‘Sleep’ Director Jason Yu On Crafting His Chilling Horror Debut
In his feature film debut Sleep, writer and director Jason Yu crafts a chilling and deeply effective horror story that gets something right that more horror films don’t: his film features a believable and realistic couple. The chemistry between his two leads, Lee Sun-kyun (who sadly passed away earlier this year) and Jung Yu-mi creates a couple that you truly root for. This isn’t another bickering horror couple that you can’t wait to watch fall apart. Instead, Yu crafts his horror through the heart-wrenching experience of watching them crumble.
In the film:
Newlyweds Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, Parasite) and Soo-jin’s (Jung Yu-mi) domestic bliss is disrupted when Hyun-su begins speaking in his sleep, ominously stating, “Someone’s inside.” From that night on, whenever he falls asleep, Hyun-su transforms into someone else, with no recollection of what happened the night before. Overwhelmed with anxiety that he may hurt himself or their young family, Soo-jin can barely sleep because of this irrational fear. Despite treatment, Hyun-su’s sleepwalking only intensifies, and Soo-jin begins to feel that her unborn child may be in danger.
We spoke with Yu about his personal connection to the film, crafting a realistic couple, and his iconic shaman.
DC: How do you feel about the movie finally coming out? How does it feel to have it coming out to the world and everyone getting to see it now?
Jason Yu: I think it is very surreal, and I feel very grateful that it is showing in theaters in the U.S. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined something like this happening, and I’m grateful for the American audience, especially the film festival audience who liked Sleep. I think it’s because of them that we gained some traction to be able to open up in theaters here. I’m also grateful for Magnolia and Magnet, who put faith in acquiring the film and releasing it.
DC: Can you tell me a little bit more about where Sleep came from?
JY: I guess there are various factors, but the first would be a personal anecdote. I have some nasty sleeping habits myself. I’m a very loud snorer, and I have a severe case of sleep apnea where sometimes you forget to breathe while you’re sleeping. At that time, the snoring never really worried bothered my wife, but when I stopped breathing, that’s when she would wake up and not be able to go back to sleep because of how terrified she felt of me not breathing. In the mornings I would hear about these stories, and although I felt immensely guilty and sorry that she had to go through that, the storyteller in me was also very fascinated. It made me imagine what would happen if my symptoms were even more frightening or threatening or scary.
And I think that sort of sparked a potential story, a potential prospect of me creating a horror film about sleepwalking. But besides that, there’s also just the sheer shock and terror I felt when I read these stories about sleepwalking, whether somebody jumps out of a building or drives while sleeping or harming somebody next to their bedside. It made me wonder about what the everyday lives of such people would look like, but more importantly, what the lives of their loved ones would look like, the ones who have to be around them. That fascination also sparked a great interest in the subject.
DC: That’s so interesting. And so it’s funny, my husband also just started snoring really loudly and we’re doing sleep studies. But I love your couple in this film. I mean, I feel like so often in horror, we have couples who are catty and don’t really seem to love each other, but your characters just really like each other. It’s so refreshing to have a couple in love and happy, which makes this all the more upsetting and terrifying. So I wanted to hear about writing the couple and then also directing your incredible actors through that chemistry and getting those performances.
JY: Yeah, that’s very interesting. When I wrote the screenplay, a lot of personal elements seeped into the story. I was preparing to marry my longtime girlfriend and now wife. Because of that, I think I made the protagonist a married couple and revolved the story heavily around their marital relationship because that was the stuff that was going through my mind outside the screenplay.
Most movies or stories I consume about marriage, they’re usually very cynical, if you know what I mean. The conflict is quite internal. Either somebody makes an irredeemable mistake or they have a big fight, or they simply fall out of love. And because I was at the cusp of marriage, I think I wanted a more romantic view of what marriage can provide. I wanted to portray a couple that really loved each other, as you said, who trusted each other, who were best friends, then throw an obstacle their way and show how they would overcome this problem as a married couple, as a married unit. And that was, I think, they’re more in love and the relationship is much more supportive than other films.
