Sleep – Jason Yu: “I learned everything from watching Bong Joon-ho do it”

Grand Prize at the Gerardmer Fantastic Film Festival, Sleep tells the story of how a couple’s daily life is turned upside down when the husband becomes a sleepwalker. Express interview with filmmaker Jason Yu, as the film hits theaters today.

A few hours before he won the Grand Prix at the Gerardmer festival, we met Jason Yu in the lounges of the grand hotel. For his first feature film, Yu takes a horrifying behind closed doors look at the life of a very happy couple, upset by the husband’s sleepwalking attacks. The latter terrorizes his wife by getting up in the middle of the night and behaving completely erratically (he eats an egg without removing the shell, tries to jump out of the window or compulsively scratches his face). Anxieties and jumpscares will follow the evolution of the symptoms until a stunning finale. Sleep hits theaters today.

How did you come up with the idea of Sleep ?
I wanted to make a film about sleepwalking. It’s a great idea, because it’s a truly terrifying experience. For the person suffering from this illness, but also for those around them. However, at the time, I didn’t know too much about horror films. But I heard about these stories in which a man jumps out of the window while he is sleeping or kills the person sharing his bed… And that fascinated me. Less for these aspects of terror elsewhere, than for what this induces in the daily lives of these people. I was very curious about the lives of the people around a sick person. What can the wife or husband of a sleepwalker endure? It had to be a good story.

And how did you start writing the film?
Very gradually and enriching it with personal elements. At the time I was working on this project I was getting married to my girlfriend. This is the reason why the two main characters embody a married couple and why the heart of the story lies less in the fantastic developments, than in the life of this couple. Usually the stories of couples in the cinema are very cynical, but for me, because I was experiencing a very happy moment in my love life, I wanted my description of life as a couple to be optimistic. I wanted to describe a happy couple, who functioned as friends, and who were going to be undermined by an exogenous element.

At the beginning of the film, there is even a veneer of romantic comedy. Was it wanted?
No way. I can see that people laugh during the film but I have never seen Sleep like a comedy.

However, it seems to be part of the construction of the film, which starts from light, even absurd elements, and plunges into the supernatural and horror…
I know. It’s a funny feeling for me: I’ve always considered all my short films – and Sleep as well – as dramas. But at festivals they are always classified as comedies or films with black humor. I’m making drama! Because I have the feeling, without wanting to be pompous, that life is nestled in drama. That said, even in the worst situations, in horrible or sad moments, there is always a little humor. And I think my films are sometimes perceived as comedies because I like the absurd. look Sleep : the situation is as crazy as it is dramatic, but the characters must react to these paroxysmal situations and they do so with sincerity. This is what produces comedy effects.

This mix of genres and these absurd situations that you talk about remind us that you started working for Bong Joon-ho.
It’s true. My first job out of college was assisting Bong Joon-ho. I was assistant director on Okja. I spent two and a half years following him around and watching him work, from pre-production to post-production and even during promotion. At the time I didn’t realize how much I learned from seeing him make his film. It is only by doing Sleep that I understood everything he had silently instilled in me. I repeated at every stage everything I had seen him do on Okja.

For example ?
Bong Joon-ho works a lot from storyboards. From the first scene to the end credits, his entire film is storyboarded. Obviously as I had only worked with him, I imagined that everyone did the same – I was wrong (laughs). At the start of production Sleep, while nothing was signed, I had already storyboarded the sequences and people said to me: “why did you storyboard your entire film, when you’re not even sure you’ll do it?” I told them that it was the only way I knew how to make a film (laughs). In the same way, I used what I had seen him do during the dubbing. Bong completely rewrites certain scenes at this point, he reinvents the story that he can modify up to that point. This is, for him, the last stage of the scenario.

You also collaborated with Lee Chang-dong.
And it was an incredible experience. At the time for a living, I created English subtitles for Korean films. And I was contacted to take care of the subtitles for Burning. Usually, when I create subtitles, I translate the Korean dialogues, send my text, and that’s it. With Lee Chang-dong, we had more than a month of exchanges where he asked me to justify the use of a word, a verb or an expression. It was very enriching. This must come from the fact that he also wrote books and especially that he wrote the dialogues himself. I knew English better than him, but that was his job. He was always changing things. He wanted to know all the nuances of a word, all the subtleties. Sometimes I told him that a formula would sound strange in English, that no one spoke that way, but he didn’t care: in his Korean dialogues there were strange things and he wanted it to sound strange in English. Lee Chang-dong is a filmmaker who has a unique vision and that extended right down to the subtitles. He is a very meticulous, very precise artist, who wants to know what is happening in all the details.

Since we are talking about details, why did you choose a structure in three chapters?
When I wrote the first version of the script, there were these three chapters. It must have been unconscious: I knew that the story took place in a closed place and I wanted to progress the action in a methodical way. It was also linked to the limited budget. I couldn’t show everything, I knew I would be forced to make choices. The three-part structure allowed me to focus on three moments in the couple’s story, as if they were three different little stories, three chapters. It also showed the evolution of the couple’s relationship. And it finally worked like a puzzle: each ellipse created a form of mystery that the spectator would be forced to recreate for themselves. I really liked this playful aspect and I love hearing people come up with theories as they leave the room, imagining what could have happened to fill in the narrative gaps.

Who were your influences?
People talk to me about Rosemary’s Baby or Shining. These are films that I love, and which have had an impact on me. But to be honest, I didn’t have any specific influence other than the structure of a play. It was almost embarrassing: my team regularly came to ask me what they could draw inspiration from for a decor or an atmosphere and I gave them the same answer each time: “take inspiration from my life”. Obviously, that didn’t help them much!

Sleep, currently in cinemas.