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The Cinema Guild Acquires Hong Sangsoo’s “The Day He Arrives,” Official Selection of Un Certain Regard at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival

Posted Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 - Comments Off on The Cinema Guild Acquires Hong Sangsoo’s “The Day He Arrives,” Official Selection of Un Certain Regard at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival
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New York, NY — The Cinema Guild announced today the acquisition of U.S. distribution rights to The Day He Arrives, the acclaimed new film from Hong Sangsoo. The deal was negotiated by Ryan Krivoshey of The Cinema Guild with Luna Kim of Finecut. Theatrical release details will be forthcoming.

Sungjoon, a film director who no longer makes films, heads to Seoul to meet a close friend. When the friend doesn’t show up, Sungjoon decides to wander around. He runs into an actress he used to know, shares a drink with some young film students, and against his better judgment, heads to his ex-girlfriend’s house. The next day, or perhaps some other day, Sungjoon finally meets his friend. They go to a bar called Novel whose owner bears a striking resemblance to his ex-girlfriend. The next day goes very much like the previous day. But for however many days Sungjoon spends in Seoul, hopefully he’ll be able to discover the unseen forces behind all the random happenings in his life.

Hong Sangsoo made his debut in 1996 with the celebrated “The Day a Pig Fell into the Well.” Since then, through the 11 films that he wrote and directed, like “The Power of Kangwon Province,” (1998) “Turning Gate,” (2002) and “Ha Ha Ha” (2010), which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Hong has consistently enjoyed using a complex and highly ordered architecture under a seemingly random surface created by spontaneous circumstances to shed insight into his characters’ lives. Renowned for his unique cinematographic language and unprecedented aesthetics in filmmaking, Hong Sangsoo is considered one of the most established auteurs in contemporary Korean cinema.

“We’ve long been admirers of Hong Sangsoo’s films,” commented Ryan Krivoshey, “so we’re especially thrilled to be releasing The Day He Arrives, his best film in years.”

The Cinema Guild is a distributor of independent, foreign and documentary films. Upcoming releases include Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz’s “The Interrupters,” Cristi Puiu’s “Aurora,”  Vadim Jendreyko’s “The Woman with the Five Elephants” and Bela Tarr’s “The Turin Horse.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon