Chapter 111: Gangwon Province

The van left Seoul at five in the morning on the first day of August.

Not the production van of the KBS Saturdays—a different van, larger, the film production’s vehicle that held the equipment cases and the luggage and the father and the son in the back seats. The driver was a production assistant named Kwon Jihoon, a man in his mid-twenties who drove with the specific efficiency of someone who had made the Seoul-to-Gangwon run many times for many productions.

The city thinned. The apartment complexes gave way to the industrial zones. The industrial zones gave way to the agricultural land. The agricultural land gave way to the mountains—the Taebaek range’s western slopes, the specific geography of Gangwon Province that held the landscape the Korean War had crossed in 1950.

He watched the mountains arrive through the van’s window. The green of the August growth—the trees dense on the slopes, the summer’s fullness holding the mountains in the specific quality of the season’s peak. The mountains that would stand in for the war’s terrain. The landscape that the camera would film as the refugee child’s road.

His father sat beside him. The father’s quality in the van was the specific quality of the accompanying parent—not the driver, not the production crew, the parent who was present because the child needed the presence. The father reading a book—a play by Chekhov, the Russian playwright whose work had been the university theater’s constant. The father’s reading was the parent’s version of the child’s preparation: the practitioner maintaining the practice alongside the production’s demand.

They arrived at the location at eight-thirty. Three and a half hours from Seoul.

The location: a village in the mountains—not the constructed set of the KBS sound stage but the actual village. Baek Junho filmed on location. The director’s method was the real space rather than the constructed space—the actual houses, the actual roads, the actual mountains. The camera would film the real world and the actors would inhabit the real world and the real world’s quality would be in the film’s image.

The village: twenty houses along a mountain road, the traditional Korean rural architecture—the low tile roofs, the stone walls, the vegetable gardens. The village had been partially dressed by the production’s art department—the 2012 signage removed, the 1950 props installed, the anachronisms eliminated. The village was not the 1950 village—the village was the 2012 village made to look like the 1950 village. The difference was visible to the knowing eye and invisible to the camera.

The accommodation: a converted farmhouse at the village’s edge. The production’s residential space—the rooms allocated to the cast and crew, the communal kitchen, the common area. His room was a small ondol room—the heated floor, the futon, the window overlooking the mountain. His father’s room was adjacent.

He put his bag in the room. The bag held the month’s necessities: the clothes, the toiletries, the script, notebook nineteen. The specific packing of the twelve-year-old who had calculated what a month away from home required—the mother’s list supplemented by his own additions, the notebook non-negotiable.

He stood at the window. The mountain was outside—the slope rising behind the village, the trees dense, the August heat audible in the cicadas’ volume. The specific quality of the Gangwon mountains in August: the green, the heat, the insects, the distance from the city.

The city is three hours behind, he thought. The studio is three hours behind. The partnership is three hours behind. The school and the neighborhood and the convenience store ajumma—all of it three hours behind. For one month, the world is this village and this mountain and this camera and this character.

The first day was the preparation day. No filming—the cast arriving, the spaces assigned, the production’s logistics established. The crew had been on location for three days already—the camera positions scouted, the lighting tested, the schedule confirmed.

Baek Junho gathered the cast in the village’s communal yard at four in the afternoon. The full cast: twelve actors—the child (Woojin), the mother (an actress named Han Soyoung, early forties), the old man on the road (a veteran actor, seventy-two), the woman with the baby, the soldier, the villagers. The cast assembled in the yard under the August sun.

Baek Junho stood before them. The director in the location’s space—not the hanok’s intimacy, the production’s authority. The face that did not smile. The voice that did not waste.

“내일부터—찍습니다.” (We start filming tomorrow.) He said it. “한 달입니다.” (One month.) He looked at the cast. “이 마을이—영화입니다.” (This village is the film.) He said it with the specific quality of the location-filming director: the real space was the film’s world. The actors would live in the world they would perform in.

“연습—안 합니다.” (We don’t rehearse.) He said it.

The statement landed in the yard. No rehearsal. The television’s method had been the one-rehearsal-then-take. The theater’s method had been the weeks of rehearsal. Baek Junho’s method was the no-rehearsal—the first take as the first encounter, the camera recording the actors’ genuine first response to the scene.

No rehearsal, he thought. The camera films the discovery. The discovery is the quality. The prepared response is the rehearsed response. The unrehearsed response is the real response. Baek Junho wants the real.

“대본—알고 있죠?” He confirmed. The script known—the actors had read the script, the characters understood. The understanding was the preparation. The performance was the discovery within the understanding.

“내일—첫 장면. 민수하고 어머니.” (Tomorrow—first scene. Minsu and the mother.) He looked at Woojin and Han Soyoung. The first scene: the before. The mother and the son in the Seoul home, the morning before the war began. The having that preceded the losing.

“오늘—쉬세요.” (Today—rest.) He said it. The first day’s instruction was the rest—the body arriving at the location, the body settling into the space, the body resting before the work.

The evening. The farmhouse. The communal dinner—the production’s catering, the large pots of rice and jjigae and banchan served in the communal kitchen, the cast and crew eating together at the long table.

He ate beside his father. The specific quality of the communal meal on the first night of the location shoot—the people who would work together for a month eating together for the first time, the social assessment happening over the rice bowls.

Han Soyoung—the actress who would play his mother—sat across from him. She looked at him with the specific quality of the actress assessing the child actor who would be her scene partner. The assessment was different from the television’s assessment: the film’s mother-son relationship would require the sustained intimacy that the television’s segmented takes did not demand. She needed to know the child’s quality at the meal’s proximity before the camera’s proximity.

“밥 잘 먹네.” (You eat well.) She said it. The first words—not the professional assessment, the maternal observation. The actress beginning the relationship from the mother’s position.

