A Film Made Almost Entirely Out of Uncut Scenes ¹

A feature built out of long, uninterrupted takes, and the small arithmetic problem — eight eggs, an unknown number of retakes — that came with shooting it that way.

Conversation follows three women who studied together in Paris in their late twenties and are now, in their late thirties, no longer as close as that shared history might suggest — the plot, on the page, is not much more elaborate than a series of conversations between people who used to know each other well. What distinguishes the film formally is how it is shot: almost the entire runtime is built out of long, unbroken single takes, one scene to a shot, with no cuts inside a scene to smooth over a stumble or reset a prop.²

It premiered in the Korean Cinema Today section at the 26th Busan International Film Festival in October 2021, directed by Kim Deok-joong, and had its theatrical release on 23 February 2023.³ The two-year gap between festival premiere and general release is ordinary for a Korean independent film of this size, though we have not independently confirmed why in this particular case.

Long, uncut takes solve some problems and create others. In a joint Cine21 interview, actor Park Jong-hwan — who plays a lead role, Seung-jin, and is profiled elsewhere in this issue — described a scene built around a shared meal where a prop ran into trouble simply because the take count kept climbing: with around eight eggs on set and no certainty how many takes the scene would need, he said he started by eating a whole egg per take and later switched to splitting them in half, to make sure there would be enough left for however many more takes the scene took.² It is a small, logistical detail rather than a dramatic one, and it is also one of the more concrete pieces of information available about how this film was actually made.

His co-star, Jo Eun-ji, described a separately shot single-take scene — set in a taxi, with her character drunk and half-asleep — as physically difficult enough that she asked the director to push it to another day rather than continue, which speaks to the same production method from a different angle.

Here is what none of the sources available for this piece say: where any of it was filmed. Reviews describe an apartment interior, an apartment stairwell, a park with a circular walking path, a taxi, a parking lot, and a café one interviewee described as looking "too Korean" to convincingly stand in for Paris. A dedicated interview with director Kim Deok-joong on the production discusses these same settings without naming a single one of them. A Korean government filming-location database surfaced in an early search for this piece and looked, briefly, like an answer — it turned out to catalogue an unrelated public park with no stated connection to this production at all.

We are not going to invent a location this film's own director didn't give an interviewer. For where the actor profiled in this issue actually studied — a real, nameable place — read the companion piece on Seoul Institute of the Arts.

1. ¹ SAMPLE COPY — preview build, not a published piece. Conversation is a real, released feature film. This piece is written from published interviews and review coverage, not from a screening: no Second Look Korea editor has seen it. Nothing here is a verified review until fact and legal review is complete.
2. ² Production detail and quotations from a two-part joint interview with actors Park Jong-hwan and Jo Eun-ji, Cine21, on the making of Conversation.
3. ³ Premiere and release dates per the Korean Film Archive (Cinematheque KOFA) programme record and Cine21's film database entry (movie_id 58634).

TITLE

Conversation · 컨버세이션

DIRECTOR

Kim Deok-joong

FORMAT

2023 · 120 min · feature

REVIEWED IN

Issue Three