An infamous film buff, the North Korean dictator wanted to improve his country’s cinema so badly that he kidnapped the talent himself. In 1978, Kim abducted South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-ok, and forced them to make movies for the Hermit Kingdom -- until the duo plotted their own daring escape. Shin and Choi’s stranger-than-fiction story is recounted in The Lovers and the Despot, a UK documentary by Ross Adam and Rob Cannan that was made with Choi’s participation and played in the Berlinale’s Panorama program after also playing Sundance. It was acquired by Magnolia Pictures, which plans a release later this year.
In Berlin, NFS chatted with Adam and Cannan about gaining trust as documentary filmmakers, language and culture barriers and why a director and a dictator are very similar roles.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity.]
NFS: I have my own connection to this story -- I wrote my college thesis on Shin Sang-ok.
Cannan: Oh, why don’t we just ask you questions? [laughs] We should have come across you while we were making the film.
NFS: It was a creative writing piece, actually. But I did a lot of research. So I’d like to know how you gathered your information and gravitated to this story yourselves.
Cannan: Well, I’d like to keep on asking you questions now. So, how did you come across this story?
NFS: I heard about it first in a film history class, really offhandedly. They said North Korea had kidnapped a South Korean director. So my professor said that and then moved on, but it really stuck with me.
Cannan: For us, what’s really intriguing is -- obviously it was reported a little bit in the West, particularly in the States when they escaped in the ’80s. And I think there was a Dateline piece. But then the story kind of disappeared. And why did such an amazing story get forgotten about? So, it’s intriguing how it’s ended up in a film history course. Who found that story? We can’t remember exactly when we read something about it somewhere. But we think it was probably an article.
Adam: It sounded kind of like a myth. Like, this director was kidnapped by this dictator? It sounded kind of bullshit to us when we heard it, honestly.
Cannan: And eventually we started discussing, "Oh, this is a real thing. There are actually more details to the story. Why don’t we contact Choi?"
NFS: She’d already been contacted by several others wanting to tell her story, right?
Cannan: Yeah. She should be doing this Q&A to answer some of your questions, actually. [laughs]
NFS: How were you able to gain Choi’s trust?
Cannan: Well I’d say, advice to any young filmmakers trying to make a documentary: Perseverance. Very often the first answer is no. And if you don’t want to take no for an answer, eventually, with all the time and patience and being as charming as possible and building trust, we were able to persuade her. She obviously wanted to know what our angle was, and she liked the fact that we were talking about the romance side to this story, as well. We weren’t just interested in the Kim Jong-il craziness.
Adam: And also, you should know your culture. So when we went out, we read our books on Korean culture, so we bought the right presents.
Cannan: We read that there’s a big present-giving culture in Korea if you’re invited. So eventually, after speaking with her assistant for a long time, they kept wanting us to send our pictures, details about ourselves, CDs and so on. And eventually they said, “OK, we’re inviting you over.” And if you’re invited, it’s customary to bring gifts and they have to be very nicely wrapped. So we researched what kind of gifts. We thought, well, Koreans like tea, but maybe they’ll like some English teas. So we took them teas and jams and things from London and we got them all professionally wrapped, looking beautiful.
Adam: They’re not bribes, but don’t be afraid of bribes, I would say, if you’re making a documentary. This is going to happen. [laughs]
NFS: Did you already have funding when you approached her?
Cannan: It’s very hard to get funding before the rights are secured. So if you have grants, you can persuade private investors or something to put money in first, but most official funders would say, “Hang on a minute, have you actually got the rights to tell the story?” That took a while.
Adam: I would say that’s the biggest thing, when there’s a financial commitment that you have to make yourselves. That was the biggest leap for us, just going blindly to Korea.
NFS: And several times, too.
Adam: Well, the first time we financed it ourselves. But after we came back with an agreement, we got a little funding from the BBC. Things kind of snowballed from there.
