MM: What’s your approach to writing dialogue? The way the dialogue is delivered in this film is so subtle, so human. Those dialogue sequences flow with such authenticity.
K: Thank you. I certainly have a lot to learn in this regard, but I appreciate your words. I don’t know, honestly. I knew the scenes, and I had a sense of what I wanted them to be discussing. Sometimes I didn’t know exactly what I wanted them to say, but I knew the mood of it. It’s a bit of a mystery to me. One of the things that guided me through the processes was trying to make the film that I wanted to see, and this included everything: trying to film it in the way that, if I was watching this film in a theater, I would be drawn to a specific composition, or even a particular cut. “What is going to make me lean forward?” When I’m really drawn to a film, I literally, physically, find myself moving towards the screen, and I wanted to honestly figure that out. The lightness of a conversation, or sometimes the heaviness of a conversation, will do this for me.
In this particular story, although I didn’t shoot it like a documentary at all, I did think about the actual circumstance. If I was in Columbus, and I heard about the son of a famous architecture critic being stuck in Columbus, and I found out that he had met a working-class girl who knew a lot about architecture, I personally would be really interested in following them and following their world for a brief moment of time, if I were a documentarian. Sometimes I think, what would I hope to capture in a conversation if this was happening between a mother and a daughter, or a man and a woman? Sometimes I write a scene that, if I was a fly on the wall, I would hope to capture, not because it’s always so precise or it’s moving a plot, but it’s telling something in a certain way, or it’s drawing me closer to the people that are inhabiting that particular moment.
MM: In a more conventional film, perhaps, we would expect John Cho’s character to not confess that he would rather have his father die than stay in Columbus.
K: As a viewer, you do sort of want to be surprised at times, and there were times where I thought, “What would surprise me?” I knew that, for example, when we’re in a hospital, there’s always the expectation that there are going to be scenes in the hospital room that will be very dramatic. I knew that I wanted to not meet that expectation. I knew that every time we were in the hospital and he entered the room, I was not going to cut into the room because we might expect that. That’s the same with the conversations, and again, I don’t know if I always succeeded in that, but when there were moments when the conversation could move in different directions, I was certainly motivated by that. After my first or second pass, or maybe my third draft, I started getting notes. I sent it out to two people specifically who offered really good notes, and I made some changes that I felt were really helpful.
MM: I understand that working with actors is something you didn’t have much experience with.
K: Our time was really short. We shot in 18 days, and all of the scenes were very site-specific, so there wasn’t a lot of margin for error. We didn’t have a lot of time, not only to do coverage but even to rehearse, so we were constantly pressed for time. Therefore rehearsal was very limited. I know that the actors read with one another. Not all the actors, but I believe Haley and John, and Haley and Rory Culkin, they would read the lines, but there was no formal rehearsal. We did talk before every scene. I tried to create space for them to approach the scene the way that was most productive and beneficial for them. It turned out to be the most interesting process. It was so lovely, and it’s so vital, connecting with the actors and getting a sense of how they’re going to approach a scene, and making adjustments.
John Cho, photographed at Sundance Film Festival 2017 by Fabrice Dall’Anese
MM: What was the thought process behind including an Asian-American character without making the film about the “Asian identity?”
K: Once I visited Columbus, the basic outlines of the story became clear to me, and I knew it was going to involve someone who was stuck in this town, who had to be in this town. I knew why he had to be in this town, and I knew that he wasn’t going to be from America, or not living in America at the time, so he wouldn’t have the option to travel back up to Chicago and stay there for a few days. Once I had determined that this person was going to be from overseas, I just wrote what I knew. I was sort of excited, because I didn’t go into the project thinking, “I want to have an Asian lead,” but once I had a sense of the story, I immediately decided, “I’m going to make this person Asian, because there’s a lot of my own life that I can bring into this character. “ I wrote it a Korean person, and then my producer Chris Weitz suggested John Cho, whom he loved and had worked with before. He was the first person we cast. I spoke with John, and he was incredible. He really got the script, he was really thoughtful, and he’s just a lovely and generous person—the kind of human being that you want to work with, but also has a real presence. I marveled at him during so many of those quiet scenes: his ability to sort of tell his own story through quiet.
This story wasn’t written to be about Asian identity. There are certainly stories, good stories, about ethnic identities that are important, but this was not a story that was primarily about Asian identity, but, if you are an Asian, and you are in a small town in the middle of America, I think it would also be neglectful to act as if that wasn’t a part of the character. At the end of the day, he’s a human being who is having his own struggles, and certainly his culture is a part of that struggle, as it is for all human beings. I love that, and I hope I can do that in any film that I make: considering the whole human being and their culture. MM
Columbus opened in theaters August 4, 2017, courtesy of Sundance Institute.
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