DC: I love that though because I feel like, again, the conflict isn’t just someone’s bad in the relationship. You want to save the relationship because it is such a good one.
JY: It was great working with the two performers and trying to cultivate this chemistry and bond of a newlywed couple. It was actually one of my biggest concerns going into this film, because I’m not sure if this is an axiom in the American film industry, but in Korea, the fighting scenes, the climax scenes where everything, where there’s conflict, and where things are operatic, those acting scenes are, counterintuitively, quite easy for the actors because all they have to do is perform what’s in the screenplay.
But the loving scenes, the chemistry, the bond, there’s something about those scenes that you can’t obtain with sheer acting prowess. There’s a lived in quality that’s required. So taking that to heart, I suggested that maybe the two actors spend a lot of time with each other before the set, maybe go for ice creams or take a stroll in the park. But I think they’re too busy to do that. And they right away said, “No, we don’t need that. We already have four previous films under our belts where we played romantic partners.”
Also, they were great friends already. So I used that to my advantage, and they were absolutely correct because the first scene that we shot was this very intimate scene between the two, and they nailed it completely and persuaded me that they were married. So I told them they were right to refuse my suggestion of getting ice cream.
DC: So a lot of this film takes place in that apartment, and it’s a pretty small apartment. What was your approach to making a small space feel not feel repetitive?
JY: Yes, absolutely. The single location was one of the biggest challenges that we had to face because the location itself was very bland and very small because we wanted to capture the realism of what this newlywed couple will live like.
DC: Thank you, by the way. Finally a movie where it’s not this massive, expensive apartment.
JY: Thank you so much. Yeah, I agree completely. There were some instances where we pondered whether we should make the location more cinematic, give it more depth, and make it visually more interesting. But we in the end said that to heighten the horror is to heighten the realism, which is to make the space as real as possible, which is very flat and boring.
It did create a lot of challenges for the cinematographer and the production designer. But what really saved the day was how the story is divided by chapters. So we had three separate opportunities to give three different looks to the same space. And what we really tried to do was, whether that be cinematography or production design, we really wanted it to enhance the psychology of the protagonists and also their relationship. So for each chapter, we were going for different looks that would enhance those aspects.
DC: That’s so cool to hear. And so Kim Geum-soon, she plays your shaman. How did you find her? She’s incredible. Her addition to Sleep gives the film even more of a genre feel. So I wanted to hear more about her character and casting her and making her feel so kind of out of time.
JY: Thank you so much for mentioning her. She’s a great actress. She isn’t that well known, but I think thanks to her recent filmography, she’s gaining a lot of attention and people are marveling over her acting prowess. It’s funny because one of my ADs who was in charge of casting, he gave me lots of tapes or audition tapes for a previous film, and I discovered her through those tapes.
So I’m not sure, I didn’t fact check this, but I didn’t realize that one of her great works, her famous works in a previous film was playing a Shaman. And I think the AD, this is just something that I have a hunch on, he purposely hid it from me just so that I wouldn’t put that, take that into account when casting her. And the funny thing is that I did watch that film, and I really did love the Shaman in that film, but I never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that Kim Geum-soon, the actor I cast for my own shaman, was playing that shaman. That’s how much of a chameleon she was, and that’s how great she was.
So in the end, I got over it. When I realized that she played the Shaman, I was a bit like, “Oh, you should have told me.” [Laughs] But once I realized how she performed and just how much range she has, it wasn’t a problem for me at all. And she nailed it. We really had only, I think one day to shoot that whole scene, which really required great focus and precision and great acting, and she was very grounded from the start. She was the anchor for that whole scene for the rest of the cast and crew, as well. So I’m very grateful for her.
Sleep is out now on digital platforms.
Categorized:Interviews
