Lee Chang-dong had a finished screenplay. He had gone through pre-production. Then the South Korean director walked away from the film that would become "Possible Love," because he couldn't answer two questions.
"What meaning does it have for me to tell this story in the form of a dramatic feature film?" Lee said through an interpreter at a global press conference for the Netflix drama. "And also, am I worthy of telling their story?"
The story was a real one. More than a decade ago, Lee said, a Korean conglomerate laid off workers en masse, the workers answered with an all-or-nothing strike, and authorities met the strike with a brutal crackdown. In the aftermath, more than 30 people, laid-off workers and their family members, died by suicide, he said.
"The closer I got to their actual lives and pains, I constantly asked myself these questions, and I just couldn't answer them with conviction," Lee said.
The breakthrough came years later from his co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, who suggested adding "the gaze of a documentary filmmaker." That reframed everything. "Not only was this going to be a story about the pain of others," Lee said, "but it could also be my story as a filmmaker."
The result is Lee's first feature in eight years, since 2018's "Burning." "Possible Love" follows Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), her laid-off husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and their young son, whose lives collide with those of documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). It competed at the Venice Film Festival, screened in Special Presentations at the Toronto International Film Festival and is South Korea's official submission for best international feature at the Academy Awards. It opened in select U.S. theaters Oct. 23 and began streaming on Netflix Nov. 6.
Read Cup of Soul's TIFF review of "Possible Love".
A chip bag out the window
The film opens with the family driving to a former co-worker's funeral, and Lee said he deliberately showed only one funeral. Showing the full scale of the tragedy, he said, would have made it impossible to tell the story at all.
What wounded the workers most, Lee said, wasn't only losing their jobs. They believed the Korean public was on their side and then watched it turn away. That set laid-off workers against those who kept their jobs, and eventually against one another.
Inside the car, the couple's son opens the window and lets an empty snack bag fly. Lee said he didn't want to pin a fixed meaning on it. The boy knows where his parents are going, Lee said, and the air in the car is too heavy, so he lets go of something he has been holding tight. Then the bag lands on the road and gets run over by passing cars, "much like how it would actually happen in our daily lives."
'The answer is already written in the screenplay'
Jeon, who won best actress at Cannes for Lee's "Secret Sunshine" (2007), said she agreed to the role before reading a page, simply because it was Lee's film. Once she did read it, the script "just lingered for such a long time."
Her preparation was almost radical in its simplicity. "The only thing I wanted to make sure I did in preparing for the role was that I knew my lines by heart," Jeon said. "Aside from that, I wanted to go in as a completely blank slate."
Sul, who starred in Lee's "Peppermint Candy" (1999) and "Oasis" (2002), called this his third film with the director and admitted he is "quite the worrier." Reading a Lee script, he said, feels like finishing "a wonderfully written piece of literature," and it left so much in his heart "I didn't know what to do with it."
He built Ho-seok from the outside in. Before the layoff, Ho-seok was the man who paid off his sister's debts, Sul said. After the layoff and the crackdown, the character carries wounds that are physical and mental, and his emotions silence him. "His language has changed to one that was non-verbal," Sul said, so he focused on movement, down to how Ho-seok uses his hands, showing a man who has lost his sense of security. Despair, sadness "and above all, anger" come out of his body, he said, at times violently.
Sul said none of that can be built alone. He leaned on Lee, on Jeon and on his scene partners. "I always think that the answer is already written in the screenplay," he said. "And so I always try to stay as loyal as possible to what Director Lee has written."
Asked about a quiet scene in which Mi-ok watches her child delight in a rainbow, Jeon drew the line between the character's past and present. As a girl, Mi-ok was stopped from chasing the rainbow, a moment when "she was denied her free will," Jeon said. As an adult, the rainbow reminds her of that girl, but "in that moment she uses her free will to find her own freedom."
Labor, capital and AI
Lee pushed back on reading the film simply as a class story. His real subject, he said, is labor and capital. He saw the strike as a turning point after which workers' rights would no longer be protected and the public would side with corporate productivity over people, a stronger tide of neoliberalism.
Then he brought it to the present. "With the arrival of AI, we are seeing more and more that the value of labor is on the verge of disappearing," Lee said. People once built their identities, and their relationships, on the work they did. "We now live in an era where with the loss of labor and jobs, we are almost on the verge of losing our sense of self as well." He said the film's nod to Steve Jobs stands in for that force: "the marriage of capital and big tech, and how that affects our lives."
Streaming vs. theaters
Asked how the global success of Korean film and television has changed the industry at home, Lee said streaming brought real energy, and real damage. Korean theaters were nearly shut down for about two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and that blow, combined with the rise of streaming, threw the industry out of balance.
Lee framed "Possible Love," a Netflix film that played theaters first, as a test case. It shows, he said, that streamers and cinemas don't have to play "a zero-sum game," and "there is a way for us to mutually benefit from another, and for us to co-exist."
What kind of love is possible
The title is the thesis. Lee said he wanted to ask what kind of love is possible between people, not only romantic love. That includes the uneasy love between the person holding the camera and the person in front of it. "When we hold up a camera and film someone or something, the person behind the camera has the power," he said.
His answer, in a divided and isolated era, was not a hedge. "Even at times when it doesn't feel like it will be possible," Lee said, "it is still, I think, only through love that we will be healed and reconnected to one another."
"Possible Love" is streaming on Netflix.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, in the U.S.
