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Interview: Kogonada Talks Columbus, Formalism, Ozu, & More

Kogonada on working with Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho and seeking “modernism with a soul.”

Interview: Kogonada Talks Columbus, Formalism, Ozu, & More
Photo: Superlative Films

Kogonada is a name familiar to many cinephiles. His video essays, often featured on the Criterion Collection’s website and releases, are tightly edited celebrations of his favorite filmmakers, among them Ingmar Bergman, Wes Anderson, Robert Bresson, and Yasujirō Ozu. With videos devoted to exploring the presence of hands, centering, passageways, and more in directors’ works, it can be said with relative clarity that Kogonada is consistently, and literally, engaged in a project of deconstructing cinema. That his subjects are often auteurs gives his essays a poetic dimension, as they keep vigil over the certain something—he might say “form”—that makes their films stay with us.

It comes as little surprise, then, that his first feature feels like the work of a precocious—though scarcely pretentious—student. Columbus takes place in the namesake town in Indiana, a small Midwestern municipality that also happens to be a mecca of modernist architecture. The film is as much a meditation on form, space, and time as it is a study of the nascent friendship between Jin (John Cho), in town to visit his ill father, and Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a bright 19-year-old with an amorphous passion for architecture. It’s a small picture that’s both brainy and deeply emotional.

Last week, I met Kogonada at Cinetic Media, where we talked about working with actors, being influenced by Ozu, and seeking “modernism with a soul.”

How did your video-essay work inform the making of Columbus? They seem to have some formal similarities.

In many ways I was workshopping and playing with form itself. It was happening in a public space where I was kind of engaging cinematic forms that interest me and reworking them in ways that I found interesting and compelling, and so, certainly, it was part of this larger conversation I was having in my head about cinema and always with a desire to maybe one day make a film. That’s a big dream, you know, to say, “I’m gonna make a film,” so I didn’t necessarily think that that was possible, but it was there. So I think it informs it because it’s a part of the same conversation in some ways.

In other interviews you’ve given you talk about this idea of form a lot. What does form mean for you?

I think content is obvious. Content is what we always talk about, and sometimes when we see a film we immediately talk about the story of the film. We interpret and we do it with art itself. I understand that, and one can really be challenged by the idea of something. I’ve definitely gone through periods, and still do, in which that’s something that I engage, but I think in my own personal life, the thing that’s stayed with me, like the thing that I find my whole being altered by, is something that’s harder to articulate, which is kind of the form of something that stays with me. And whether it’s a presentation of time or even space itself, it’s harder for me to shake off because it’s not just something that I’ve reduced to an idea or story and there’s something about that that fascinates me. Growing up, my dad was always his own kind of formalist—not in an academic or theoretical way, but he always told me to pay attention to those kinds of things. He and my mom would often take walks and sometimes he would often come home with a branch or a rock, and he would always say, “Do you see this?” And I’d say, “Yeah, it’s a rock or branch.” [He’d then say to really] look at it. He’d really make me pay attention to the form of things that I pass by all the time and to appreciate it, to note it. So that has, I think, also been a part of my being.

Do you fear that people engage with content to the detriment of form?

It can be a distraction. You know what I love about architecture and food? Both kind of make you contend with form. If you made a meal and you just talked about some idea, some story of the meal, but not the way it tastes, not the way you’re really responding to it, maybe you could convince yourself that something you don’t even like, that you’re not really responding to tangibly or sensually, is good because you like the idea behind it. But I do think that what matters, or a big part of that equation, is: “How are we responding to it?” And maybe not even immediately but maybe the day after. What’s staying with you at the end of the day? That matters. I really believe form matters, and so if content gets in the way of that so that we can’t even address it, that it’s as if it doesn’t matter, then I’d say, yes, content sometimes gets in the way of that.

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Well now I understand why you refer to your video essays as “sushi”!

[laughs] Right! Well, yeah. I think those cuts matter. I really feel like it’s something that will help us, will deepen us in some way.

I think it was Godard who said that in order to criticize a film you have to make another film. Do you see Columbus as responding to that sort of thought?

Yeah, and maybe it’s not a critique, but it’s wanting to join the conversation. I was studying Ozu and I really felt that he was pursuing a kind of cinema that was really addressing what it means to be modern and offering a sense of time and space that could connect in a way to modern beings. In his case, post-war Japanese citizens but even for the world, like trying to understand that. And that’s gripped me because it moved me. It addressed my own existential floundering and made me want to make cinema that continued that conversation. He passed away, and I think there was more to be explored. So, in regard to feeling like cinema is a part of a conversation, that for me is what I feel so honored by: to be able to assert myself a little bit into that ongoing conversation.

Do you see Ozu’s work as a formal influence on Columbus?

