"I didn't imagine the story of a man wandering the seashore of the waves would be so heartbreaking!"

Director Park Chanwook and Scriptwriter Chung Seokyung's melodramatic detective story Decision to Leave marks the 1st month of its release. The audience is giving steady and enthusiastic support to the suspenseful romance between 'Seorae (Tang Wei),' the wife of a man who died unnaturally, and 'Haejun (Park Haeil),' a detective hovering around her. As Director Park Chanwook's partner, who has been working with him since Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Scriptwriter Chung Seokyung also wrote a lot of screenplays and scripts, including the movies The Truth Beneath, Believer, TV series Mother, Little Women, a new drama series, etc. With Scriptwriter Chung Seokyung, let's find out what makes us ruminate Decision to Leave over and over again after we watched it. 

- The number of audiences for Decision to Leave exceeded 1 million on July 13. And the audience continues to watch it several times repeatedly, saying 'the more you watch it, the deeper meaning you can feel.' What do you think of the review? 

= I hardly watch my movies again because I'm a bit embarrassed. I watched Decision to Leave at Cannes for the first time, and I thought I could watch it again and again, thinking, 'It's the first time I've watched this movie.' The story itself is supposed to spin like a revolving door. When Seorae's love ends, Haejun's love begins, and when Haejun realizes it, he goes out to look for Seorae... In a way, the story was written as if it would never end. Maybe, that's why I wanted to watch the film again, I think.  

- It is said that you planned Decision to Leave with Director Park Chanwook, who was working on The Little Drummer Girl in London, England. He had declared that he wouldn't make a melodramatic movie or a romantic comedy, nevertheless, he made the film anyway. Are there any attractive points that could change his mind in this story?

= Well, rather than having attractive points, I think we wrote this story quite smoothly after deciding to write it. There's a killer, there's a detective, and a husband dies in the film, so I thought about how the man should die to start the story. I think I've had an idea of death falling from a mountain all the time. So, I thought about looking at the mountain while falling from it and dying, and the image of the person who fell matched the mountain. 

- Then, the beginning of the story is more of a thriller than a melodrama?  

= Writing a melodrama was hard for me. I was not confident in writing the scene where the main characters looked at each other and said they loved each other. One character just happened to be a detective and the other a murderer. Since a detective loves his work and reads a lot of things from a crime scene more than anyone else, I thought Haejun could read the murderer's mind at the scene and feel it close. A detective is not the one who judges if a suspect is right or wrong, but the one who catches the real culprit. Therefore, in the process of investigating the case, I thought a suspect's mind could come to the detective's mind as if he was reading his or her letter. The director's first idea was a romance movie. He told me to do a melodrama. Since Director Park likes Émile Zola's style, he is attracted to something like a tragic romance. That's how it started.  

- Detective Haejun is different from the somewhat wild and outspoken detective characters in many Korean cop films. It seems that you created the character without being conscious of the characters in the existing typical cop movies. 

= While making movies, I had a few opportunities to meet detectives, and I felt good about them every time I met them. They seemed scary, but I thought they were very considerate of the other person and approached the criminals humanely. I also thought that we could live safely thanks to them. I wanted to include what I have experienced in reality a lot. I think the director especially wanted to develop the detective character into a neater and more polite one. 

- Besides Martin Beck, who is well known as the main character in the Nordic mystery novels, is there any character or image that came to mind while you were making Haejun's character? 

= Since the director likes the series, he recommended that I should read them. I think Director Park liked Martin Beck's image of an office worker with sincerity. I think Haejun was born by combining a sincere office worker and the detectives I met.  

- Haejun told Seorae, "You are very upright. Few people can be upright like that without being nervous." Did you include the impression from Actor Tang Wei in the script? 

= It was the director who wrote the line. When I first heard it, I was like, 'Oh, cool, huh?' I liked that because I didn't know what it meant clearly. It's funny when you hear it at first, and then you think about whether she is really upright or not. After that, you may feel sad. Seorae couldn't have come to Korea if she had lived in China happily. She must have led a very harsh life in China and even in Korea, where she couldn't make herself understood in Korean, and she has no one who understands her or she should understand. In the meantime, it was sad to think how great it was to maintain her posture straight. I think it's a good line. And when we think of Actor Tang Wei, we can recall her straight posture anyway. She is the person who approaches and shakes hands with a straight posture. There is cheerful straightness in her that we cannot feel because we are people who bow.  

- Did you map out Seorae's past in China? 

= I didn't map it out but just thought about it like a story. In the original script, the book 『Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas』 was included a lot but most of them have been edited out in the end. 『Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas』 is a kind of a compilation of mythic geography and beasts. For example, it tells a story of a beast with furs and horns in a country, explaining the beast eats this and does that, etc. So, from the POV of 『Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas』, I thought about Seorae's story. People living in the mountain area have stiff hair and sharp nails because they have to climb the mountain. People living on the seashore like to dig and hide well, do not show their minds easily, and breathe only with gills. Seorae is the character who should live in the sea, but she was born in the mountain. It must have been very hard for her to live with the body with gills but without furs. That's why Seorae comes down all the way to find the sea.  

- Any images or figures you recall while creating the character Seorae? 

