Lee Chang-dong on Possible Love, Power Dynamics, and State Violence

And thank you, Haley Jung, for doing our interpretation for us.

Thank you so much.

Director, thank you for being here.

It's so wonderful to have you back in New York at the New York Film Festival.

And I do want to start with Possible Love and spend some time with the film, especially since almost everyone here has gotten to see it.

It's funny, the film strikes me as a sort of a reunion of sorts, because it reunites you with two lead actors who have given some of their greatest performances in your films.

Seoul Kyung-goo from Peppermint Candy, Oasis as well, and John Do-yeon for Secret Sunshine.

It's no surprise they give such remarkable performances here.

I'm just curious, how did that reunion with these two actors come about?

사실 이 가능한 사랑의 원래 이야기는 십여 년 전에

I had originally wanted to tell or make into a film the story for Possible Love about more than 10 years ago.

And at that time, when back then the story was only about the two characters, Hoseok and Mi-ok, it was already decided and agreed upon between all of us that it would be played by Jeon Do-yeon and Seol Kyung-gu.

And the actors were aware of that as well.

However, due to different reasons, we had to shelf the project for a while.

And after that, I tried to get the story made in different versions and had made different attempts.

But again, it just didn't work out at the time.

And these two actors, they were very patient with me.

They waited all along.

And so when early last year I had reached out to them, shared with them that we were going to finally get the story told, they were so extremely happy.

I remember Doyeon almost teared up because that's just how much she wanted for us to reunite to tell the story.

You know, for both of them, when we worked on our previous films together, I was a younger filmmaker myself.

I was very bent on being thorough and not losing sight of anything on set.

And those two as well, being very young actors then, I think they were also very bent on doing their very best job.

So there was a high level of tension between all of us to a point where I think some might have felt that the overall working process at the time was quite painful.

But this time when we reunited, I don't know, maybe it's because I've gotten so much older.