Filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho is understood for guiding a few of South Korea’s greatest industrial hits of screens giant and small, such because the zombie blockbuster Practice to Busan (a $140 million box-office smash), or breakthrough Netflix sequence like Hellbound and Parasyte: The Gray. However the director’s most up-to-date function, The Ugly, was made for a mere $160,000.
A miraculous feat of unbiased filmmaking amid Korea’s more and more hyper-commercialized leisure sector, the interval thriller nonetheless has all the gloss and manufacturing prowess of a midbudget studio function. Yeon absolutely self-financed the movie, which he additionally wrote, by way of his manufacturing outfit Wow Level, making certain whole artistic management. He paid his small however distinguished forged — together with stars and trade veterans Park Jeong-min (Rebellion), Kwon Hae-hyo (Peninsula) and Shin Hyun-been (Revelations) — a modest day fee, whereas promising them a share of backend earnings. Related preparations had been made with the skeleton crew and award-winning division heads. Main native studio Plus M Leisure later boarded as distributor and worldwide gross sales agent. Monetary particulars stay undisclosed, however worldwide presales moved briskly at movie markets over the previous yr, suggesting Yeon and his collaborators have probably already made a tidy return.
The Ugly may have its world premiere on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition on Sept. 9, adopted by industrial releases in South Korea on Sept. 11 and the U.S. on Sept. 26.
Korean media shops have hailed The Ugly’s manufacturing method as a possible artistic resolution to the skyrocketing actor charges and manufacturing prices which have plagued the native movie trade in recent times, as swelling Okay-content slates at Netflix and Disney+ proceed to drive up the price of expertise. Yeon has equally urged fellow Korean creatives to experiment with financing and manufacturing constructions.
A haunting thriller that weaves thriller with social critique, The Ugly follows Im Dong-hwan, a person who learns that the stays of his mom, Jung Younger-hee — who vanished 40 years earlier — have been unearthed in a forest. Teaming with a TV journalist, he investigates her previous as a garment manufacturing unit employee in Seventies Seoul, solely to seek out that her former colleagues recall her merely as an particularly “ugly” lady they’d quite overlook. Dong-hwan additionally begins to suspect that his father, Yeong-gyu — a blind man who overcame his incapacity to boost him and turn into a grasp artisan — could also be guarding secrets and techniques of his personal. What begins as a household thriller steadily opens onto broader questions of social resentment, morality and the enduring trauma of historical past.
Forward of this yr’s Busan Worldwide Movie Competition — the place Plus M will likely be promoting The Ugly on the Asian Contents & Movie Market, and Showbox will likely be promoting Yeon’s upcoming zombie thriller Colony — The Hollywood Reporter linked with Yeon through Zoom in Seoul to debate the layered meanings of The Ugly and the daring microbudget experiment that introduced it to life.
(Warning: Spoilers for The Ugly comply with.)
I perceive The Ugly is a venture you’ve been engaged on and eager about for a really very long time. How did it start?
I wrote the script across the time once I did The Pretend (2013). I needed to inform a narrative about generational variations. My father’s technology in Korea was centered so closely on achievement and financial improvement. My technology got here after that and every little thing was modified for us. The principle character [in The Ugly], Im Yeong-gyoo, overcomes obstacles in a really dramatic method, and he’s virtually a logo for Korea’s fashionable improvement. As a counterpoint, I created the character Jung Younger-hee to discover who and what was erased throughout this era of miraculous development.
The digital camera avoids displaying Younger-hee’s face all through the complete movie till the final shot, the place you reveal a photograph of her. However the face we see isn’t the actress TKTK who performs her. How did you provide you with that picture you utilize to symbolize her? I discovered it virtually heartbreaking in its frank ordinariness.
I needed a face that might be anyone’s but in addition no one’s, representing that complete technology of Korean society. The ultimate reveal is nearly documentary-like, and I needed it to increase the movie’s world into our actuality. Everybody will likely be naturally interested by simply how “ugly” she is, however the expertise of ugliness is a really subjective factor. Most significantly, she is a deeply simply character, and her relentless sense of justice makes these round her very uncomfortable. I needed to pose the query: Is it actually her face that’s ugly, or the corruption of those that scorn her? To me, she symbolizes a form of “discomforting justice.”
Shin Hyun-been as Jung Younger-hee, the murdered and mistreated ethical middle of ‘The Ugly.’
Ethical complexity is a trademark of your work. How do you method shaping the viewers’s sympathies to create this multilayered facet?
After I begin imagining the world of a movie, I method it in a Socratic method, the place I search for two opposing egos that may conflict and query each other in an limitless loop with no decisive reply. Discovering themes the place characters can constantly interact and undermine each other on this method, as a form of contrasting perfect, is essentially the most gratifying factor to me as a creator. My standards for an amazing movie is one which begins as quickly because it finishes, as a result of it begins a line of questioning within the viewers’s thoughts that may’t be simply resolved.
