A Kim Jong-Il Production

by Paul Fischer

  That done, Shin went looking for an office to rent, the bodyguards with him every step of the way. After ten days he returned to Budapest, and from there he and Choi traveled to Pyongyang. They continued to do everything they could to gain Kim’s trust. When an interview with Shin denying any abduction and confirming his free life in Eastern Europe was published in a Japanese magazine, Shin immediately sent Kim a copy and received a happy phone call in return, authorizing even more trips to Western countries.

  Shin and Choi’s relationship with their jailer was a peculiar one. Over the years Jong-Il had developed a reputation as a warm, caring studio head, at least to those workers who were loyal to him. The stories of his time at the studio, from official sources and defectors, paint a man who treated his workers kindly and generously, although he could also be unpredictable, moody, and impatient. Jong-Il often turned up on set, sitting with the production units “without ceremony” and asking them about their personal and professional lives, sometimes promising to clear away a problem they might have, like a mafia don in a Francis Ford Coppola movie. Sometimes he stayed on set the whole day. This happened less frequently on Shin’s sets, perhaps because Kim didn’t want his new protégé to chafe under an ever-watchful eye.

  When it came to the filmmaking process, Shin said, there were “fewer restrictions than is commonly believed” in terms of what he was or wasn’t allowed to film. But every film was developed in story conferences with Jong-Il, who insisted the film’s “seed” had to be suitable “from the point of view of ideological education.” They met in person only for these conferences and at parties, which Shin disliked and which he and his wife now avoided if they could. For the day-to-day running of affairs, Choe Ik-Gyu, whom both Shin and Choi deeply disliked, was their liaison to the Dear Leader, passing on any messages and requests.

  Unexpectedly, while Choi had spent more time with Jong-Il, it was Shin who had the better rapport with the Dear Leader. Shin found himself having “mixed feelings,” he admitted, for the man who had taken away his freedom and sent him to prison, only to gift him with more filmmaking and creative freedom than he had ever had. Shin had come to respect Kim’s taste in and keen understanding of movies even if, he realized, the Dear Leader had trouble differentiating fact from fiction, and often talked of James Bond or Rambo films as if they were “social realist docudramas.” Shin tried to dispel this notion while remaining careful not to make the young man feel disrespected or talked down to. On the whole, at least when it came to cinema, “he was like any ordinary young man. He liked action movies, sex movies, horror movies. He liked all the women that most men like.”

  The Dear Leader had a sense of humor and was the funniest North Korean they met; “half the time our phone conversations with Kim were taken up with jokes,” Shin said. He was, overall, honest: “when [Jong-Il] made promises, he kept them,” Shin said, and claimed Kim spoke to him openly on many topics, including the manufactured aspect of the “idolatry of the leaders” he was imposing on his people. “Many times Kim expressed his concerns about his country to me” with a candor he could not permit himself publicly, Shin said. He was nothing like the “madman” he would soon be portrayed as in the press, Shin insisted, even though he was clearly sociopathic—rather, he was “a meticulous planner who executes his projects with iron determination.” And in the end, Shin concluded, “the revolution justifies everything. The end justifies the means.”

  Even Choi reluctantly found the young man charismatic and decisive. “He pays attention to everything, he keeps track of everything.… He is simply amazing,” she said at the time. But “he thought he could do anything he wanted.” He had a habit of trying to keep the people around him on their toes, alternately praising them and putting them down so that they never knew what would come next. Sometimes he treated Choi like a respected elder, like a mother or grandmother; other times he was scathing and disdainful. Some days he flattered and praised her, while on other occasions he would criticize her clothes in front of associates. At some of the parties, he would start gossiping about South Korean film and television stars, including loudly talking about Shin’s alleged affairs, while Choi sat right next to him.

