Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong makes intimately scaled dramas that are rich in detail, populated by ordinary people living in everyday worlds. But despite the seeming mundanity, his characters find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that push their limits and their communities to emotional breaking points. 

In Burning, a young man (Yoo Ah-in) becomes convinced that his romantic rival (Steven Yeun) is a murderer. In Poetry, a grandmother (Yoon Jeong-hee) struggles both with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and the aftermath of a horrible crime committed by her grandson (Lee Da-wit). In Oasis, a formerly incarcerated man with a mental disability (Sol Kyung-gu) and a woman with cerebral palsy (Moon So-ri) begin a relationship that transcends the disturbing way that they met. All of them suffer, and all of them are changed. 

These traumatic fissures in otherwise placid surfaces lend a unique tone to Lee’s work, underscoring his engrossing character studies with an unsettling tension. This combination of elements wouldn’t work in less skilled hands, but Lee’s approach clicks with Letterboxd , as evidenced by his filmography’s stellar 4.0 average rating. “I will always be in awe at how Lee Chang-dong can infuse his quiet and seemingly simple aesthetic with such weighty devastation,” shares Cinemateq in their four-and-a-half-star review of Poetry.

Before making the transition to filmmaking, Lee began his career as a novelist and playwright, two disciplines that influenced his movies in different ways. From the theater, he gained a rapport with actors; from literature, an ability to fully immerse the viewer in a character’s perspective. In 1993, he began working with Park Kwang-su, a key figure in the Korean New Wave who became his mentor. Lee served as a co-screenwriter and assistant director on Park’s To the Starry Island—a film whose moral and structural complexity foreshadows that of Lee’s own work as a director. 

NYC’s Metrograph theater is currently in the midst of a Lee Chang-dong retrospective, fueled by Film Movement’s new 4K restorations of Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Poetry and Oasis. Along with Burning and Secret Sunshine, the series spotlights Lee’s six feature films, plus A Brand New Life and A Girl at My Door, both of which he produced and the former he also co-wrote. To celebrate the occasion, we spoke with Lee over email about thinking from a cinematic perspective, exploiting genre conventions and exploring the intricate contradictions of humanity. 

Where do you start when developing a film? Do you start with building a character, creating a narrative, or thinking up a specific image?
It depends on the developmental stage of the film. For example, Peppermint Candy started with a simple desire to create a film about going back in time. Then the image of a man standing on the tracks in front of an oncoming train came to me, along with the final scene of the film. Burning is based on a novel, but I realized that I could make the film only after I thought of the final scene.

Your films always seem to have underlying tension, whether it be interpreted as sadness, trauma or violence. How do you explore the other aspects of a story while maintaining this kind of tension?
I believe that every scene of a film must maintain a tension in them, even if they do not have an explosive emotion or a burst of violence. Not knowing what is going to happen next is “cinematic”—just like our lives. I also do not enjoy creating a scene with an intent to serve a singular purpose, since our lives are not like that. Every single aspect of our lives is complex. Sadness, joy, optimism and pessimism, the light and the dark, all coexist in our everyday lives. 

Your films tend to be tragedies, but Green Fish and Burning have aspects of the gangster or thriller genre. What do you think is the relationship between your work and these genres?
Green Fish and Burning are both films that take the structure of a genre film, while trying to break its clichés. The audience often believes that real-life problems are artificially set within the virtual world of film, thinking that [these problems are] one of the elements that conform to the formula of a genre film. Thus, they are consumed as entertainment within the genre, rather than being seriously reflected upon. 

Capitalism works in a way that you must criticize (or pretend to criticize) capitalism within your film while making it commercially successful [at the same time]. If you truly wish to criticize capitalism as a commercial filmmaker who uses a lot of capital to create your films, you must learn to exploit or defy the conventions of a mainstream movie. Burning was a film that started with the intent to defy those genre conventions, and the stereotypes of the audience. 

What do you think extreme stress or trauma reveals about human nature?
Everyone unexpectedly encounters pain and suffers from hopelessness. That is life. The bigger the desire, the bigger the pain. The problem is how you cope with them. Through the struggle, humans find the purpose of life and find salvation. Protagonists in tragedies are those types of people. I tried to capture the human struggle for meaning through my films.