“네.” He said it. He was eating well—the mountain air’s appetite, the body’s hunger from the travel.

“어머니는—안 오셨어?” (Your mother didn’t come?)

“아버지가 오셨어요.” (My father came.) He indicated his father beside him.

Han Soyoung looked at his father. The actress’s assessment of the parent—the same assessment his mother had made of Seoyeon’s mother at the Hongdae lunch. The professional parent evaluated by the professional performer.

“연극하신다면서요?” (I heard you do theater?) She said it to his father.

“네.” His father. The modest confirmation.

“좋으시겠다—아들이 이렇게.” (Must be nice—your son doing this.) She said it with the warmth that the first-night’s social exchange required.

“감사합니다.”

The dinner continued. The conversations of the first night—the logistics, the schedule, the production’s specific habits established through the shared meal. The communal quality of the location shoot: the cast living together, eating together, working together. The rehearsal room’s intimacy extended to the twenty-four-hour day.

After dinner. The farmhouse. His room.

He called his mother.

“도착했어요.” (I arrived.)

“어때?” (How is it?)

“산이에요.” (It’s mountains.) He said it. The description that held the location’s essential quality—the mountains, the green, the distance from the city.

“밥 먹었어?” (Did you eat?)

“네.”

“아빠는?” (How’s Dad?)

“옆 방이에요.” (He’s in the next room.)

“잘 자.” (Sleep well.) She said it. The words that crossed the three hours’ distance—the mother in Mangwon, the child in Gangwon, the phone connecting the two points of the family’s geography.

“엄마도요.”

He called Seoyeon.

“여보세요.”

“도착했어.” (I arrived.)

“어때?” (How is it?) The same question his mother asked—the partner’s version.

“다르다.” (Different.) He said it. The location’s quality was different from the studio, different from the set, different from the rehearsal room. The real space. The real mountains. The real village.

“리허설 안 한대.” (They said no rehearsals.)

“… 진짜?” (Really?)

“응. 첫 테이크가 진짜래.” (Yeah. The first take is the real thing.)

She was quiet. The processing.

“그거—무서운 거 아니야?” (Isn’t that scary?)

He thought about it.

“아니.” He said it. The hundred years’ accumulated first-takes—the thousands of scenes filmed without the rehearsal’s safety net. The body knew the first-take’s quality. The body trusted the discovery.

“내일—찍어.” (Tomorrow—I film.)

“잘 해.” (Do well.) She said it. The same words from the premiere night, the same words from every threshold. The partner’s words that held the support.

“할게.”

“전화해.” (Call me.)

“할게.”

He ended the call.

He sat in the ondol room. The mountain’s silence outside the window—not the city’s hum, not the neighborhood’s sounds, the mountain’s specific silence that was not the absence of sound but the presence of the natural. The cicadas. The wind in the trees. The distant water of a stream.

He opened notebook nineteen.

August 1, 2012. Gangwon Province. Day one.

He wrote: The location is real. The village is real. The mountains are real. Baek Junho films the real world. The actors inhabit the real world. The camera records the real world with the actors inside it.

He wrote: No rehearsal. The first take is the discovery. The discovery is the quality. The prepared response is the rehearsed response. The unrehearsed response is the real response.

He wrote: Tomorrow: the first scene. Minsu and the mother. The having before the losing. Han Soyoung across the dinner table—”You eat well.” The actress beginning the relationship from the mother’s position. The mother-son intimacy that the month will build.

He wrote: The mountain’s silence is different from the city’s hum. The silence holds the natural rather than the constructed. The natural is what the camera wants. The camera wants the real. The real is here.

He closed the notebook.

He lay on the futon. The ondol floor’s warmth beneath him—the August heat supplemented by the floor’s heating, the traditional comfort that the Korean architecture had maintained for centuries. The warmth rising into the body. The body settling into the month-away’s first night.

He thought about tomorrow. The first scene. The mother and the son. The having.

The having is the hardest scene to film, he thought. The losing is easy—the body knows the loss and the camera records the body’s knowing. The having is hard because the having must be unconditional—the audience must believe the mother-son bond is complete before the bond is broken. The having’s completeness makes the losing’s devastation real.

He would meet Han Soyoung’s giving for the first time in the scene’s first take. No rehearsal. The body meeting the actress’s quality with the camera recording. The discovery of the mother-son relationship happening in real time, under the camera’s eye, in the real village.

This is what Baek Junho wants, he thought. The genuine first encounter. The camera filming the actors discovering each other. The discovery is the quality the audience will feel—the freshness that the rehearsed scene cannot produce.

He thought about his own mother—the mother in Mangwon, the mother who had packed the rice ball for the four-fifty van, the mother who had held his hand during the five seconds, the mother whose unfallen tear had been the cost’s measure. The character’s mother would be different—Han Soyoung’s actress-mother, the fictional mother who would be lost. But the quality of the having would be informed by the quality of the real having—the twelve years of the real mother’s love providing the foundation for the fictional mother’s love.

I will use the real to make the fictional real, he thought. The same principle as Seoyeon’s tree—the grandmother’s zelkova placed in the rehearsal room. My mother’s love placed in the film’s scene. The real relocated into the fictional. The relocation is the acting.

He turned off the light.

The mountain’s darkness was different from the city’s darkness—darker, more complete, the stars visible through the window in the absence of the city’s light pollution. The August stars over Gangwon Province, the sky that the 1950 refugees had walked under, the same stars in the same positions sixty-two years later.

He went to sleep with the stars and the mountain and the silence and the mother’s having and the morning’s first take waiting—the camera that would record the discovery, the discovery that would be the film, the film that would be the next step in the building that had started one year ago in the Hongdae rehearsal room where the tree appeared because a girl saw it.