It should be a fresh beginning for Soo-Jin (Jung Yu-Mi) and her husband Hyun-Su (Lee Sun-Kyung, the “Parasite” star in one of his final roles) at the opening of “Sleep,” having a baby on the way and suddenly rid of their cantankerous neighbor at their modest flat in Seoul, yet Hyun-Su cannot get a good night’s rest. Anxieties about becoming a new father and a flagging acting career could be responsible, but that still wouldn’t explain the deep scratches he inflicts on himself in a somnambulant state, worrying Soo-Jin to no end and whereas it used to be the two of them that would complain about the crank downstairs, their new neighbor wonders what’s going on with them when she can hear screaming at night. Soo-Jin and Hyun-Su may not feel as if they can put their best foot forward, but it is the start of one of the great directorial debuts of recent memory when writer/director Jason Yu crafts a devious and darkly funny horror film that is one to keep your eyes peeled for.
The couple’s puffy white Pomeranian Pepper hints at the kind of mischief Yu is up to in “Sleep” where the playful banter between Soo-Jin and Hyun-Su that was once an endearing quality of their marriage suddenly looks like a liability when they don’t know how seriously to take each other when Hyun-Su can’t get a proper diagnosis and while he’s completely unconscious of what he’s capable of in the middle of the night, Soo-Jin can’t think of anything else. Their apartment where a sign insisting that “Together We Can Overcome Anything” sits adjacent to the front door grows progressively darker as they start to drift apart and despite Soo-Jin bringing a shaman in to cleanse it, the seeds of doubt that have contaminated the place would seem to be impossible to remove, even with scrubbing for the supernatural. All the couple’s extraordinary efforts to save the marriage and their sanity, however, are rooted in something very real as Yu taps into fears of adversity that could reveal a lifelong partner to be something other than the person they thought they were wedding.
As sharp and witty as “Sleep” is, particularly with Jung and Lee building off the chemistry they cultivated over the course of their previous collaborations with Hong Sang-Soo, it is even more incisive as a look inside a marriage, with the increasingly extreme measures to resolve the situation becoming a most unusual and touching expression of love. Yu also puts a great deal of care into every frame, reminiscent of his mentor Bong Joon Ho, for whom he served as an assistant director, and now that the film is arriving in U.S. theaters after its premiere last year at Cannes and a celebrated festival run, he spoke of all the fun details he was able to pack into his first feature, the inspiration behind making it and how Bong pushed him towards taking a chance on himself.
Is it true this all may have started with you ruining your own wife’s sleep?
There is truth to it. Not to the extent that these characters go through, but I do have a bad case of sleep apnea. I basically snore a lot, which torments my wife. Butthe bigger thing is that I sometimes forget to breathe while sleeping, which is funny because not breathing is not audible. But it’s not really the snoring that bothers my wife’s sleep. It’s when I stop snoring and stop breathing when she wakes up and she’s frightened and she has to keep awake and wait till I do [take a breath]. Even if I do return to normal breathing, she’s unable to sleep afterwards just because of how terrified she was that I wasn’t sleeping and I would only find out when I wake up in the morning and she’d tell me that she hadn’t slept since.
Although I felt immensely guilty about it, I was also fascinated by that situation because I thought there was a horror to it. It’s such a small thing and it’s not even very harmful to her or to others, but the fact that it terrified her was interesting, so the next gradual step was me imagining what would happen if my sleeping habit was [actually] harmful or threatening to my wife, what would happen then? Imagining those scenarios led me to create a horror film about sleepwalking and sleeping habits, so that was just one small nugget of inspiration. Another one would be just the sheer horror and shock I felt reading up on these stories about sleepwalking patients, whether they jump off a balcony or drive while sleeping, literally harming people by their bedside. I remember feeling shocked and wondering what the lives of these people must look like, but more importantly, the everyday lives of the people who have to live around them because I couldn’t really imagine.
You’ve said actually thinking about the wife’s point of view – and not yours in real life, but the one in the film – cracked this open narratively. How did that become a turning point?
It’s interesting because when I first approached the horror film about sleepwalking, I think I focused too much on what the sleepwalking symptoms might be and how to make that as terrifying as possible, which I felt was a bit too gimmicky. It lacked substance. So I didn’t really do anything with that. But when I was fiddling with the story, a lot of personal aspects seeped into it unbeknownst to me. At that time, I was at the cusp of marrying my longtime girlfriend, now wife and because of that, the theme of marriage was strong in my mind, so I think that’s why I made the protagonists a married couple and and and had the story revolve heavily around their relationship. That’s when I realized it’s less about the sleepwalking symptoms itself, but the reaction of of of the wife character. I was imagining how my wife would have reacted if I did this and that really got the story rolling and and made me passionate about it.
Your two lead actors had such a long history together and I understand they didn’t necessarily rehearse, but when you saw their dynamic, did it change your ideas about these characters?
