Director Kim Mi-jo on 'Gyeongju Travelogue': 'Avengers-level cast — I couldn't afford to disappoint them'

The casting lineup alone makes "Gyeongju Travelogue" worth anticipating. Lee Jeong-eun, Gong Hyo-jin, Park So-dam, Lee Yeon and Byeon Yo-han — all in one film. The prospect of seeing actors celebrated for their craft share the screen is enough to mark the release date on the calendar. The director who has been racing toward that day alongside such a formidable ensemble can barely contain her excitement.

"The cast is so incredibly accomplished," she said. "I didn't want to bring them all together and then produce something people would trash."

The candor was disarming enough to draw a laugh — here was a filmmaker stepping from independent cinema into her first commercial feature, speaking with complete honesty. Director Kim Mi-jo sat down with The Korea Herald at a cafe in Jongno-gu, Seoul.

"Gyeongju Travelogue," opening Wednesday, is Kim's first commercial film. She burst onto the scene with her feature debut "Seagull" (2020), which won the grand prize at the Jeonju International Film Festival. Where "Seagull" centered on the voice of a middle-aged woman who survived sexual violence, her new film turns its gaze to the family of a crime victim — and to grief, mourning and revenge.

The film follows Oksil and her three daughters, who set off for Gyeongju to take revenge on the man who murdered their youngest, Gyeongju, eight years earlier. The four women — none of them capable of so much as swatting a fly — pull on matching T-shirts and head out on a revenge mission they are wholly unprepared for. Beneath the bumbling exterior lies a tangle of wounds and sorrows each has carried quietly within the family, and a burning rage that has made vengeance feel like the only possible path.

If family is the force that can make us laugh, make us cry and even drive us to a dangerous resolve like revenge, then this film — dressed in the clothes of a revenge thriller — is, at its core, an unflinchingly honest portrait of family.

Kim first conceived of the film in 2014, during a family trip to Gyeongju. The city, long a pilgrimage site for school excursions, revealed another side to her — a texture and atmosphere she had not expected. It was a place where the everyday and ancient burial mounds coexisted, where the living and the dead seemed to share the same space. That shadowy undercurrent beneath Gyeongju's bright surface made it the ideal setting for a story about family and revenge.

"I went to Daereungwon with my family, and it suddenly started raining," she recalled. "We bought ponchos at a convenience store and walked on, and as I trailed behind everyone, they all looked like people who had just killed someone and were heading down from the scene. The image I captured that day was the starting point for 'Gyeongju Travelogue.' The irony of a revenge story unfolding in a tourist destination was also part of the appeal."

Kim wrote the first draft of "Gyeongju Travelogue" in 2021. Wanting the family's journey to feel inevitable, she gave the deceased youngest daughter the name Gyeongju. In that early draft, the film was a drama centered on Oksil, with the daughters occupying a more observational role.

As she revised, Kim kept asking herself what each daughter's inner life might look like. One by one, the characters came alive. In the finished film, it is not only Oksil — played by Lee Jeong-eun — who commands the screen, but also eldest daughter Jeongju (Gong Hyo-jin), second daughter Yeongju (Park So-dam), the third daughter (Lee Yeon) and the killer Baek Seong-hyeon (Byeon Yo-han), each carrying their own story. "I wanted to avoid any character being used merely as a plot device," Kim said.

"I never imagined such wonderful actors would come on board," she said. "I genuinely think of it as an Avengers-level cast. That's exactly why I put so much care into building each character. I wanted to give every character a key scene and create moments where the ensemble performances could really shine. We held a lot of script meetings with the crew and shared a great many ideas about the characters."

Running through the film's heavy current of a daughter's death and the drive for revenge are moments of irresistible comedy. Kim never set out to make a black comedy, but her instinct to see tragedy as something other than purely tragic seeped naturally into the story. She mentioned her father, who had offered a New Year's wish that his daughter's film would become a "70-million-viewer movie." As in the film's setup, Kim is in fact the youngest of four sisters.

"I tend to start every story from somewhere inside myself — the screenplay is essentially me. I build characters by taking small parts of myself and expanding them. My father has a great sense of humor, and our family has a habit of looking for the bright side even in serious situations. Because 'Gyeongju Travelogue' is ultimately a screenplay I wrote, I think the way I see the world inevitably finds its way in."

The family's fumbling, half-hearted revenge quest passes through the faces of daughters who have each carried their own burdens — the weight of being the eldest, the second, the third — before coming to rest, finally, on Oksil's face as she stands alone before Baek Seong-hyeon.

Unlike Baek, who kills without a moment's hesitation, Oksil — even with the moment she has longed for right in front of her — confesses she feared, until the very end, that she might forgive the man who murdered her daughter. The road to revenge is agonizing, and the heart of the one who walks it is no different.

"Many people say you should 'forgive' wrongdoing," Kim said. "But does forgiveness actually resolve everything? And if you don't forgive, does that mean nothing gets resolved? I wanted to pose those questions. I thought telling someone who has suffered such a profound wound that they must forgive would offer no comfort at all. My feeling was that the fire burning inside Oksil could only be extinguished if she saw the revenge through to the end."

Kim drew considerable attention with her debut, but stepping into commercial filmmaking opened up an entirely new world. The limited shooting schedule was a major source of stress early on. As production progressed, she gradually let go of her determination to render every single scene with painstaking precision. Making this film taught her that cinema is built not from individual cuts but from scenes.

"I came to realize that learning to see the bigger picture — while making compromises with reality — is what matters," she said. "Along the way I picked up my own set of tricks. The shoot ran a little long because of the weather, but I feel like I got to do almost everything I wanted. All things considered, I'd say we held our own." She laughed.

Having just turned a new chapter as a director, Kim says "Gyeongju Travelogue" gave her the space to tell the family story she had been carrying. As she has always done, she has put a period at the end of one story and is already looking toward the next subject. More pressing for now, though, is whether the film can clear its break-even point of 1.2 million admissions. "We have to make it happen," she said, and the resolve in her voice left no room for doubt.

"What I most wanted to portray in 'Gyeongju Travelogue' was a story about a family falling apart in the face of tragedy — and each member finding themselves in the process. Just as I felt after making 'Seagull' that it was time to move on to the next question, I feel now, having told this family story, that it's all right to move on to something else. Just being able to release the film makes me happy. But above all, we need to clear that break-even point. We can do it — and we will."