Namkoong Sun, director of Netflix’s Korean romance “Love Untangled,” said her first commercial feature felt little different from her independent films once cameras rolled, apart from the scale. The freedom, she added, came with weight. Namkoong was speaking at “New Voices in Film,” an industry panel staged by the Busan International Film Festival and Netflix as part of Creative Asia, alongside Ryu Eun-jung and Song Kwang-min, the married co-directors of the short “My Aunt.” Namkoong’s first two features, “Ten Months” and “Time to Be Strong,” were independent titles released in theaters.
She joined “Love Untangled” when the project and screenplay were already in place, coming on at the adaptation stage, and said the offer landed just as she wanted to find joy again after two films about thorny social problems. A little over a year passed between opening the production office and release. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if I failed to take responsibility within that freedom.
But because that freedom was there, there were definitely things I was able to bring to it.” Netflix staff sat in on meetings and worked inside the team throughout, she said, and the changes to the script were her own, made in service of what she saw as the film’s theme of happiness. The story is set in 1990s Busan, and with a modest budget for a period piece, the production recreated the Gwangan Bridge under construction to give the film a sense of place. Her message to younger directors was that a director always carries responsibility for the story, “but within a space where creative freedom is guaranteed, I think you have to take that responsibility really seriously.” Namkoong said she missed crying and laughing with audiences and cast in theaters, a ritual a streaming release doesn’t allow.
On Twitter, Instagram, all kinds of social media, everyone flocked in and enjoyed it together, me included,” she said. But I was getting messages from people in Brazil and friends in Poland and Colombia saying the film was popular there.” The film reached No. 1 in many countries and stayed in the global top 10 for more than six weeks, she said, even though it was made in Korean and is “really just a Busan story, a very local story.” Her earlier releases had harder luck with timing. The press screening for “Time to Be Strong” took place on the day martial law was declared in Korea.
It follows a dog groomer looking after an abandoned dog over the course of one day, when the niece she raised 10 years earlier turns up at her door. It won three prizes at this year’s Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, where Namkoong served on the jury. It is streaming on Netflix in Korea until December as part of the platform’s showcase of the festival’s prizewinners.
Ryu, who also plays the lead, drew on her own childhood, when she was raised by her fifth aunt, who later took in an abandoned dog. She had no plans to act in it but, having worked as an actor before, took the role herself and asked Song, her husband, to co-direct. Song handled directing on set, the pair shared storyboarding in pre-production, and Ryu led post-production.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
