Interview Lee Chang Dong
If Lee’s best-known films—Poetry (2010), Secret Sunshine (2007), Oasis (2002)—have tested the possibilities of melodramatic form, Burning finds this former novelist bending the contours of the thriller. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the film accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty. Speaking through a translator as the festival drew to a close last week, Lee answered a few questions about the film’s inspirations and themes....