The Korean director and co-writer Oh Jung-mi built the script around a documentary-within-a-film device, and Netflix carried it to audiences.
SEOUL, South Korea (Screenplay Biz) – Before Lee Chang-dong commits to a script, he puts the idea through a test that most development executives would recognise as a gut check with a structure. In coverage of his return with Possible Love, the director described three questions he asks himself, and the answers decide whether a project survives. The film, which Lee co-wrote with long-time collaborator Oh Jung-mi, is now a Gotham Awards nominee for best original screenplay and reaches Netflix subscribers this week.
The three-question gate
According to a Screen International feature on his return to filmmaking, Lee asks whether a project is meaningful to him, whether it is meaningful to an audience, and whether it is meaningful in itself. If he cannot be confident of the answers, he finds it hard to carry on, and he will stop even after writing or preparation has begun. That is an unusually blunt rule for a writer who has made a career of slow, deliberate films. It means that drafting is never treated as a sunk cost.
The same feature reports that Lee wrote the screenplay with Oh Jung-mi, who also co-wrote Burning, and that the pair spent several years on it. Casting was largely settled early in the process, which suggests the script was written with specific performers in mind rather than patched around them later.
A co-writer’s one structural idea
A separate interview in Another Magazine adds a detail about how the writing partnership worked. By that account, the project had been in his mind for a very long time, and Lee hesitated to tell a story about people whose lives were so far from his own. What unlocked it was a suggestion from Oh: use a documentary as the framing device. The accounts differ on timescale, with Screen International stressing several years of scripting and Another Magazine describing a much longer gestation, which probably reflects the gap between the first impulse and the writing itself.
The device gives the film its shape. A filmmaker, Ye-ji, played by Cho Yeo-jeong, wants to feature the family of a laid-off factory worker in a film about shrinking labour rights. The worker, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), end up entangled with Ye-ji and her wealthy husband. A film about making a film lets a writer put an observer inside the scene, which means class difference can be dramatised as a negotiation between people who need something from each other.
Borrowed scaffolding: Dekalog and a real strike
Another Magazine reports that the plot loosely draws on the 2009 labour strike in Korea, and that the film was first conceived as a homage to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog, specifically the tenth part. The opening title card carries the Tenth Commandment, and Ye-ji’s dog is named Blue, a nod to Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy. Lee told the magazine he was drawn to the question of what it means not to covet in a capitalist society.
A report from Spectrum News 13 in Orlando points to the same social root. It reports Lee as saying that a mass layoff at a major South Korean company more than a decade ago, and the violent suppression of the strike that followed, compelled him to make a film about it. He also said the goal was a film about desire as a form of love. His own summary of the theme was a single question.
“Is love even possible?” – Lee Chang-dong, Another Magazine
How the project reached an audience
The script’s route to the screen was not smooth. Screen International reports that the production stalled in early 2025 when Lee had trouble securing theatrical investment. Netflix then stepped in and agreed to a theatrical release. The film opened in Korean cinemas on 23 September, played in several other territories in mid-October, and streams on Netflix on 6 November. Spectrum 13 describes it as playing in select theaters before the streaming date.
For writers, the arrangement is worth noting. A script that had difficulty finding conventional theatrical money found a home with a streamer that guaranteed a cinema run, which is a path more auteur projects may now try.
Gotham attention for the script
When the Gotham nominations were announced, The Film Stage listed Lee and Oh as nominees for best original screenplay, alongside Mike Leigh for Tender Loving Care, Martin McDonagh for Wild Horse Nine, Sandra Wollner for Everytime, and Marine Atlan and Anne Brouillet for La Gradiva. A second outlet’s complete list of Gotham nominations covers the other categories. The ceremony is due at the end of November.
Practical takeaways
This section is analysis, built on the reported facts rather than on statements by the writers.
- Write a test for your own project. Lee’s three questions are a ready-made checklist before any long commitment, and applying them early can save years.
- Look to your co-writer for the frame. The documentary device came from Oh, and it solved a problem of access that Lee had felt. A partner’s outside view can fix a problem the main author is too close to see.
- Quote your influences openly. The Dekalog structure and the Commandment card give the story a moral spine, without hiding the debt.
- Plan the money and the page together. The stall in early 2025 shows that the strongest script still depends on a financing route.
The material also shows why Lee’s working method rewards patience: casting early, drafting for years, and testing the idea against a stated principle. None of the sources describe his rewrite process draft by draft, so that part of the story remains undocumented.
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