Interview

In Another Country: Isabelle Huppert on finding the language of emotion in Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs

Rafa Sales Ross
Finding the beauty everywhere.
Finding the beauty everywhere.

With the release of A Traveler’s Needs, her third collaboration with director Hong Sang-soo, star Isabelle Huppert speaks to Rafa Sales Ross about the freedom of his unusual filmmaking style and the universal language of cinema.

There is something very philosophical about Hong Sang-soo, time ing, what it means to be alone, what it means to speak to someone else… These are all very basic human things but he explores them at the core of what it means to understand someone.

—⁠Isabelle Huppert

Iris (Isabelle Huppert) is not your regular French teacher. She has no textbooks, no flashcards and no memorization tools. What she does have is a method: to fish out a student’s rawest emotions and translate them into French, scribbling the result onto a piece of paper and handing it back to them in the hopes that the catharsis of confession will help them better absorb the language.

A Traveler's Needs

A Traveler's Needs 2024

Directed by Hong Sang-soo

Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveler’s Needs trails Iris as she meets different students across Seoul over the course of a day. The teacher roams around parks, picks up musical instruments she has no idea how to play and takes large sips of makgeolli (a milk-based Korean alcoholic drink) with the ease of someone unrestrained by rusty ideas of professionalism. Like most of Hong Sang-soo’s films, the simplicity of the premise gives way to a magic of sorts, one that comes out of humans figuring out their way around each other in all its clunkiness and wonder.

In Another Country

In Another Country 2012

Directed by Hong Sang-soo

Claire's Camera

Claire's Camera 2017

Directed by Hong Sang-soo

A Traveler’s Needs marks the third collaboration between the South Korean director and the French actor, following 2012’s In Another Country and 2017’s Claire’s Camera. Filipe puts it well when he says, “All Hong/Huppert movies are very self-aware about her presence.” The star’s unique magnetism imbues their collaborations with an enhanced awareness of the relationship not only between director and actor but also between creative collaborators from different cultures, with Marc noting that, “Hong’s films are always about (mis) communication, but never more apparently so than in the films with Huppert.”

Hong’s latest is a story about language beyond just communication, prodding at how translation thwarts emotion—be it through poetry or long-buried truths painfully bubbling to the surface. “I’m especially moved by the way this expands on Hong’s use of language in earlier films,” says Audrey, adding, “Instead of secondary languages solely being a means to an end, they also act as a way to better understand your own emotions. There are things too innate to express with the words we know.”

As I prepare to speak to Huppert, I can’t help but think of English as our bridge, too—her French seeping through her words as my Portuguese does through mine. How deep would we have to dig to find the small cultural references buried within our questions and answers? Can we ever fully understand one another while standing atop this foreign viaduct? I don’t know, and neither does she. When I ask her, she feels less interested in discussing the ins and outs of acting in a different dialect and much more curious to know how I connect to my partner, whose native language isn’t my own, either.

I can feel Iris still within her when she asks me this question, one I’m not fully prepared to rummage through myself. So I steer her back into Hong Sang-soo, the freedom of the foreign and the joys of being given the time to appreciate what we should never overlook.

Some laughs and some makgeolli.
Some laughs and some makgeolli.

You have often worked outside of your native language. Do you feel you act differently in English than in French">Isabelle Huppert: I think you are not the same person when you speak a different language and [I’ve] always thought so. It’s the way you speak, the way your face moves, where you place your hesitations… It makes you a different person. English is a connective language, a go-between language and, in this film, it isn’t like I was speaking English with English-speaking people. I am French and the actors are Korean so we were all speaking a foreign language together and being different people together.

And you and Hong have different native languages, of course. Are you ever curious about how it would feel to speak to him in his native Korean?
I don’t think it would make that much difference because cinema is also a language in a way, and I think the main language we experience is the one of cinema. I believe I could make a movie with someone who doesn’t speak a single language that I would understand but, because cinema is a language of its own, we would connect in the best possible way.

I often think about married people or couples who don’t speak the same language and it always fascinates me how they connect. If you decide to be together and you don’t speak the same language, how does that work? It’s the same with me and Hong, even though we don’t share a love relationship. How do you connect completely? I am not sure and I am also not sure I could cope with this in a love relationship, not one of cinema.

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation 2003

Directed by Sofia Coppola

How did it feel to thread those lines between the fictional and factual as a Frenchwoman in a foreign country?
Being in Korea, where I cannot read the alphabet and therefore cannot read the inscriptions and signs on the streets, was a very special experience. Everything is foreign to me, which I very much like. I think that’s something that Sofia Coppola explored so well and in such a universal way with Lost in Translation. She really touched upon a very crucial point of what it feels like to be immersed in a completely strange place all of a sudden.

