adjust to South Korean society but that made me wonder what he was like when he was in North Korea. Are there any stories of him from his past that you at least had in mind?
Park: Seung-chul was actually a very bright and cheerful person when he was in [South] Korea. Because he had been handed a new life, going to college while being able to put his past behind him. Of course, that is until he had to start fighting cancer. Seung-chul said his family had enough to live on before the Arduous March (a famine in North Korea in the mid-1990s which forced millions to move). He’s someone who remembers eating beef jerky made from meat they had dried at their house. But the drought and flood ruined the country’s harvest and that’s when people started to die on the streets. He said that when someone from their neighborhood died at first, he used to think he should go and bury him quickly, but as the number of people dying and missing increased, he ended up walking past whatever people said of people he had known dying. This was shown in film “Dooman River” as well but this is the exact reality of North Korea that I had heard from them. Anyway, then his eldest brother defected to the South alone so his family suddenly got accused of being a reactionary. There’s a place of exile in the North Hamgyeong Province which they were moved to, after having lived in an apartment in Pyongyang, where they started working on a collective farm. And after going through the experience of defecting, he said he got the habit of raising his eyes quickly. I actually wanted to show that habit of his in the movie as well but I was worried it would seem too direct of a description of him or would make the movie a bit funny so I went with the lid hair. I wanted make him seem somewhat off in terms of his appearance.

10: How did you actually become close with Jeon Seung-chul?
Park: I was very close with Seung-chul’s older brother who crossed over the South first. He was in my class at college. And Seung-chul joined our class as my junior. And we traveled to Bucheon, Jeonju and Busan, touring the country to attend film festivals because I said I was going to make movies. Seung-chul loved traveling. You don’t have the freedom to travel in North Korea. So I guess he was happy to move about to his heart’s content. We also talked a lot about movies while traveling and he said he wanted to do movies too so he briefly worked on the production team of a movie I was the assistant director for. Then it’s not long after that we found out he has cancer.

10: Why did you choose to show the story of how he adapts to South Korean society when you could’ve also talked about his escape or life in North Korea?
Park: I guess it was sort of like fate. The director of “Dooman River” had told me he couldn’t show beyond what he had seen and I too had heard a lot about what he had been through before but I wasn’t confident of showing it in a realistic way. The daily lives of the people I portrayed in “The Journals of Musan” were things I had observed myself and could tell of. And their life from before is their past. I wanted to talk about their life in the present. And their sadness and pain from the past still existed. That’s why I hadn’t even considered showing their escape in the movie. Or maybe I instinctively thought about production costs. (laugh)

10: Well the actual Seung-chul was able to go to college which is very different in terms of environment from the Seung-chul we saw in the movie. What sort of researching did you do to make up for this difference?
Park Jung-bum: Seung-chul had an older brother and was happy compared to other defectors. I didn’t really do more research but there were about 15 friends that Seung-chul and I used to hang out with. We used to drink a lot together as well. But after two or three years, most of them left for the U.S. I showed this in my movie as well but they were already broke here so they were saying it’s better to get paid 10,000 per hour than 5,000 per hours from washing dishes. And there were instances where they’d put out their homes for lease, the ones the government provided for them, and they themselves would live in cheaper places. They’d use that money and the subsidy they get from church for living costs. And all of them are great drinkers. (laugh) I’ve seen all sorts of defectors. And there are different ranks for them as well. Those who were high-ranking officials, in other words, people with information to give to the South, would be given more compensation and those who worked on collective farms received basic adjustment money. But the government got rid of even that when the number of defectors hit 20,000. They were handed only the leased apartments. Back in the days, he defectors who received around 40 million won worth of stipend for settling into South Korean society, all went through the process of living in pleasure for the first two to three months, and then becoming poor. They would get paid several hundreds of thousands of wons per lecture at first but that too would last only the first few months. So they have a hard time later on. They’ve become used to the laziness seen in communist regimes so they don’t want to do hard work. They’re weak at competing. And I’ve seen very few who are sure about life. It’s ironical.

10: “The Journals of Musan” is a film drama, not a documentary. And writers of film dramas are bound to want to make their main characters seem to be in more dramatic situations. But it seemed like you removed all the elements that could make one sympathize with Seung-chul or make his life seem grimmer.
Park: I think so. I think all of our lives are dramatic. But it doesn’t look dramatic on the outside. And that’s because nobody on the outside fully understands what another person is thinking or feeling on the inside. So they just observe. You look at how that person lives his or her life throughout the day and come close to understanding and realizing what that person is about. I think that’s the reality of films. A drama comes about in the process of observing and questioning, not by deliberately showing a character’s situation. Not one individual lives his life for show. And I think scenes which force one to be moved, would seem fake, at least for this movie. Of course there are certain genres that need such elements. But this is what “The Journals of Musan” is about, a collage of somebody’s life.
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Senior Reporter : Beck Una one@
Editor : Jessica Kim jesskim@, Lee Ji-Hye seven@, Jang Kyung-Jin three@