Because I'd already written several scripts, I wanted to be on set, behind the camera. 'La musica' seemed to me to be suitable for a debut film. First, because it's a film without any secondary roles. Then, because it poses a challenge to mise en scène: how to show two people 'locked up' on-screen, who talk to each other for an hour... I am delighted with my actors. Delphine Seyrig and Robert Hossein are like magic: they are born actors and of the same ilk. It was difficult to find a woman and a man and to marry them. Together, they form a couple I believe in. Julie Dassin has a kind of wildness combined with a certain purity.  

She is thirty-three and thirty-seven. 

Against all fashions of thought, of living and dressing and speaking and loving and behaving and lying.

Meaning that she doesn't let herself be led by any common standard of living, of dressing, of loving, etc., because she is subject to some strange directive from which she has trouble escaping. In other words, she doesn't have any principles. Rather, she has what might be called 'a temperament that is not masked by character'. In other words, she isn't encumbered by psychology. It is out of self-interest that she comes off as incompetent. She is incredibly competent. It is not out of self-interest that she lies, but because she has a fundamental need to hide things. Where does this need for concealment come from? From the absolutism of her inescapably tragic character. 

***

The man talks about the solitary outings of the woman because he has a need for storytelling and because he takes a sort of delight in the historical pain he experiences in the telling of this painful story.

Their last meeting no longer bears the traces of any grievances or wrongdoings. All wrongdoings and quarrels have evaporated. With the termination of married life, at last there is no longer anything left to obstruct feeling. 

“He is like an offered book, of which we discover that certain pages have been carefully torn out and therefore everything is suddenly missing. His films don’t need our agreement; they require total rallying.”

“Poetic by its precision, attentive to duration, to the uncertainty of the moment, to outlined movements and to what they betray or control: Hong Sang-soo’s cinema seems to consist only of details, of contingent moments that suddenly get out of hand or explode. “I never aim for generalization; there’s never a global view on society at the origin of a film or even a shot. It seems to me that reality can only appear between the cracks of discrete, hypothetic, uncertain elements. I am wary of clichés and big expressions. I do not believe, for example, that something we could call ‘the’ contemporary Korea exists. I never try to share a truth, but only approximations.””