  Whenever Jong-Il tried hardest to seem powerful and effortless was when he came off looking like a child. So many of his emotions seemed fake and calculated—the way he took your hand at just the right time, or cried at old Soviet folk songs—but then there were the all-too-frequent bursts of wild jealousy or anger, which could cost you your job or your life. Shin and Choi had both met men like Kim Jong-Il, on a smaller scale: talented but not quite talented enough, powerful, jealous, insecure, and boastful; with an overinflated sense of their own importance in the world, a short temper, and an obsessive need to micromanage. Kim was, they thought, the archetypal film producer.

  * * *

  After being released from prison, Choi said, Shin “worked like a madman.” Among the North Korean elite, where laziness and inefficiency were condoned by a collective system that encouraged shifting blame and everyone received his minimum rations regardless of the quality of his work, the only person who was working harder seemed to be Kim Jong-Il, who was up at all hours, whether working on a film or planning a terrorist attack.

  Shin’s work ethic was famous among North Korean crews. In behind-the-scenes stills the fifty-eight-year-old man can be seen lying flat in the mud, operating a handheld camera himself, or standing in the center of large crews, ordering them around like a general. In the span of three short years, Shin and Choi directed seven movies and produced countless others, all of them bolder and better than every North Korean film that had come before them. The couple took real pride in their films. They were pushing boundaries not just for the sake of artistic experiment, but to give real pleasure and enlightenment to their audiences. They both later spoke, repeatedly, of their hope that the films were bringing some joy to the dark lives they saw around them. “In North Korea the social impact of movies was huge,” Shin said. “I don’t think I could have made films [just] for Kim’s family … [so] when I made films, what I was thinking of the most was the North Korean people who would enjoy my films.” It hadn’t taken long for him to “hate” communism, which he felt made “dead values” of love and family. “It was wretched lunacy,” he said of the ideology he saw at work every day.

  Of the seven films they ultimately made, only the first two—Emissary of No Return and its follow-up, Runaway—were nationalistic dramas in the usual propagandistic mold. In 1985 and 1986 they made a lighthearted romantic melodrama, Love, Love, My Love; a social-realist tragedy, Salt; an extravagant musical reminiscent of Busby Berkeley, with fantasy creatures, expensive costumes, and underwater scenes, The Tale of Shim Chong; and North Korea’s first martial arts action film, Hong Kil-Dong. Every one of the pictures broke with tradition. Love, Love, My Love was the first time romance had been portrayed on a North Korean screen, the regime having previously allowed for the concept of “love” only insofar as it related to the Party; indeed, the movie featured the first use of the word love in a North Korean film title as well as the first on-screen kiss in the country’s history. And Salt was full of sex and eroticism, including a shot of Choi breastfeeding, her bosom in full view, but also a violent and harrowing rape scene more graphic than anything Kim Il-Sung had ever allowed a filmmaker to get away with (in this case, the Supreme Leader personally sent word to praise Shin for his “commitment to realism”).

  Isolation and the state’s focus on film had already turned North Korea into a nation of cinephiles. Admission prices were deliberately kept low—the same price as a soda or candy bar—so that the average North Korean visited the cinema roughly twenty times a year, ten times more often than the average South Korean. The crowds were highly engaged and active, loud and rowdy. They oohed and aahed at the screen, cheered good guys and heckled the baddies. But Shin’s North Korean films changed everything. Now the audiences saw every movie not because film was a novelty, or because it was par
t of their ideological education, but because they loved them.

  Hyok Kang, who grew up in North Korea in the 1980s, remembered that in his hometown of Onsong, near the Chinese border, “when a new film came out … the whole city flocked to see them. An unbelievable crowd … People fought to sit down on the wooden seats.” Love, Love, My Love, in which Shin marshaled the precision and choreography of the Mass Games for the purpose of gigantic song-and-dance musical numbers, was so popular that for the first time ticket scalpers appeared on Pyongyang’s sidewalks, reselling admission stubs taken from the local Party office. Several defectors remember seeing the movie seven, eight, in one case twenty times. The end-credits song is one of the most famous tunes in North Korean history. Students put pictures of the film’s leading man up in their rooms—the first time the picture of an ordinary North Korean other than Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il appeared on residence walls, albeit unframed and on a separate wall, hidden away—and went home to fantasize not about the revolution but about him, the first North Korean leading man to be allowed sex appeal and tenderness. Citizens with neutral or hostile songbuns lobbied for jobs in the movie theaters, where they would be able to watch Shin Film works over and over again.

