Director Hirokazu Kore-eda on Broker, stolen babies — and the success of Korean films

Hirokazu Kore-eda returned from South Korea having seen the future. For almost 30 years, the director has been a linchpin of Japanese cinema as well as a global presence, a maker of beloved, bittersweet dramas of family life in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Kamakura and more. His new film Broker, however, is to all intents Korean. Set and shot in locations from Busan to the coastal city of Yeongdeok, it arrives with the world having fallen for Korean films and TV series. Kore-eda believes he knows why.

“In South Korea, the film set is a healthy environment,” he says. Ten years ago, he notes, the movie industry there was still often mired in harassment and abuses of power. Since then, a cultural overhaul has centred the importance of professional behaviour.

Directors don’t tend to spend interviews talking about this kind of thing. For Kore-eda, it is fundamental. “Because the set is a healthy workplace, young people want to join the industry, which in turn brings young energy to productions. So a virtuous circle develops. Because that energy is a huge part of why Korean content is now so successful.”

Kore-eda, 60, is a wry presence. Today, he is in Copenhagen, his career being celebrated by the Danish Film Institute. But our conversation stays with Korea. The résumés of the crew of his new film are filled with hits from the ongoing “Korean wave”: acclaimed movies such as Burning and Train to Busan; wildly popular series including My Mister and Squid Game (naturally). A still more visible link is with the Oscar-winning Parasite, whose garrulous patriarch Song Kang-ho now stars in Broker. (The performance saw him named Best Actor at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.)

But the seed of the project dates back to before any of the above. The usual starting point for a Kore-eda film is the actors he wants to work with. And finding an idea for Song had been an ambition for years. “For at least a decade, we’d meet at festivals and remind each other we wanted to work together. So all that time, I’ve been seeking a subject that would allow us to.”

It would finally arrive as a story bound up with children on the margins of society. Kore-eda’s films often are. In the past, he has answered questions about his own childhood with the single word “normal”. But he has also described his upbringing in 1960s Tokyo as being short of money, if brightened by a love of cinema, discovered watching movies with his mother.

In Broker, Song plays one of a pair of criminals who steal a newborn anonymously left in a church “baby box”, planning to sell the infant to childless parents. That might read as the outline of a grim thriller. (Or ill-advised comedy.) With Kore-eda, it becomes humanist, melancholy — lovely, even.

The director first started work on ideas involving baby boxes after reading of Japan’s one example, in a Catholic hospital in Kumamoto. Later, he discovered they were widespread across South Korea.

To Kore-eda, the flow of influence across borders is more complex than it can seem. Cyclical too. When he was beginning his career in the early 1990s, he says, young Korean filmmakers looked for inspiration to Japanese directors such as late arthouse giant Shinji Sōmai. “And now young Japanese filmmakers are envious of the success of Korean cinema. But they also want to learn from it.”

Kore-eda first found international acclaim with Maborosi, his 1995 tale of a marriage between a widow and widower, she with a son, he with a daughter. It had the emotional ache that would become his signature, while never feeling less than authentic. (Kore-eda trained in documentary.) The tone was set for a body of work including gossamer family portrait Still Walking (2008); Like Father, Like Son (2013), an understated epic of newborns switched at birth; and 2018’s flawless Shoplifters. Among admiring western critics, there was talk that his low-key delicacy spoke of a vaguely defined Japanese sensibility. “I still don’t really understand what a ‘Japanese sensibility’ is,” Kore-eda says.

But Broker is his second consecutive film made outside Japan. The Truth, released in 2019, was a French chamber piece starring — who else? — Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. Again, he says he was simply led by wanting to work with the actors. Both The Truth and Broker still provided small lessons in cultural context. Kore-eda says his French cast advised that their characters should be more verbal than his script suggested. Shooting Broker, the Korean actors proposed impassioned outbursts.

I ask Kore-eda if there has been any resentment from the Japanese film community to him working abroad, the way British lips can purse at talent exiting for Hollywood. He pauses for some seconds, his expression somewhere near amusement. “I wonder,” he says eventually. (He recently returned to Japan as showrunner on Netflix series, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House.)

But Kore-eda’s place in Japan has also been contentious. In 2018, Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes before achieving splendid box office results in China and the US. Such a triumph might have been expected to be praised by the Japanese ministry of culture. But Shoplifters was also a film about a Tokyo family in poverty, surviving through petty crime. Shinzo Abe’s government said nothing. “Certain voices saw it as being anti-Japan,” Kore-eda says. “Because it spotlit something about the nation they saw as shameful.” Yet that silence backfired when the failure to acknowledge the film was raised in the Japanese parliament. An invitation to the ministry followed. Kore-eda declined.

“Because I didn’t want only to celebrate the success, or have it used politically. I wanted the issues in the film to be discussed.”

Once more, things went differently in Korea. Last year, Kore-eda says, Song was invited to a celebratory dinner with South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol after his Cannes prize. There too was Kore-eda’s friend Park Chan-wook, the Korean film-maker named Best Director at the festival for his romantic thriller Decision to Leave. “So Park Chan-wook accepted his invitation. And then he used the event to raise the challenges facing Korean film, and ask for the government’s support. I thought: ‘Ah, that’s what I should have done, isn’t it?’ But he is clearly more mature than me.”

Immaturity is not a word one associates with Kore-eda. Like all his films, Broker has endless nuance. Even in a story about the black market in stolen babies, there are rarely heroes and villains. That approach to his characters — giving everybody light and shade — tells a tale about his films in general. You can read it as an ethical choice: a commitment to represent people as they truly are. It also makes for a better movie.

The same dual logic ripples everywhere in his work. In young performer Im Seung-soo, Broker introduces yet another gifted child in a Kore-eda film. The director says that, while careful to keep his child actors focused, he aims to make the shoot enjoyable for them. “I want them to look forward to it. Do that, and the performance follows.”

He circles back to the general need for toxicity-free film sets. “It’s important because the end-product becomes immeasurably better. It might sound selfish, but a working environment where people can speak freely means they use their energy for good creative decisions, rather than being afraid.

“Right now, there is a discussion going on across Japan about the subject of workplace exploitation. And in Japanese cinema, this is how I’d like my influence felt. Filming in Korea, you could see how much difference it made just with people getting enough sleep. Again, I come back to the idea of whether young people will want to be part of the film industry. Because that is the real danger for cinema.”

‘Broker’ is in UK cinemas from February 24

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