“Whenever a human remembers something, it changes every time.” This is not so for Yang, the robot caretaker played by Justin H. Min in video-essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada’s sophomore feature, “After Yang.”
Adapting Alexander Weinstein’s short story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang” from his sci-fi anthology “Children of the New World,” the South Korean-born director tweaks a Philip K. Dick lite narrative about a man (played by Colin Farrell) trying to fix a dying, cybernetic caretaker, into something more meditative like a Ryusuke Hamaguchi or Hirokazu Kore-eda picture — whose film “After Life” had a heavy influence on Kogonada (even borrowing the title from it). The “After Yang” filmmaker programmed the Kore-eda film for the American Cinemateque in Los Angeles this past week, alongside director Jun Ichikawa’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s “Tony Takitani,” which Kogonada’s recent looks into the Oscar-nominated “Drive My Car” director’s body of work, recalled the inspiration its tremendously unique symphonic film language has had on his own (he also not-so-subtly hinted Hamaguchi’s hard to find “Touching the Skin of Eeriness,” can be found online, if one wishes to partake in a deep dive.)
“You create memories out of real narrative,” Kogonada said, presenting “Tony Takitani” at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica this past week, putting an ironically apropos spin on the all-too-common artistic mantra, “write what you know.” Shooting the movie in several different aspect ratios and styles to convey the temperate and fleeting nature of human recollection in contrast to Yang’s filmed video logs. In a curiously revealing way, the Academy Ratio shot snippets we see were given a deliberate, temporal limitation by the filmmaker, despite the robot’s imaginatively infinite capacities, which recalls cinematic theories of time’s constraint on expressive form as brought to life by filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami with his seminal final statement, “24 Frames” — Kogonada noting the Kore-eda’s films “are really about the value of these little passing, fleeting moments.”
“After Yang” is very much about “growing into grief;” about the fragile nature of existence. But, much moreso even, it’s a movie about existence’s endless possibilities to open our eyes to other worlds. “I’ve always struggled with my sense of being in this world,” Kogonada said, and his remarkably sensitive adaptation “If we break any human being open, they contain worlds; they contain galaxies, and we’re often not as curious or interested in the people all around us.” “After Yang” makes sure we’re reminded to see not only the people around we might see as “other,” but the people and things they care about.
We were lucky enough to sit down for a wonderful chat with Kogonada, and talked about why Yang very much still remains a mystery to the filmmaker, how his Asianness, or the “construct of Asianness” informed his character, as well as how his debut film “Columbus” and its themes tie into those of his latest.
Something that immediately struck me watching the film was the title change. You’ve reframed the story from a day about saying goodbye to a dying robot boy into the discovery of a hidden life a father didn’t know his surrogate son had.
There’s definitely seeds in the short story that I loved, and hopefully retained some, but, honestly, the thing I love about the word “after” is that it has a double meaning – like a post-time experience. Certainly, it means after Yang no longer functions, but it also means the pursuit of something — that you’re going after something —and both of those meanings really felt right for the story. There was something in the idea that, at some point, Jake [Colin Farrell’s character] was in pursuit of Yang. Not so much to fix him, but he was really trying to understand — what’s essentially, in his mind — an appliance to him, and the short story captures this very well. He was tech that was broken, first seen as an annoying task, and then it becomes a discovery, not just of Yang, but of [Jake’s] own disconnection — the ways life has been passing him by and all that. I think I was trying to reframe it and attend to the pursuit of Yang by extending [the narrative] beyond a day.
Such a beautiful approach. It reminded me of a Murakami story in the way Jake kind of goes into sleuth mode, and then later there’s a missing person component. What’s so fascinating is that Yang’s existence is manufactured, so he’s a construct of Asianness. Jake is almost searching for the answer as to what makes someone human, in the same way Yang questions whether he’s truly Asian.
Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it. It’s a strange thing because I knew Yang wasn’t going to be your typical A.I. that wants to be human. There was a real acceptance, or recognition, of what Yang is, but I do think in its own way — as a kind of reverse mirror, or something — it also expanded Jake’s sense of humanity. At least that was our attempt. No, not even an attempt…
I’d like to talk about that mirror reversal. “After Yang” almost flips the story of “Columbus,” in a sense. Both are about a father/son mourning process. Here, you very much explore all the goodness Yang brought to a family via Jake seeing through his memories, in a similar way that Jin learned to appreciate his father’s passion through Casey’s education – learning, through her, things about his father that he never appreciated.
There’s something there, yeah. Absolutely. It’s funny, because I think “Columbus” is very much about things that are invisible — like buildings and architecture that we pass by and don’t recognize how or why some of that architecture may be speaking to us, maybe even offering something that is profound, even though it’s coming from something that may be as mundane as a bank building.
I think when we think about A.I. it’s already implicitly fascinating to us – we think that we’re going to find something that contains some hidden truth, or something really complicated. But I liked the idea that opening [Yang] up is just as simple as looking at your iPhone, or asking your grandparents a question, and realizing that there were worlds you had no awareness of. There’s something about that reversal that was really interesting to me. But I don’t mean to also dismiss it as the profoundness of how much time we carry with us. For Jake, Yang seemed like a child, but it turns out he was more of a grandfather. He had outlived them all, many times over.