  Choi Eun-Hee, who starred in Salt and took supporting roles in Runaway and Shim Chong, was a household name again, known throughout North Korea. She and Shin were the most famous people in the Workers’ Paradise—excepting Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, of course. (They finally met with the Supreme Leader at one of his New Year’s Day lunches, exchanging handshakes and small talk with him for several minutes, the pinnacle of achievement for a North Korean.) Every outdoor shoot was mobbed by hundreds of people eager to see the famous filmmaker and his actress wife at work. Laborers stood by as scenes were shot near construction sites. “Almost everyone knew our names,” Shin remembered. “When we were out shooting our films, children often followed us, shouting Shin Sang-Ok! Choi Eun-Hee!”

  Shin’s films, in the words of one North Korean defector, clearly hinted at “different things” than Kim Jong-Il had so far allowed: sex, sensuality, action, fun. Shin’s fantasies suggested to ordinary North Koreans the possibility of life, of encountering something unexpected, in contrast to their real lives, which were so bland, codified, and controlled. “The most attractive thing for audiences,” one woman said, “was that [Shin Sang-Ok’s films were] a bit erotic.” Another woman agreed, adding that the most popular films were those with “kiss scenes.” Shin and Choi had been famous in the South for their strong female characters and their stories of women fighting the limitations of a patriarchal society; now they would break women free from their typecasting in North Korean cinema as mothers, wives, and fighting comrades, and allow them, finally, to be in love.

  Some of the changes were subtle. Love, Love’s leading lady, Jang Son-Hui, had sharp, almost Western features that went directly against Kim Jong-Il’s ideals of beauty, which usually determined the choice of star; and in Salt Choi spoke in a northern regional dialect, rather than the “national” accent the Workers’ Party insisted upon. Other changes were much bigger, such as the beginning of Runaway, which opens with a quote from Les Miserables (“So long as ignorance and misery remain on Earth, books like this cannot be useless…”), by Victor Hugo (a foreigner, no less), rather than the usual epigraph by the Supreme Leader; or the ending of Hong Kil-Dong, in which the hero turns his back on his native land and chooses exile over struggling for the collective dream.

  Kim Jong-Il admired Shin’s work and could not deny him things that he knew were necessary to make better films, even if this required bending his own all-important rules. Above all the Dear Leader wanted success, and he had it—but it backfired. One woman who later defected said that until 1984, “we just watched our films and documentaries and accepted them the way they were. We thought that’s how movies are. But after the Shin Sang-Ok era, we had new eyes. We could judge which movies are interesting and which are not.” A former student agreed: “Before the Shin Sang-Ok era, the movie plots were really transparent and simple. Even if we only saw the first half of a movie, we already knew the whole story. The plots were always the same. The main character went through many hardships and was always saved at the end through Kim Il-Sung’s love. Shin Sang-Ok brought a more realistic approach to cinema.… The traditional films were so boring—we wanted to see Shin’s films.” This was more than mere filmgoing excitement. Up until then, the student said, “we had been taught that the whole world consisted of our regime and our country. We couldn’t think outside of that.” But then Runaway was released and it showcased not only footage of Paris and Tokyo, but also a soundtrack of ABBA covers. Suddenly young North Koreans were humming ABBA tunes on their way to work or school and standing in the fields to re-create the dance moves they had seen on-screen. Among the elite the youth threw private (officially illegal) parties to play ABBA records imported through the Chosen Soren. And quietly everyone whispered about the foreign cities they had just seen: their bars, restaurants, and nightlife; the cars; and the white people with their variety of clothes and hairstyles. Compared to that, they thought, Pyongyang was most certainly not “the perfect, the best, the ideal city.”

