The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of After Yang.

You adapted this from a short story. How did that process begin?

Kogonada: I had a producer [Theresa Park] that was very committed to doing a project with me, and she sent me a collection of shorts. She had also bought the rights to a different short that I had read, and in that collection was this short. And there were some ingredients in this story… it was very slight and I knew it would have to be expanded. I have some friends that are chefs and they go to a market and they have an idea of what they want to make, but then they suddenly see some ingredients and then they know. I had some ideas of what my next film would be, and when I read this short there were just some essential ingredients that felt very personal to me. I wanted to explore and expand the story.

I love that idea about how you have to catch up to loss

How did that expansion work? How do you open up that short story? Did you talk to the author [Alexander Weinstein]?

Kogonada: I had the best experience a filmmaker can have with an author. I went to his house in Michigan and we had a great meal. He made me some loose-leaf tea, he’s quite the connoisseur. He had seen my first film, Columbus, and we shared a lot of the same sensibilities. He said “this film is yours, do whatever you want—I wrote the short that I wanted to write but I trust you with the film.” And he gave me the permission to make it my own. The short takes place in one day, there’s no memory bank and it’s really from the father’s perspective of having his own memories about Yang. It’s really a story about him catching up to grief that he didn’t know he had. For him, Yang was like an appliance, it was broken and it was almost annoying. But as he begins to recollect his memories of Yang and has an appreciation, he then feels the loss. I love that idea about how you have to catch up to loss. Sometimes it’s immediate and you know you’ve lost something, and other times, in order to feel loss, you have to feel love. That’s the bargain of loss—the pain only comes if you care deeply enough. In my life, I have felt detached at times and it protects you from feeling. As soon as I had kids, I felt so exposed and vulnerable in a way I never had. That relationship between keeping disconnected and detached versus the cost of caring was something thematically that I was exploring in my life as a new father.

I saw an interview with Colin Farrell where he was saying his impulse is usually to go big in scenes, and in this one he learned more restraint. The film is very internal.  

Kogonada: It was such a pleasure to work with Colin and he was so ready to play these notes and stay within an octave. We talked about jazz, about early Miles Davis versus late Miles Davis. He was ready and brought all of that into this film already. There were so many days when the notes he was playing were mesmerizing. As an actor, you can play a number of octaves, and it’s so clear just like a musician. If you want to get the applause, you can go everywhere and showcase those talents. But when you start trying to play two or three notes and hit a certain quality, if you do it well, it will hit someone and stay with them. And I think that’s what Colin did with this role. He was trying to figure out the notes of interior life without having to express it in more obvious ways.

The house they live in is so striking. How did you find it?

Kogonada: Even in the script, I had written that this was an interior story thematically. Initially, I had written that the only time we even feel the city or the outside world is through reflection or windows. And then at some point we decided to put in a few shots of the outside world. But I always knew this was going to be an interior story, obviously and explicitly the interior of Yang, and really Jake’s interior journey. So I knew that 70% of the film was going to be in this house. That house had to have a certain story in itself. For me, settings are not just settings or backgrounds but they are a part of the story. In the films I love, there’s such a sense of place within those films. I knew the house had to be able to carry the story. It was hard to articulate, but we were looking for a certain thing that has a spatial dynamic to match the family, but a lot of them were gigantic houses. I also wanted to keep them at a certain level—they’re not a wealthy family. Even though I think it looks fairly big, it’s actually a tiny Eichler house. So small and it required quite a bit to even figure out how to shoot scenes. But there was something in this Eichler layout that had a story. We built around the atrium. There was no tree but as soon as I saw the layout, I thought there should be a tree in the center of this house. It was one of three Eichler homes in New York, because Eichler did try to bring these houses to New York. They were low-cost mid-century homes and they never took off in New York, so there were only three. This house was abandoned and they’d been trying to sell it forever. When we walked in, everything was completely white. So we were able to take the shape of this house—which I loved—and the transparency and the way the house was built and just build our own version of this future home.

This film is begging me to ask about the opening credits. Tell us about conceiving that set piece. I heard it was Jodie Turner-Smith’s first day on set and you put her in a rubber suit!

Kogonada: I love dance and I love architecture, and I’m moved by both. When I was writing the script, Jodie has this line “I just want to be a family, a team.” At that moment, it just felt right. I suddenly felt that I wanted to see all these families in sync before we started unraveling them and individualizing them. We’re all a part of families, and either in sync or out of sync with them. There was just something to seeing the rhythm of families, and our main family in sync that put a real smile on my face when I wrote that in. I knew I wanted it to be a suspended credits sequence. When I was a little kid, I saw this this one martial arts film, this Shaw Brothers film that has suspended credits with each member of a gang showing off their specialty with different colored backdrops, and I think that film came to mind as I thought about how to stage this. But the choreographer had this lovely way of talking about it—she described it as “a pop of confetti” at the beginning of the film and the rest of the film is the confetti slowly falling to the ground. In regards to Jodie, who was such a gift to the film, we initially had an Iranian actress that was going to play the role of Kyra. This was during the Trump administration and they suddenly closed the border for her and she couldn’t get into the states. We were already in production and had to re-cast. We had a number of people and Jodie was one of the finalists but had missed her flight to New York, and arrived later that night. Colin read with her and sent me the clip, and we both realized she was incredible and had to play the role. She never went back to LA and two days later we had to film the dance scene! She had to learn the entire dance, and what was so incredible was that they had to really work on it together. By the end, they were all sweaty and high-fiving each other and they really felt like a family. It was such a great way to integrate her with the rest of the cast. All the families that danced certainly felt that way, bonded.