Past Lives | movie | 2023 | Official Featurette
Two childhood friends are separated after one’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunite | dG1fOWQ0T2JrbUNKWXM
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 [musique]
00:03 La histoire de "Past Lives" est sur Nora Moon.
00:07 Son nom coréen est Nayoung.
00:09 Elle est mariée et elle se reconnecte avec son amie de la vie.
00:15 Ce que nous voyons, c'est cette relation profonde qu'elle a depuis sa vie,
00:19 qui revient et qui challenge certaines de ses vues et ses conceptions
00:23 sur son identité dans son état présent.
00:25 La histoire est sur la fermeture.
00:27 [musique]
00:32 Dès le début, Céline nous a demandé de ne pas faire de contact physique,
00:36 ce qui rendait la situation plus explicite et étrange.
00:39 Je pense que cela compte pour la quantité de fois que les acteurs se posent,
00:44 un petit petit coup de main, et elle nous a dit de ne pas toucher.
00:47 [musique]
00:55 Jusqu'à ce moment où l'audience s'est sentie avec nous,
00:59 je pense que ces réactions étaient vraiment viscères.
01:03 [musique]
01:05 -Waah, c'est trop bien.
01:07 -En créant cet artifice de "maintenant, tu ne peux pas faire quelque chose",
01:13 cela rend plus de choses.
01:15 Ce moment est devenu pressurisé.
01:17 [musique]
01:20 -Waah. -Waah.
01:22 [rires]
01:25 -Alors, arrêtez le bruit, s'il vous plaît.
01:27 -C'est bon.
01:28 -Et vous n'étiez pas autorisés à vous rencontrer.
01:31 -Tôt dans les conversations avec Céline, nous avons sorti cette idée
01:35 de ne pas pouvoir rencontrer Théo et moi jusqu'à ce que nous puissions absolument.
01:40 Heureusement, nous avions une équipe qui nous a aidés à faciliter cela.
01:43 Nous avons été accueillis par des portes différentes,
01:45 nous avons eu des rencontres sur Skype où nous avons été tous en noir.
01:48 Et quand Nora et Hyesung viennent dans l'appartement et qu'Arthur le rencontre pour la première fois,
01:54 c'est nous qui nous rencontrons pour la première fois sur le film.
01:57 -Bonjour.
01:59 [musique]
02:03 -Bonjour. C'est gentil de vous rencontrer. Arthur.
02:08 -Je pense que ça marche et c'est aussi juste amusant
02:10 d'être en mesure de faire ces petits expériences en tant qu'acteurs.
02:13 -Oui. -Oui.
02:14 -Especially when you're working on 35mm film,
02:18 you know you have only a limited amount of takes.
02:21 So it kind of heightens… -Everything.
02:23 -The stakes, everything. -Yeah.
02:25 -Everyone was so concentrated and focused.
02:28 -He was just this kid in my head for such a long time.
02:31 I think I just missed him a lot.
02:33 -Did he miss you?
02:35 -It was a unique situation in that in such a short amount of time,
02:40 we had to create a marriage that was believable
02:44 and also a deeply connected childhood first love.
02:49 And the physicality of that is really specific.
02:53 The way that I had to be as Nora with Arthur
02:57 as opposed to Hae-sung is entirely different.
03:00 One of the essential ideas of this movie,
03:03 based on Céline's actual experience,
03:05 is she could feel like a completely different woman
03:08 in the presence of each of these men
03:10 who know and love her so differently
03:13 and fully and completely.
03:15 -There's a cultural component of a boundary,
03:18 a Western idea of boundary versus an Eastern idea of boundary.
03:22 I think it helps draw a stark difference
03:26 between the two relationships.
03:28 If you watch Nora and Arthur,
03:30 they kiss, in most scenes they're holding hands,
03:34 and I think for Céline, touch is very meaningful.
03:37 -What it means to see an Americanized woman
03:41 confronted with a hologram of her past as a Korean,
03:45 but now in her adult, fully realized form
03:49 and what that feels like.
03:51 We were so excited by this idea of like,
03:53 "Oh, I don't think we've seen it in that way before."
03:56 -I missed you.
03:58 -Me too.
04:01 -I let myself be inspired by the child actor Seung-min
04:06 who, when I met him, was always so shy
04:09 and he had his elbows always to his upper body,
04:13 almost like taped.
04:14 And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting.
04:16 That's some beautiful piece of body language
04:19 that I want to carry with the adult has on
04:22 because it kind of shows how repressed his emotions are."
04:26 Tony Leung, in Asia, he's known for the man
04:31 who speaks with his eyes
04:32 in moments where we are vulnerable together
04:35 but don't have any dialogue.
04:36 How deep can I go showing that inner life
04:39 only through the eyes,
04:41 which are the only parts of the nervous system
04:44 that are openly exposed to the real world
04:48 and thereby have a window to your brain
04:50 and your heart and your emotions.
04:53 -We were looking at the Marina Abramovic Lay encounter,
04:58 which involves Marina Abramovic.
05:00 She's sitting at a table
05:01 and a willing participant comes and joins her at this table
05:04 and they have this wordless exchange
05:05 just with their eyes.
05:06 That was one of the pieces of source material
05:09 that we could all agree upon
05:10 just to make sure that we were all living in the same world,
05:14 what we wanted for that first encounter,
05:16 that wordless exchange after so many years.
05:19 -The bar scene was crucial.
05:27 We took two days to shoot one scene
05:30 and arguably the movie lives and dies
05:34 on the success of the bar scene.
05:36 The genesis of that scene was a real-life experience
05:39 where Céline found herself flanked by two men,
05:43 one her husband and the other her childhood sweetheart.
05:47 And the uncanny and mysterious and profound experience
05:52 of sitting in the threshold between two men
05:55 who could know her so completely
05:57 but in totally different ways.
05:59 So we really took our time
06:01 in terms of making sure we could honor
06:04 what that experience is like.
06:06 -We had jokes that, you know, this is a love story,
06:16 but we're subverting the genre and it's almost become sci-fi
06:20 that Hyesung could present to her
06:22 as some sort of hologram of a different time,
06:25 a different life,
06:26 that she's jumping back from the present
06:28 to the past to an imagined future
06:31 depending on which way she was facing.
06:34 Yeah?
06:35 Sounds like, hmm.
06:37 That was something that we were aiming for
06:40 from the beginning,
06:41 like how to extrapolate and make monumental
06:45 what you can argue is kind of a simple scene.
06:48 -I remember for me,
06:55 wanting these escape routes.
06:58 I kept suggesting maybe I go get a drink,
07:00 maybe I excuse myself to go to the restroom.
07:02 I kept trying to leave because it was so awkward,
07:05 but Celine insisted I stay there
07:07 in the uncomfortable awkwardness of the scene.
07:10 And like Greta said, after two days of filming,
07:13 finally we get to a point where Hyesung and Arthur
07:16 are sat alone and kind of have their man-to-man talk,
07:20 if you will.
07:21 And I think that that build-up led for,
07:24 you know, a tremendous energy and a very dynamic scene.
07:27 Do you want to say anything?
07:28 -No, I have nothing to add to that.
07:30 [laughter]
07:31 -It's so awesome.
07:32 [music]