  There is an old Asian saying that “drop by drop, the water perforates the stone.” Kim Jong-Il had kidnapped Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee to help promote his regime and tighten his control on his people’s thoughts. Instead, Shin and Choi’s movies were drops of water, each one slowly but surely wearing away the Kims’ supremacy.

  * * *

  Working for Kim, Choi Eun-Hee later said, was “luxury filmmaking.” Nothing was refused them. When they needed a fan to simulate wind, Jong-Il sent them a helicopter. When they requested fake snow in the middle of spring, Jong-Il flew the entire crew to the top of Mount Paekdu, the only place in the country where snow still lingered. When they planned a scene with thousands of extras, Jong-Il put at their service the entire military. And, in what he later called the high point of his directing career, when Shin needed special-effects scale models to achieve a shot of an exploding train for the climax of Runaway, he asked, tongue-in-cheek, whether Kim wouldn’t just give him instead a real train to blow up. To his surprise, an actual, functioning train was delivered to the set, loaded to the brim with explosives. Shin had only one take to get it right, but that was a lovely problem to have. Runaway’s final train explosion became one of North Korean cinema’s iconic images.

  Salt received rave reviews internationally—another first, as critics tended to disparage North Korean films, even Shin’s—and Choi won the Best Actress award at the Moscow Film Festival, the most prestigious prize ever received for a North Korean film and the second international award of the Shin era. Choi’s performance was unprecedented in North Korean cinema history for its naturalism and nuance. (Choi was permitted to go to Moscow to accept the award, and after the ceremony she and Shin sat in their hotel room taking pictures with the small trophy: they knew they might never win another, and that this one, as soon as they touched the tarmac back in Pyongyang, would be taken to Kim Jong-Il and forever remain his.) Hong Kil-Dong was a huge box-office hit in the Eastern Bloc, becoming one of 1986’s top-grossing films in Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. These were relatively humble achievements, but still unprecedented in the history of North Korean film, as well as heights it would never scale again.

  With every success, Shin and Choi’s travel restrictions were eased slightly. They were frequently in Budapest and Moscow, giving interviews and taking meetings, in the hope that these short trips would convince the world they resided in Eastern Europe of their free will; and now Kim Jong-Il allowed them to travel as far as West Germany, where they filmed the underwater scenes of The Tale of Shim Chong at the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich. Alfred Hitchcock had shot his first film there, and in recent years the soundstages had played host to The Great Escape, Cabaret, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Now Shin and Choi walked this hallowed ground, albeit shadowed nonstop by seven b
odyguards, who hovered over them on every set, at every production meeting, at every lunch. Unlike the previous minders—usually film workers—these guards had been taken from Kim Jong-Il’s own bodyguard corps.

  Jong-Il’s elite team of bodyguards was one of the most sinister, intriguing aspects of his way of life. He kept 120 of them and preferred them to be orphans; once hired they were not permitted to visit home or to ever leave the Leader’s side. If they wanted to marry, they were only allowed to marry a typist or secretary from a specific unit of the Party, and the matchmaking procedure itself was bizarre. A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife. If the bodyguard refused to marry the stranger, he would have to wait another two years before being able to reapply—and this time he would have to marry the girl whose photograph he had blindly drawn, whether he liked the look of her or not, at risk of being dismissed. Once married, the guard and his bride were provided with a house, paid for by the Party; the wife would be installed there, and the guard would be permitted to visit her once a week.

  The bodyguards were trained at a special college outside Pyongyang where the curriculum taught them how to blindly put their lives on the line for Kim Jong-Il, and how to most ruthlessly eliminate any potential threat. Jong-Il preferred them polite and quiet. In later years he took to showing new recruits the Clint Eastwood action picture In the Line of Fire, about a Secret Service agent who is haunted by his failure to save President Kennedy and determined to save a new president from the threats of a maniac, as a how-to video of what he expected of them.