I should say, when it comes to Columbus, I wouldn’t be so bold to say that it’s like an Ozu film, or even trying to replicate one. But there’s no doubt that his influence is there. Ozu gave you a sense of time and duration but in a way that wasn’t just trying to feel it. I think that there are some filmmakers that may even feel that from Ozu, and it really becomes like this test of patience, like “I’m gonna just make you experience someone eating or drinking water for 25 minutes and then you’ll feel what 25 minutes feels like.” I don’t think Ozu ever tried to do that. I think he mixes that with a slow care for the people who inhabit these spaces, so that by the time you’re done watching one of his films, their presence makes you miss them more deeply in their absence. So there’s something very fundamental where he creates enough warmth and connection and humanity that he makes you care about this time that’s passing. He makes you feel sad when it feels like something is ending. So there’s something about the stories he was telling, which were largely about goodbyes, which this film is in some ways largely about.

I want to shift toward the film’s architectural aspects. You’ve said that, for Casey, architecture is “an entrance to a way of seeing.” But I also get the impression that this struggle with her mother was the entrance to that in a way. To you, how do these notions of a “way to see” and struggle relate?

I think the way she’s even responding to modern architecture is deeply related to the struggles she’s having with her mother and the kind of chaos that her mother is presenting but also the sort of devotion to her. The messiness of her relationship with her mother and the deep sensitivity to not wanting to be away from her [informs her response] to architecture. And this particular kind of architecture, which is minimal and which is about empty spaces, resonates with her in a way that she doesn’t [understand]. She’s fairly young. She knows she’s responding to it in many ways, that it’s creating a space for her to process. [And in] bringing it back home I think she’s trying to control her environment a little bit and to create sort of the same lines at home, and so it’s deeply related to her relationship, the brokenness of it.

She has this love for architecture, but it’s not until she meets Jin that she can say why she loves it.

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That’s right, that’s right.

Did you ever study architecture, even as an amateur?

You know, I think there was a time where, maybe like a lot of people who have a creative side, I thought, “Maybe I’ll be an architect.” I’ve always loved architecture, but I’ve never studied it.

There’s this part in the film where Jin mentions his father’s phrase: “modernism with a soul.” It’s mysterious to him, to us, and it encapsulates so much of the film. I also get the sense that it captures how you feel about Ozu. What does “modernism with a soul” personally mean to you?

I think that, at times, modernism can feel really distant and alienating or maybe just intellectual. There’s this sort of promise and I think it’s what Ozu offers. I think Ozu is a modernist but not in that way that’s just playing with form itself. It resonates deeply and maybe almost feels spiritual in a way but not giving into being modern—you know, a kind of spirituality that can still be tenable in a modern world. I’m desperate for that. That’s what I want. I want something that feels deeply meaningful but is tenable as a modern human being. I don’t know what that is, but I think it’s worth pursuing.

From the perspective of someone with a very strong editorial intuition, what was it like working with actors?

It was the thing that I didn’t know fully. There are these filmmakers that you love where actors are these kind of objects to them, you know? So I didn’t know [how it would be], but man, it was such a wonderful experience. I was just fortunate to work with five actors who were all deeply human, deeply generous. They really gave me insight. I’m most eager to work with actors again. I’m really interested in their craft and what they can bring into spaces. Maybe they’re the soul of this modernism and the way we are as humans. It was such a valuable experience its something that I’m real eager to reengage.

Speaking of that soul, one of the interesting tensions in the film are these huge modernist spaces without people and how you bring so much love to them by putting people inside them.

Thank you. I think that that’s it. It was my desire to see how those two things relate. And then, I feel like in some ways, you can only feel absence if you really appreciate presence and vice versa. And if you don’t really appreciate presence, then absence is not gonna hit you as hard. And vice versa. And humans bring that. I think it makes you attend to spaces and time itself. I think humans are the critical element of that.

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Can you talk specifically about working with Haley Lu and John?

John came into this project with the intention of bringing a kind of generosity and focus to the whole cast and crew. He had worked with people who had done that. But he, as an actor—one of the things that he really wanted to do at this stage of his career was to “play quiet.” He had said that to me early on in our conversation. I knew, then, that I wanted to work with him. And really, just to see that part of him as an actor was really lovely. And I feel like he has a harder task in having to play that counterpart. And then Haley Lu, she was really like, as a young actor, so passionate about this part and knew that she had to carry it. I said to her, to both of them, “There’s not gonna be a lot of places to hide in this film. We’re not gonna have a lot of plot or bombs or any effects, so it’s gonna be you and you have to be present.” I will feel forever indebted to Haley for really being present and giving everything to it.

Peter Goldberg

Peter Goldberg is a New York City-based film critic and copywriter whose criticism has appeared in The Baffler, Film Comment, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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