I had never heard of Korean director Hong Sang-soo. His work is being featured the Criterion Channel. He's made 25 features and he's been making two or three movies a year.
I don't know if Claire's Camera is typical of his work. It was filmed in Cannes I guess during the film festival there. He's known for working on low budgets, he films everything on location but doesn't spend a lot of time scouting locations. According to the fellow in the video introducing his work, he writes the script for the day's shooting starting at 4 AM so by 9 AM he's ready to go to work.
The movie stars Isabelle Huppert as a kind of annoying person. She's a music teacher by trade, but she tells people she's an artist because she takes snap shots with one of those instant, Polaroid-type cameras they make now. I don't know if we're supposed to take her seriously as an artist, but I've run into people like that and they're embarrassing to listen to. She befriends a Korean director and a couple of the women who work for company marketing his movies.
It made me think of a "documentary" I had seen about The Brady Bunch. Sherwood Schwartz talked about a scene in Hawaii where Peter is in his pajamas and finds there's a big, hairy tarantula on him. Schwartz said that Christopher Knight really didn't want that thing walking around on him, but he did a good job. The interviewer asked how he felt about forcing a child actor to do a scene like that when he didn't want to. Schwartz shrugged. He said there was more to being an actor than saying your lines.
In this movie, all the actors did was say their lines. There were long dialog scenes, the actors sit at tables in cafes or restaurants of stand in one spot on the beach. The camera is on a tripod in every scene. He pans a little and uses the zoom lens, but the scenes are all filmed in one long take.
I can see how the guy could make three movies a year.
Reportedly made for $100,000. Woody Allen could make a movie like this so easily.
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