France’s Isabelle Huppert, one of the leading actors of her age, has crafted a unique relationship with Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo.
Hong’s “A Traveler’s Needs,” which premieres this week in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, is the third time that Huppert has starred in one of his unique pieces of minimalist cinema. She says she hopes the partnership can go much further.
Huppert plays a footloose and intense French woman at large in Korea and vaguely making ends meet as an untrained language tutor with eccentric methods. Her private lessons and drinking sessions merge into each other and quickly resemble Hong’s typically introspective chit-chats between intimate strangers. While most conversations are cordial, Huppert’s character’s encounter with the mother of one of her adult clients is more strained.
“Everything in my relationship with Hong Sang-soo has been by chance. That’s only one of the things that has been so wonderful about it,” Huppert says.
They first met in a Paris art gallery Huppert where was attending a show with French filmmaker Claire Denis. Later they met again in Seoul, around an exhibition of photographs in which Huppert was the model.
“The next day, Hong told me that he was preparing a film but that he had no idea what it was about, only that he had chosen the place. I liked that idea of developing one’s imagination from a place. He asked me if I wanted to be in it, and I said ‘Yeah.’” Shortly after, they began shooting 2012’s “In Another Country” in a seaside town in Korea, on the basis of a couple of pages of background notes.
The 2017 film “Claire’s Camera” came from an unstructured, but not entirely chance, meeting in Cannes. “We ended up doing this film in Cannes, during the festival, just a few streets away. The film, of course, was about something else, but the festival was included in background,” Huppert says.
“This one, ‘A Traveler’s Needs’ came from a retrospective of Hong’s films in Paris. We met. He said we should do another film together, and within two or three months we were filming. I knew nothing about it, just that it would shoot in Seoul itself, which excited me very much. And I can only hope that it goes on like this forever,” Huppert says.
“Hong is a wonderful filmmaker. It is interesting to me how he is now working with fewer and fewer people. When we did ‘In Another Country’ there was a bunch of people around the camera. Now he does almost everything, including the lights.”
While dialogue-heavy — “A Traveler’s Needs” is predominantly in English, with some Korean and a smattering of French — many of Hong’s films appear improvised, hesitant at times and naturalistic. But, according to Huppert, that disguises Hong’s craft.
“I become involved every morning when he gives out the lines, which are very much written. It is very, very difficult because I have so many lines to learn in such a small amount of time. But that is another thing that I like about his filmmaking. It is the least-improvised approach you could imagine. It is all written. It is very precise. On ‘In Another Country’ I got things the evening before, but this time, no. I believe he gets his inspiration during the night, she says.
“Another thing with Hong that is so extraordinary is the paradox of time. He shot this in 13 days. ‘In Another Country’ was nine days. ‘Claire’s Camera’ was six. You might think that such a short time leads to a sense of urgency. But it is quite the contrary. It is all scripted. All planned. Hong always takes his time to do many, many takes [until he gets what he intended],” she adds, noting, “He makes me reflect profoundly on the meaning of cinema. Hong’s methods make me remember how cinema can be so vast and also so small. He manages to preserve both the power and scale of cinema while working almost alone. It is fascinating.”