Okay, right here’s an overlong studying of the story’s allegory: The blind stamp carver, Im Yeong-gyoo, represents Korea in its fast improvement period, as you mentioned, after the nation has suffered historic hardships and humiliations on the world stage. Just like the blind father, the nation is desperately attempting to beat its previous and drawbacks, in pursuit of a extra lovely future — however that pursuit virtually essentially entails a brittle type of satisfaction, which ends up in varied injustices alongside the best way. Younger-hee, in the meantime, represents pure ethical conscience, which is unwelcome in the course of the depth of this aggressive, fast-developing period. She stands for the weak who’re forged apart, erased from the narrative of the nation’s self-overcoming. However the scars from that period are nonetheless very a lot current in society, and the son, Im Dong-hwan, represents the youth of in the present day who’re attempting to come back to phrases with that generational complexity and its legacy. His father has largely been a very good dad and he’s happy with him, however he’s additionally coming to phrases with the actually horrible acts that had been entailed in his father’s overcoming. Am I heading in the right direction?
On the entire, that’s very near my intention. I’ll level out a few different particulars which can be essential to greedy the code that’s embedded within the movie. One is the character of the manufacturing unit proprietor, Baek Ju-sang, who has a really darkish, hidden facet to him, however who can also be thought-about a very good boss and first rate particular person by the folks round him. In that point of unbelievable financial hardship, he was one of many uncommon few who by no means skipped paying his staff and stored the manufacturing unit buzzing for everybody’s achieve. The second element is the minimize that Younger-hee leaves on her husband’s hand within the second that he kills her. At first of the movie, Yeong-gyoo explains it away as an harm he received whereas perfecting his stamp carving artistry. The way in which he twists the story of this scar — which can’t be erased — is vital to what I needed to precise.
You talked about the venture started with eager about your father’s technology. Have you ever proven the movie to your mother and father?
Not but. My father isn’t effectively sufficient to observe my movies, sadly, however I believe my mom, who’s from that very same technology, will see it. I’m actually curious to see what she’ll suppose.
Because the movie is an allegory about South Korea, did it shift your ideas about your nation in any significant method?
Probably not. I tweaked and smoothed a number of issues to make for a greater movie, however my core view and the central theme had been all there within the authentic script. One thing that did change was my view of the Korean movie trade. Because of unbelievable works like Parasite and Squid Sport, Korean content material has made enormous achievements on the world stage. However on the similar time, I’ve begun to really feel that the creative high quality and worth of our movies has began to be outlined by their rating on streaming platforms. It’s turn into all about quantitative attraction for world audiences. Satirically, this unstated trade environment displays the identical determined growth-oriented period that The Ugly is all about. So I believed deeply about how I may evade that logic as I put The Ugly collectively. This was an unbelievable motivation for me with this film.
Yeon Sang-ho on the set of ‘Peninsula,’ his big-budget sequel to ‘Practice to Busan’
Courtesy of Contents Panda
I’ve learn concerning the movie’s very low funds, small artistic group and the tight taking pictures schedule. You additionally had been capable of recruit high-profile actors who had been keen to forgo up-front cost for potential backend. Why did you set the movie up this manner?
Two causes. First, my daughter, like many younger folks, watches a number of YouTube — it’s virtually the one factor she watches. So I find yourself watching a number of YouTube content material along with her, and this made me begin to query the best way I make movies. As a result of when you concentrate on it, the net content material that’s actually competing with movie for consideration is commonly extremely compelling and entertaining in its personal proper, and it requires little or no up-front funds to create. As a movie buff, I additionally realized that a number of the movies I most love — by legendary Asian masters like Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others — had been made for little or no cash. So, these two elements together received me pondering that I ought to attempt doing one thing on a a lot smaller funds.
Do you’re feeling the experiment was profitable for you — each artistically and as a enterprise mannequin?
The forged and crew had been all folks I’ve been working with for a really very long time. There was no exterior funding, so the creation of this movie was basically a gaggle of pals clustered across the script, having intense creative conversations, and nothing else existed exterior that circle. So I simply hope the top end result — each commercially and creatively — is as satisfying for everybody as the method of constructing it.
Would you’re employed this manner once more?
Completely. Most of my work will nonetheless be throughout the bigger Korean system, however I positively wish to proceed making smaller movies like this. I hope traders and distributors turn into extra open to supporting such initiatives, and I urge different artists discover new approaches, too. Completely different mediums — digital versus theatrical — have totally different speeds of delivering story and data. YouTube and streaming have to be quick and immediately stimulating, whereas movie is slower and extra immersive. The Ugly, for instance, is a drama thriller that’s probably not about discovering the wrongdoer behind the homicide — it’s fairly apparent from the beginning. It’s about slowly exploring the twisted internal lives of those characters and what they symbolize — and that requires a theatrical expertise. I don’t suppose cinema is dying — however we have to be open to transformation. I look ahead to seeing what emerges.