That also makes me think that, through language, Iris tries to explore what is going on in people’s minds and to connect people with their thoughts, questionings, and consciousness. I like to define her as both a fairy and a witch because she can read people’s unconscious thoughts and then try to make them think certain things about themselves. She tries to bring people to a certain level of consciousness of where they are, what they dream of, and what regrets they have. She is hungry to investigate, to dig deeper.

Kim Min-hee and Isabelle Huppert in Claire’s Camera (2017), shot in nine days at Cannes.
Kim Min-hee and Isabelle Huppert in Claire’s Camera (2017), shot in nine days at Cannes.

Hong’s sets are becoming smaller and smaller, and the shooting days fewer and fewer. Do you think this elusive shooting period comes with a certain freedom?
Yes, because everything is so unusual. Hong is trying to make films in fewer and fewer days. Our first film together was shot in thirteen days, the second in nine and we shot this one in just six days. There is no script, no character, not even a story. When I ed, all I knew was that I was going to play a very special teacher, certainly not a traditional schoolteacher, but he didn’t say much else to me. I love that. Doing a movie, by definition, is always jumping into the unknown, even if you have a full script and know all your dialogue. For me, it doesn’t make a difference. Films are exaggerations anyway—it’s about doing things for the first time, and each time you do it—even if you know the lines—it’s improvisation by definition. Films are an experience, not a theorem.

Do you think an experience like this bleeds into your next project?
No, I wouldn’t say that. I think each experience is something in itself and stays contained in itself. I don’t connect a work to something that comes next because everything is so unique by definition. Every director, story and set is unique. When it’s over, it’s over. If anything, it just gives me the wish and the willingness to do another film like it.

There is a certain giddiness to Iris that I feel is the opposite of the severity and tension of a lot of your most notorious characters. I love how she giggles so freely and prances around her emotions. How was it to embody that youthful giddiness?
I love this moment with the husband because it is completely unexpected, and it comes from Hong’s huge talent to create situations with dialogue. All of a sudden, everything becomes so funny. In that scene, when we are all sitting on the couches, I am speaking about drinking two bottles of makgeolli and we are getting a little drunk. Then suddenly in the next scene, you find me on top of the terrace, lonely and melancholic. These situations are loaded with so much meaning, so much reasoning, just like in music. You resent everything.

Because Hong doesn’t give you any indication of your performance, the situations are so strong and so meaningful. That is almost the mystery and the strength of what he does. There is nothing you can anticipate or figure out before doing it. The dialogue is so exquisite and very much written, there is nothing that you would want to change. It’s not so easy to learn because he gives you the dialogue two hours before shooting, so you have to go over and over in your head, which creates a little tension. In life, you don’t know what you are going to say next, so learning the text at the last minute also creates this uncertainty about the next line. It’s the same as this conversation we are having right now. I have no idea what I will tell you next and that is exciting somehow.

Isabelle Huppert in In Another Country (2012), her first collaboration with Hong Sang-soo.
Isabelle Huppert in In Another Country (2012), her first collaboration with Hong Sang-soo.

The sounds of the film stayed with me—water falling, soup slurping, the harshness of musical instruments against the morning quietness. Are you attuned to the sounds around you when acting?
In a way, you connect with everything. The sound, the light, the space. If I’m lying on top of a mountain, I am experiencing a feeling like I would in real life, where you get to enjoy nature and the silence. The power of how Hong Sang-soo makes films is that he makes you enjoy feeling very strongly about things that, in principle, you should enjoy anyway. Sometimes when films are loaded with music, it disconnects you from being attuned to something very simple, very evident—light, nature, sound, voices. When this is happening in places that are empty and mostly quiet, you enjoy it all the more.

Hong famously doesn’t give many interviews. Do you ever feel a sense of responsibility in representing his films with press and audience-facing events?
What I love and respect is that he is very private and doesn’t want to share his process. It’s not always easy to make myself understood. It’s surreal. I have never done things like this before. The film belongs to him.

I love his films, all of them, and find them very different. Yet they all have the same kind of tone, and I like that they are funny while also being somewhat tragic and able to say something about life. You feel that everybody in his films is on a quest for something: love, time… For me, it’s the themes of a philosopher. There is something very philosophical about Hong Sang-soo. Time ing, what it means to be alone, what it means to speak to someone else… These are all very basic human things, but he explores them at the core of what it means to understand someone. To try to know someone. It’s very simple but very, very complicated at the same time. I find it beautiful.

‘A Traveler’s Needs’ is in US theaters November 22 from Cinema Guild.

Rafa Sales Ross

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