I remember before really talking to my parents — who were very typical Korean parents, who didn’t talk much about their lives — they were just my parents, and I had a simple viewpoint of them. But once I started really investigating and interrogating – kind of forcing them to tell me their story — it was a world. It was a world, and it took me a while to get there. Recalling their world — a world in which I didn’t exist yet—has echoed in me, in a way that’s really meaningful.
No, completely. I can relate because when my siblings and I were caring for my Korean American father, about a month before he passed, he asked me if I wanted to ask him anything, and I said no. So, I often go back to Jin in Columbus, confessing to Casey that his father never talked to him, so why bother trying. Reading the short story, I was struck by the passage “I don’t think anyone besides her had ever hugged or kissed [Yang].” Was that a creative jumping-off point for Ada (Haley Lu Richardson’s character)? Jake had no way of knowing this robot caretaker had a love in his life.
Yeah, that was a new element. Yang is still a mystery to me, even as someone who wrote it and read the book. I liked that Yang was a bit of a mystery in the story and I didn’t want to have him all figured out. Even talking to Justin [H. Min], I didn’t say “This is who Yang is, and this is how you should play him.” Justin had secrets about Yang that I didn’t know. When we were thinking about his memory, I knew I didn’t want it to feel like computer files. However memory works in that sort of world, I wanted it to feel like we didn’t understand the interface because there was something organic to it. Part of that was about presenting elements of a relationship which were not part of his programming, or what he was designed to do. This whole idea that he could initiate his own relationships and he could experience that kind of intimacy — intimacy that was outside the family project— giving Yang interactions and worlds that I was curious about — and, honestly, that I didn’t fully understand — was certainly part of it. Letting Yang be enough of a mystery to me if I suddenly felt like a girl appeared in his world, you know?
I think the first thing that Jake sees is probably one of Yang’s recently recorded memories. That sudden spark is a disruption. What does that even mean, for him to have this girl in his life? Then we find out that kind of intimacy — which probably does have something to do with Asianness, and all of that as well — is part of the equation.
Conceptually and visually, the whole way you conceived and went about constructing his memory map as like a forest of stars .
I want to acknowledge Raul Marx, a visual artist who I got to know a little while back, and really at the last hour I asked if he would help construct it because I was such a fan of his work. He works with Antibody and they’re a great group.
I knew I wanted it to feel organic as well as somehow represent Yang’s struggle for a sense of time and place. [I had] this idea there were ways in which his memories were stored but I also wanted to feel the fragments of a place being constructed. We talked a little bit about not making it familiar in the computer kind of way, that would be an element and a foundation but it would also break into the organic world. Obviously, the imagery references space itself: a galaxy. Again, if we break any human being open, they contain worlds, they contain galaxies, and we’re often not as curious or interested in the people all around us. There are Yangs all around us that have this information and sense of time [we can’t experience].
The whole idea of how you presented his memories provokes so many fascinating questions about technology, recording, memory, and film. I’m often reminded of Kiarostami in how you use frames within frames, and I kept thinking about his film, “24 Frames,” specifically in the sense that we only ever see a few seconds of Yang’s memories. Did you have like world-building rules in regards to this?
God, that’s such a good reference. I would never compare myself to artists like Ozu or Kiarostami – I’m far too bashful – but Kiarostami is a huge filmmaker who I’ve been moved by. I wasn’t looking at that particular film, but I’m sure I was conscious of that element. Also, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “I Wish” — and I think all his films — are really about the value of these little passing, fleeting moments. There was this certain sense of memory as temporal restraint, just these fragments. So, I think I did have a bit of a rule. Let’s only capture a few seconds. That’s juxtaposed against the human memories that we also feel, which are kind of presented as repetitions. The thing about Yang’s memories is they are real recordings, there is a certainty to [them]. But there’s also something faulty about that, like you’re auditioning memories, and what you are recalling, and I think that changes every time.
Definitely. Stripping away anti-Asian hate, Russ, polarity, and political friction. Lines and details cut out, Caucasian face quote. Were you aiming for positivity given the state of the world?
Yeah, some of that was written in and I did pull some of it out. I didn’t want Russ to be such a caricature. He does represent something, but as I was putting things together in the script, I realized I didn’t want him to be reduced to that. With Yang very much struggling with the construct of Asianness — we’re both people who are Asian but we live in largely white world and we’re mediating these two sort of existences. Often, for Asians who live in America, or non-Asian countries, the diaspora of Asians can make us feel maybe we’re not Asian enough, or maybe we have to identify [in a certain way]. That construct of Asianness — internalized within the Asian identity itself — was something that I almost wanted to privilege, more than use it just as a reaction to the ways in which others might define us as other, as foreign, which is obviously a big part of the struggle of being othered at all — whether its gender, or race. I suppose that’s why there’s less of that element in the film.
“After Yang” arrives in theaters on March 4.