With an absurdist and critical eye on Korean society, IM Sang-soo is no stranger to controversy - whether it’s dealing with risqué subjects as in A Good Lawyer’s Wife or political hot buttons as with The President’s Last Bang . Now he has taken on KIM Ki-young’s watershed classic The Housemaid (1960) and turned it into an idiosyncratic remake to premiere in the Cannes festival’s Competition.

 

KIM’s gritty, black-and-white original featured a genteel but struggling middle class family whose patriarch starts an affair with their housemaid. When she gets pregnant by him and is forced to have an abortion, she becomes unhinged and takes revenge on the family, wreaking havoc and terror. The Housemaid is often cited as representative of the postwar malaise Koreans felt at the time, with Confucian order falling apart and women gaining power in society. The film was re-mastered and screened in Cannes 2008 with the support of Martin Scorsese ’s World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive.

 

IM has created his own 21st century take on the story, with lavish production design and a plot twist that might dismay loyal fans of the original, but is nevertheless intriguing.

The film stars JEON Do-youn in the eponymous lead, returning to Cannes since 2007 when she won t he Best Actress Award for her performance in LEE Changdong’s Secret Sunshine . LEE Jung-jae, who starred in films such as the blockbuster Typhoon and the romantic Il Mare (later remade into the Hollywood film The Lakehouse ), plays the patriarch. Veteran actress YOUN Yuh-jung from A Good Lawyer’s Wife plays another housekeeper with SEO Woo from PARK Chan-ok’s recent drama Paju plays the betrayed wife.

 

The project was originally planned without me. It had a scriptwriter and director but it wasn’t really making progress. I was asked, and ended up participating in the middle of it. It was only as I started scriptwriting and shooting that I realized I had gotten myself into a project that was more important than I had thought. The reason for that is KIM Ki-young’s The Housemaid is a film that - transcending Korean cinema history - is extraordinary in world cinema history. And I was making a film based on that.

One might argue your film is so different from the original that it’s barely a remake.

If you think about it, Mr. KIM was much younger when he made his film than I am now. I think it might be interesting to compare the directors of these films that way. Also, materially, I had a lot more to work with than he had back then for the art direction and so on, although that’s not as important.

 

Most of all, his was a film from the 60s, with the background of the social and economic circumstances following the Korean War, when the middle class was just emerging. Young women and men came to Seoul from the countryside to work in factories, and back then, many middle class families had “shikmo” [a domestic woman helper who worked mostly in the kitchen]. I didn’t grow up in a rich family, but we also had a shikmo who had come to Seoul from the country. So the socio-economic context Mr. KIM was working with was very different from the socio-economic context of today.

 

Today - not just in Korea but globally, there are people who are much richer than the so-called middle-class, much richer than we could have imagined before. They drink wine worth tens of thousands of dollars in a single night, collect expensive pieces of art. In the meantime, we’ve also seen the emergence of neo-liberalism. Poor people get poorer and the bottom is falling out for the middle class so that a new impoverished class is forming. What I did was: I took the same events that happened in a household, and thought about how Koreans 50 years ago would react and how Koreans 50 years later would react. What has changed and what hasn’t?

 

It was immensely fascinating to contemplate the mentality of Koreans this way while working on this film. Now that it’s finished, I wonder if people viewing my film will take into consideration the question I’ve raised.

It’s more than just the socio-economic dynamics that are different in the remake.

That’s true. KIM Ki-young’s original is more a thriller than suspense. You know what HITCHCOCK said about suspense. If someone comes into a room where a bomb goes off, that’s a surprise. But if someone secretly sets up a bomb in a room the audience is watching, then people come in and play poker, and the audience is worrying about the poker players getting out before the bomb explodes – that’s suspense.

 

The two have sex without the wife knowing it. When the audience sees them all together, they are thinking of the betrayed wife, the man and the woman who have had sex, and then there’s someone who knows they have had sex that the man and the woman don’t know about. And then there’s the pregnancy that I thought only I knew about but then the others know about and so on. Viewers get involved in something that on surface isn’t a tremendous story, and creating that process is fascinating to me. I thought it would be interesting if I faithfully followed the giant, HITCHCOCK, in his thinking while making this film.

 

Tell us about the casting.

The most important role was the housemaid that JEON Do-youn played. I hadn’t worked with her before and wasn’t at all acquainted with her, but the [production] company wanted her for business reasons. We had a meal together before I started writing the script and I wrote it with her in mind. At first, she refused to take the part after reading the script. We had differences in interpreting it. Maybe she thought the film was too dark. But a few days later she reversed her decision.

 

LEE Jung-jae’s male lead wasn’t a very big one. We weren’t thinking of a star on his level for the part, but we met at a social occasion and he told me he had read the script and thought the character was interesting. He said he thought, ‘It’s a small part, but I want to try it because it’ s IM Sang-soo.’ YOUN Yuh-jung - well you know she was “a KIM Ki-young actress” when she was young. She starred in several of his films. To have her in the remake of one of his films 50 years later was, for me, fantastic casting.

 

What was it that happened with JEON Do-youn and what was it like once you started working together?

She said she watched A Good Lawyer’s Wife again and thought the kind of acting I asked of my actors was a bit different from the kind of acting she did. In my films, I give my actors a certain situation and ask them to be as natural and as dry as they can within that situation, not expressing too much.

 

JEON Do-youn, as I understood it, liked to have focus on the actor, that is, focus on the actor’s emotions so that they could give a passionate performance.

I thought she hit the nail on the head. I had been thinking the same thing and that it might be a problem when we started shooting. But she brought it up first and so I said, you do it your way and I’ll do it my way, and we’ll see what we get when we collide.

At first, she had a very hard time. She knew the character Eun-yi very well and had a lot of things she wanted to express, but I limited it and only let her do just what was needed and then cut out. But I explained to her that these things would accumulate. I asked her to trust and follow me a little bit more. We kept shooting, and she began to feel it, too, that these things would accumulate, one on top of the other within the film, and it became more efficient from then on.

 

To a lot of the film directors in the world, going to Cannes is not everything. It’s not important whether you screen your film in Cannes or not. To a director from faraway Asia, who shoots films like this, it’s probably more important.

 

What do you mean by “films like this”?

Films that have strong social, economic and political context, which are much less genre-driven, and have difficulty making a profit in their own domestic market. Generally speaking, that is.

 

I want to make a film that develops the male lead character from The Housemaid . In this film, you only see him inside the house, and don’t know what he does for a living. You see he is a very rich man who drinks expensive wine, collects art, and plays Beethoven before he leaves for work. He wants to be noble. But outside the house, he is involved with criminal elements and even murder. I would make this one in the Hitchcockian tradition as well.