'Director a job fighting perennial loneliness'

Director Min Kyu-dong speaks during the Creator Runway talk show, organized by the Korea Creative Centent Agency, at Blue Square Samsung Card Hall in Seoul, on May 31. / Korea Times photo by Park Jin-hai

By Park Jin-hai

Korean film director and screenwriter Min Kyu-dong, who recently penned and directed “Horror Stories 3,” said movies resemble life.

“Life is a shuttle bus that goes between being alone and being together. In that context, making a movie shares a lot with life,” said Min during a recent talk show hosted by the Korea Creative Content Agency organized to give advice to young would-be-creators.

Quoting the famous line of Morpheus in the movie Matrix, “there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path,” Min said the life of movie director is a long fight against the loneliness.

“Making a movie is one of the least economical activities. We spend 2,000 hours and sometimes 20,000 hours for a two-hour-long movie. When the camera is rolling, I’m working with 100 staffers. But, when the shooting is finished, everyone goes to their separate lives and it is only me left again,” he said. “We the directors say that the one who can stand the loneliness longer will be the winner.”

The Seoul National University graduate started studying the basics of movie making in 1995 and debuted with “Memento Mori” (1999), the second installment in the famous Whispering Corridors series.

Regarding his low-budget debut movie, he said he initially declined to do the horror sequel and that he had to struggle to make it without anyone’s help. “As a novice, I had no one around to advise me. When the director’s headphone was broken, no one told me that any other headphone can do the same job until the film was finished. So I had to alter using one headphone left with the co-director scene by scene.”

Following “Memento Mori,” he wrote and directed the successive “Horror Stories” series. As for the reason he keeps on doing the low-budget and stock horror series, Min said that this was because he knows the effect a movie can have on a person’s life.

He said that he received a thank you letter from two fans, who said they married after watching and chatting about his debut horror movie, adding, “Although a movie is one of many media outlets today, I realized that for a certain person it can change his or her life 0.0002 degree and when the function of time is added into the person’s life equation, it can make a huge difference in the end.”

“I am not just writing scripts but trying to write really good ones. Because, a movie has that much meaning in life,” he said.

Min has also made romantic comedies and period dramas including “All About My Wife” (2012) and “The Treacherous” (2015), respectively.

Min said the recent horror story is his seventh script that has made into movie, but eight other completed scripts were not. This repeated failure made him suffer from panic disorder.

He says, however, the most dreadful moment for directors is when they have no more stories to tell. “The most challenging moment doesn’t come because of technology. It is rather when they have no more stories inside them to tell. At that point, whatever outside help comes, directors can’t do anything.”