Cannan: Some places like the BBC will give a really small amount of development money, like a kind of, “Oh, go and see.” Not enough money to cover it, but go and see if you can shoot a little promo, cut a five-minute thing together, then show us what you got. And even that wasn’t enough time to get them to commit fully. But it meant we had something we could start showing to people to raise more money. In the end we had to raise private investments to buy the rights.
NFS: You had to buy rights for a documentary?
Adam: Life rights. Also we were paying for the archive she gave. So it was all the Shin films we could use after that, and the photos, and the tape recordings. There was no way we were going to make a film without all that.
Cannan: It was a package deal. You can make a movie without life rights, but by buying the life rights you get them to agree to certain things in the contract, like they won’t try to sue you, they won’t seek an injunction against the film.
NFS: Did she gain any influence over the story? Like final cut, or editing notes?
Cannan: They wanted that. We gave them quite a lot in the contract, just stopping short of having any actual control. So we were committed to keeping them notified of the script as we were developing it, showing them the cut. They had the right to tell us if anything was defamatory in the cut, but there wasn’t really anything ultimately they could do.
NFS: Did you have any Korean producers on the project?
Cannan: No, we were talking to Korean producers for a while and we thought that would be a good route to go down. We thought, oh, Korea has a booming film industry, there must be financing out there. But it turned out to be much more complicated than we imagined to try to get Korean financing. In the end, it was simpler to not go down that route. We did get a tiny amount of money from the Seoul Film Commission.
"It’s the craziest story set in the world of cinema that we’ve ever heard of."
NFS: Every significant interview in this film is in Korean. It must have prevented you from being as spontaneous as you wanted. How did you handle that during filming?
Cannan: It’s certainly tricky. And for Choi, we needed a live translation so we could keep up with it. We knew she could talk at length. So first we had to carefully plan the questions, and in fact, she wanted the questions in advance as well. [But] no questions were refused. For that particular one, because it was so important, we actually hired a Korean documentarian because we thought more than just a normal translation, she would hopefully understand what we were after.
NFS: Were you concerned about coming into this film as an outsider?
Adam: We were concerned on a logistical level, just the amount of translations we would have to account for. That was always a difficulty for the film, because it’s costly. In terms of cultural? No.
It’s a very culturally specific film, of course, but [we wanted] to make this an average, universal story. There are certain things that will attract people from any country, wherever. One of those things is obviously the romance part of the story, the melodrama. But another one is the obsession, this passion for films. You don’t have to be Korean to feel that.
Cannan: Yeah, we hope that it will appeal to anyone who loves film. Because it’s the craziest story set in the world of cinema that we’ve ever heard of.
Adam: And that’s the way we see Shin, in a way. Yes, he’s a child of Korea and a very specific place. But his identity is not that; his identity is more as a filmmaker. That’s a broad identity I think we can all share together, as filmmakers.
NFS: I was wondering if you saw the same central irony in the story that I did, which is that Kim Jong-il and Shin Sang-ok are very similar characters, that being a director is very similar to being a dictator?
Adam: Well, that depends on the style of director. We’re dictatorial. [laughs]
Cannan: Absolutely, in the sense that Shin, even more than being a director, he was a studio boss. And we put a little bit of it in the film, that he ran the studio like a dictator. He fired someone if he didn’t like them, and everyone had to do exactly what he said, and he didn’t listen to anyone. So he was certainly dictatorial in the way he ran the studio. But yeah, both men are driven by obsession with film, for slightly different reasons.
NFS: Kim kind of ran the country like a film set.
Cannan: Absolutely, that’s why we were really interested in North Korea in that sense. It’s almost as if [his citizens] are actors, they have to play this role. And it’s a very unreal place that’s controlled by these myths and stories that are fed to the people.
Adam: And Pyongyang is like a model city. It’s clean, it’s sterile.
Cannan: It’s like a set.
To learn more about The Lovers and the Despot, visit its Berlinale profile page.
Be sure to check back for more coverage of Berlinale 2016.