Yes, absolutely. It’s not that they didn’t want to do rehearsals, and I’m not sure this applies to Hollywood film sets, but in Korea as an [assistant director], we have this rule of thumb while scheduling — we usually place the conflicts in the beginning. It’s quite counterintuitive, but the big arguments, we place them first and [then] the scenes where the characters are loving and we have to really see their chemistry at the end because the conflicts and fights, all they have to do is just act what’s on the page, not to belittle [those scenes]. But the chemistry and the love, that has to come naturally. You really have to know each other and bond [for those scenes to work]. And I was aware of this, so what I really wanted the two actors to do was to spend some time with each other — not necessarily rehearse, but maybe we could go out and eat and do all these things to bond as a married couple. And they they said no to that idea immediately. [laughs]
They already had had four films under their belt together, so they told me not to worry about this sort of chemistry and they were right because we didn’t have the luxury of scheduling it in a way [where] we could do the conflict stuff first. We had to do those bonding scenes first because of the budget and because of the the history and the strong friendship that they already had working on these projects together, they were able to play a married couple really well without having to go through that bonding process.
The work you did on this set also seems to set the tone for the relationship throughout. Were there ways to facilitate the performances?
I think the the set itself played a great part in them getting into the role that they were playing because that’s what they explicitly said. And there were some moments where we were compelled to make the set even larger and give it more more cinematic depth, meaning we had to deviate from the realism of what a real Korean house might look like, but in the end, we decided it has to look like a realistic house. The size and scale has to match those small square box-like houses that are not cinematic at all and can be terribly bland, but doing that really enhanced the realism of the setting and it helped the the the two leads get into character because they felt that they were actually performing in a real newlywed house.
Was there a prop you were particularly delighted to be handed by the production design department?
Every prop was very fun for us because because those are the only things that we could work with. We only had one location, so whatever prop we did bring was out of deliberate intention. What I really loved was the bells of the shaman, which isn’t a set prop, but more of a character prop. That took immense time trying to find, but I really love the how this ancient-looking bell came out of this high-end handbag, and a problem we had with this bell is that it was immensely loud. We thought we might go deaf if we heard more than five seconds of it ringing, especially in that small house and there was a baby on the set as well, so just to protect the eardrums of everyone, the cast and crew, we had to create another plastic replica of it just for the shaman to shake it. Those guys also did a great job in making a replica and I don’t think anybody really noticed how we switched from the real one and the plastic one.
I also love the wooden sign that says, “Together we can overcome anything.” It’s very outdated and not really something that their generation would place so confidently in their house because it ruins the aesthetic. But it just I think it shows how much the wife believes in that saying and how she almost personifies it. It’s almost like a mantra to her, so I really like that prop as well.
I was going to ask about the bell because it was incorporated into the score – was that something you knew before filming?
That was the idea of our wonderful composers Chang Yong-jin and Chang Hyuk-jin, who are very famous composers of the original K-boy band and brothers, actually. They moved to film scoring and they’re excellent at that too. As a debuting director, I never really had a clear understanding of what work is cut out for the sound department and what work is cut out for the score department, so I kept asking composers to put in sound effects in the score and they were confused about me doing that. But in the end, they realized my intention, which is, like you said, incorporating sounds into the score, and especially with the bell sounds, I think incorporating that into the score really heightened what Soo-jin, the wife, must have been feeling at that time.
You’ve been quite humble in other interviews about how you considered yourself a novice on set and didn’t go to film school, but clearly you’re quite good at this. Was there a moment where it clicked for you that filmmaking was where you belonged?
To this day, I don’t think it’s something I’m really good at. Thank you so much for saying so. That being said, I don’t think confidence is a trait that I have, but I realize that I at least have to feign confidence to the cast and crew because you are the captain of the ship in some sense. Even veteran actors like Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi are relying on the director, whether he or she is a debuting director or not, to lead the ship.
But I do remember this special moment. Before directing “Sleep,” I was an assistant director for various Korean films, and one of them was “Okja” by director Bong Joon-ho. Usually what assistant directors do in Korea, unlike the United States where it’s a lifelong profession, is that it’s a temporary profession for aspiring directors who learn the craft and between projects, they write their screenplays in the hopes that they get made. Then once you complete your screenplay, the first person you show it to is your mentor, the director you AD’ed for. And in my case, that was director Bong Joon-ho.
So I remember being in between jobs, and being unemployed and begging director Bong to let me be an assistant director for his next project and we scheduled like a coffee meeting. And while we had this coffee meeting, while I had him there, I gave him my screenplay [for “Sleep”] for him to give me notes on. And after reading it, he said, “Jason, I think you should forget about my next project. You should direct this because this is a great story that you’ve written and you’d be really great at that.” That’s when this pipe dream of becoming a director [seemed] actually within arm’s reach and although I was an AD and an aspiring director, it never really felt tangible. It was just something in the far future that might happen and might not. But when he said that, I realized this is a very realistic thing that I can do. He really gave me that courage and confidence for me to really pursue directing this project, which was a very memorable moment for me.
“Sleep” opens on September 27th in limited release including New York at the IFC Center and the Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan and in Los Angeles at the Alamo Drafthouse DTLA. You can find your local theater here and it will also be available on digital and VOD.