Past Lives director needed star Greta Lee to be a little bad at Korean

Previous Lives takes place throughout time and international locations — and languages. Nora, the character on the heart of A24’s acclaimed new drama, switches between her native Korean and the English she’s spoken since she was 12 years previous. It’s firmly a bilingual movie.

Crafting a bilingual film means accepting that the nuances of its language will in all probability be misplaced on many of the viewers, writer-director Celine Track tells Polygon. However, she took nice care in guiding her actors to search out the precise technique to converse in each of the languages, to make it possible for the best way they pronounced phrases made sense for his or her characters.

The film follows two childhood sweethearts, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Nora (Greta Lee), over the course of their lives, revisiting them in 12-year increments. The 2 half methods of their youth, when Nora’s household immigrates to Canada; reconnect of their younger maturity, solely to half methods once more as a result of pressure of a long-distance connection; and within the current day, Hae Sung visits a married Nora for a few days in New York Metropolis.

Photograph: Jon Pack

In one of many movie’s most memorable scenes — the scene that picks up what the enigmatic introduction teases — Nora sits at a bar with Hae Sung and Arthur, and interprets for them. Arthur is studying just a little little bit of Korean and Hae Sung is satisfactory together with his English, in order that they do handle to have one dialog collectively when Nora is within the toilet. However in any other case, every of the lads waits as Nora talks to the opposite, unable to know.

In actual life, Yoo speaks English, and the actors have been advised what the dialogue was. So, determining simply how Hae Sung and Arthur converse of their non-native tongues, and the way they react to what’s being spoken round them, added a brand new layer to the appearing and directing decisions.

“Teo Yoo, as a result of he speaks English, he tried to emulate the best way that non English audio system, particularly Korean ones, converse English,” Track says. “I believed it turned out so superbly.”

On the flip aspect, Arthur has a number of scenes the place he clumsily tries to talk in Korean, and it’s implied that he’s been slowly studying the language. Magoro initially wished to apply just a little extra and get higher at Korean, however Track had different concepts.

Photograph: John Pack/Twenty Years Rights/A24

“I used to be like, No, it ought to be type of dangerous, as a result of that’s the character. The character is attempting to be taught Korean,” she says. “It’s not likely a matter of, like, Does he converse Korean? It’s extra he’s attempting, and I believe that effort felt actually significant.”

However essentially the most fascinating case of language is Nora herself. She’s fluent in each Korean and English, switching between the 2 relying on the context. Nevertheless, there’s a distinction in the best way she speaks in Korean and the best way she speaks in English. For non-Korean audio system, that is delicate, a small vocal shift which may not appear important, however Track tells us that it was deliberate.

“Greta’s degree of Korean, I really feel like, was excellent for the film,” explains Track. “As a result of she seems like a child when she speaks Korean as a result of she emigrated when she was a child and she or he solely actually speaks to her mother and father in Korean. So it type of made sense that she spoke Korean in a childlike approach.”

Photograph: Jin Younger Kim/Twenty Years Proper

Like Magoro, Lee wished to get higher at Korean for the film. But it surely wasn’t the precise selection for a personality who left the nation and the language in her childhood. Track says that she advised Lee to not enhance her Korean.

“It ought to really feel just a little bit like [she is] attempting to maintain up with the language.”

In Previous Lives, language ties every part within the film collectively, linking Nora’s childhood — the model of herself left behind in Korea — to her present-day mostly-English-speaking self. However although Nora’s Korean will not be so polished, it’s nonetheless the language she subconsciously reaches for. In a single specific evocative scene, Nora and Arthur lie in mattress speaking, and Arthur mentions that every time she sleep talks, it’s at all times in Korean. It’s part of her and ceaselessly can be.

Previous Lives is in theaters now.