The scene they were shooting depicts the early days of the strike: Ho-seok, Mi-ok, and Cheol walk through the front gate of the plant, toward the encampment, looking nervous but optimistic. They have rolling suitcases, backpacks, and a big blanket in a plastic zip case. “Cut,” Lee said through a walkie-talkie. “When they’re passing by those two men”—worker extras—“the men should bow to Ho-seok, but not too deeply.” Ho-seok enjoyed a level of familial seniority; he refers to his younger co-workers as dongsaeng, younger brother.
For the next scene, Kim switched from a big, shoulder-mounted camera to an iPhone. He held it horizontally, panning the busy tableau of the main tent—a folksy sing-along, banner-painting, cute kids. The idea was to mimic what an SP worker might have shot with his own smartphone. Lee ran the actors through multiple takes, but still felt dissatisfied. He walked over to Kim, who’s best known for his work with the director Park Chan-wook and on the hit Netflix series “Squid Game,” a gory satire of economic survival. (In the first season, we learn that the protagonist had also been laid off from, and traumatized by, a fictionalized version of SsangYong Motor.) “Something more like this,” Lee said, miming a frame with his hands. Kim smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Sure, give it a try. Lee took the iPhone and shot the scene himself.
Lee employs a fiercely vérité style: endogenous light and sound, lived-in muss. He tries to get his actors not to act, and uses nonactors, sometimes pulled from his crew, whenever he can. “I don’t find it meaningful to rehearse in an office,” he told me. “The actors have to be on set.” Only there can tingly frictions and glints of revelation emerge. Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of “Anora,” called Lee a master of “unsafe cinema.” Lee loves, and is often compared to, John Cassavetes and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Lee Isaac Chung, the director of “Minari” and “Twisters,” told me, “He’s one of those filmmakers who’s a genre unto himself.”
Lee was born in 1954, the fifth of six children, to an educated but impoverished family in the city of Daegu. The Korean War had ended the year before, and Daegu soon became a base of support for the pro-U.S. military government. Lee’s father, a leftist, opposed the new regime and isolated himself, refusing to take part in what he saw as a “vulgar capitalist society.” Lee describes a similar personage in one of his stories as a “failure in life,” and a suspicion of ideology pervades his work; he bristled when I asked if he, too,thought of himself as a leftist.
It was Lee’s mother who supported the family, by sewing traditional hanbok. “I remember having less and less money, and moving to smaller and smaller places,” Lee told me. One of his two older sisters, who has cerebral palsy, suffered a fresh round of taunts in each new neighborhood. So did Lee, who got into frequent fights. At one point, the entire family lived in a single room in the back of a relative’s house. Lee returned a few years ago, for a French documentary, and discovered that the room was now a bathroom. “I couldn’t believe all those bodies had fit into that space,” he said.
During elementary school, Lee showed no interest in studying. A cousin made him a deal. “He told me, ‘If you do your homework, I’ll bring you a book,’ ” Lee recalled. The books were Western classics abridged for kids: Jules Verne’s “Two Years’ Vacation”; “The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexandre Dumas. “That was, for me, a crucial moment,” Lee said. He immersed himself in adventure tales and started to write his own, mimicking their style. He also found himself on the set of a film. The director Kim Soo-yong, who made some of the best Korean features of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, shot one of his not-so-good movies, a melodrama titled “Sorrow Even Up in Heaven,” at Lee’s school, and cast Lee as an extra. He gets caught in a rainstorm with the main character, a destitute fourth grader.