= Instead of a figure, I imagined a person who came from a place where civilization or social systems are strong or strict. Someone from outside the law, relationships, or culture. That's why Haejun asks, "Seorae, what era are you from? The Tang Dynasty?" I thought it would be nice if Seorae had been like a jellyfish only with DNA in a stratum and then suddenly made into a human being without knowing anything.  

- Since the lines Seorae and Haejun exchange are in a literary style, they seem to be more powerful and meaningful. 

= I tried hard to write the lines realistically. I always try to write them naturally, but people always say they're written in the literary style. So I even thought about writing historical dramas because it wouldn't matter if the lines were less realistic in the script for a historical drama. I think the audience is getting used to my style. This time, I'm glad that people said, "I think it's meaningful because the lines are written in the literary style," rather than "the lines are written in the literary style too much." I thought of the words that Seorae could use. What would Seorae say if she used old-fashioned expressions in Korean? If she had watched a historical drama, she would say 'He lost his life' instead of 'He died' or 'He passed away' when she described her husband's death. And like the expression, 'At last,' the timing is right, but the meaning is slightly different in the context. I think I am glad when I finally find such words or expressions.  

- The language barrier between the two characters seems to make the actors' gazes more affectionate. 

= I watched the movie 4 times in total. I saw it at the premiere, at Cannes, and 2 times at other film festivals. I see something different every time I watch the movie. What I liked this time was the scene where Haejun says 'I want to know the pattern' and Seorae unlocks the cell phone and returns it. Seorae is not upright in the scene. She is bending her shoulders. Also, Seorae slightly bends her shoulders in the scene where she tries to leave, thinking that the first interrogation is over. That's kind of touching, too. I can feel that Seorae has lived like that, and she is scared now in the scene. And I think the audience would have liked Seorae at that moment unknowingly. I thought that's how she expressed the fear she felt in physical language. I wonder if that character would have expressed it like that if she knew Korean. That's why Tang Wei is a good actor.  

- You worked with Production Designer Ryu Seonghee, Costume Designer Kwark Jungae, and Music Director Cho Youngwuk, all of whom you have been working together for a long time. Nevertheless, you said that Decision to Leave is the work that the distance between the script and the completed version of the film is the farthest. 

= Watching the last scene at Cannes, I thought that filming, music, makeup, and production design were all well matched. I felt the script was too small here. When I watch a movie, I think, "This is how the script was filmed." And then I say, "The actor acted well." This time, however, I kept thinking, "What did I write, and how did it turn out like this?" while watching the film. I think the other staff members felt the same way. Since we have been working together for a long time, everything has turned out to be perfect in the end. Of course, it was my first time working with the director of photography, but the filming was great, too. While watching the whirlpool in the sea in the film, my heart seemed to indwell there. When I said to the DP, "I think the whirlpool acted so well," he said that was the power of CG. I couldn't believe it looked so natural by CG. (Laughs) In the script, it was written that the sea was swirling, but I didn't know that it would swirl like that. None of the scripts I wrote had this much nature. No matter how hard I try to use nature, it seems to be another matter to make nature natural.  

- Do you prefer mountains to the sea? 

= Yes, my heart pounds when I see conifer forests on the plane while passing through places like Finland and Hokkaido. I feel that 'I'm here now, and I'm safe here.' Maybe people who live in the mountains think they can hide between trees. But my husband always wants to go to the beach, especially the hot and humid one near the equator. When he goes there, he says he can breathe easily and feel like he's in his hometown. I think there must be a reason why we met. It's good to think of people as agricultural products or regional products, thinking about the characteristics of people from the mountains or the sea. People born in summer, fall, or winter can also be different. I wanted to portray people as products of nature. With this mindset, the movie also came out as if it were a product of nature. 

- You quoted Confucius saying, "The wise man likes the sea and the kind man likes the mountains" in the line. Is it a sentence you like? 

= Not exactly. While describing Seorae as a Chinese character, I thought it would be great if Actor Tang Wei acted her character with pride. That's why I wanted to include 『Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas』, the class of China, and the quotes from Confucius and tried to draw the history of the anti-Japanese movement in China. Sometimes, we feel China distant and sometimes close, but I wanted to remind us of the long history between Korea and China, and also I wanted Tang Wei to act thinking that we were together in some way in that imagination.  

- What kind of work are you working on now? 

= The TV series Little Women will air soon. I spent about 2 and a half years writing the script. I had a very hard time writing the script for the 12-episode drama, but I totally forgot how much I suffered when the writing was over. I keep saying 'What should I do?' while writing a script, but when the series is over, and everyone says, 'You must've suffered greatly from that,' I say, 'When did I suffer from that?' (Laughs) TV dramas and movies are different in length of time. I think I know a lot about the two-hour thing for a movie. 30 minutes later after the film started, people would feel like this, and after an hour, people would expect this, and then what kind of a story should flow here, and the story that flows underneath it has to come out of around this time, and then the story should change its direction around here, and so on. Since I've written movie scripts for more than 10 years, I've got the hang of it. What if it extends to 12 hours? Since I am set for 2 hours, I started thinking of it as two episodes at first. So after the second episode, the story ends. It was not easy for me to continue exploring 12 hours. But a story has its own size in terms of the way it summarizes a person's life rather than the depth of the subject. If the 2 hours of a movie is the time to contain the core of human life and death, I think 12 hours of a TV series can be the time length to depict one season at least.