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Isabelle Huppert joked that the 13-day shoot of Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs was “a super-production” by the Korean filmmaker’s usual standards.
The actor and director’s two previous collaborations, Claire’s Camera and In Another Country, took six and nine days to shoot, respectively, she recalled. Huppert was speaking onstage at the New York Film Festival with fest Artistic Director Dennis Lim, about A Traveler’s Needs. The film, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in Berlin last February, had its North American premiere in New York.
“I love doing it,” Huppert said of Sangsoo’s ultra-minimal productions, whose sets feature only a “tiny” camera, the director, his assistant and the actors. “It says so much about what it means to do a film. … It tells you how the cinema is flexible. It goes from the infinitely big – I was in Heaven’s Gate, for example – and it can be infinitely small. But it’s not because you don’t have much that you don’t have enough. And that’s really what you experience on a movie directed by Hong Sangsoo. … The whole thing is really a reflection about money and time.”
The ultra-prolific director has had 23 of his 31 feature films screen at the New York Film Festival, Lim said. He has two films in this year’s Main Slate (By the Stream is the other) but did not travel to New York because, naturally, he is busy shooting his next project.
Huppert explained to Lim that she and other cast members were not provided with a script or any guidance about the story in advance. They received pages of dialogue and on the morning of each production day and didn’t get any overview as to the characters and the overarching story or themes. In A Traveler’s Needs, Huppert plays a French woman traveling through Korea and making money by teaching French. Her interactions with a series of characters form the centerpiece of the film, which is captured on digital video in long, locked-off takes with few edits and no score. Despite the lack of a script or even a starting point, “miraculously,” Huppert said, “you have a film.”
Huppert, who is a brand ambassador for high-end fashion house Balenciaga, said even Sangsoo’s approach to costuming was streamlined. At his suggestion, she recalled, she bought a dress and jacket in Paris similar to one that he had seen her wear before, and her character’s signature hat was bought on a local shopping expedition in Korea when she arrived for the shoot.
Assembling her wardrobe that way contributed to the mood of travel that permeates the film, Huppert said. Characters communicate in English, which is not their primary language, and Huppert’s character is in a perpetually altered state by virtue of being a stranger in a strange land. Instead of drilling her students with a French textbooks and memorization, she explores their feelings and emotions, arguing that doing so will be a high-impact tool for learning the French language.
Huppert, who is known for appearing in films like Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and her Oscar-nominated turn in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, primarily works in French-language film and theater. In Sangsoo’s films, she observed, “I have a way of being which I am not in the French films. a bit curious, a bit naive. What it means to be in a different world. Different and not so different, because at some point everybody’s different but everybody’s the same.”
Cinema Guild acquired A Traveler’s Needs last spring and will release it in the U.S. later this year.
