(Continued from Interview ②) Actor Ryu Seung-beom explained why he gave his character a Chungcheong dialect in "Good News."
Recently, at a café in Jongno District, Seoul, an interview was held with Ryu Seung-beom, the lead actor of the Netflix film Good News (director Byun Sung-hyun).
Good News is a film about a suspicious operation by people who gathered in 1970 determined by any means to make a hijacked plane land. It was inspired by the hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351, commonly known as the "Yodogo incident," and in the film Ryu Seung-beom plays Park Sang-hyun, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
Park Sang-hyun is a character who speaks the Chungcheong dialect. When asked why he chose the Chungcheong dialect among various dialects, Ryu Seung-beom said, "While going through the process of reading the script and exploring it, one day the Chungcheong dialect suddenly came to mind. The characteristics of that language came to mind. From what I hear around me and what I know, as a Korean, you understand the characteristics of the Chungcheong dialect. I don't know what people from Chungcheong would think, but what occurred to me was the duality of the Chungcheong dialect. I thought the differences between appearance and inner meaning would suit this work well."
He said, "I had an instinctive feeling about how to blend that characteristic into the work. I thought it would fit the nature of the piece better than the character alone."
Asked what aspects of the work he felt matched the Chungcheong dialect, Ryu Seung-beom said, "I actually grew up in Chungcheong when I was young. My hometown is Chungcheong, but I don't remember it well, so I'm very cautious about saying anything definitive about the Chungcheong dialect," and added, "If I explain why I associated it with the work, while reading the script I felt many dualities in the piece. I found the sparks created by these dualities in the script attractive."
He said, "As far as I vaguely know about the Chungcheong dialect, what you say outwardly and what it means inwardly can be different. I thought those aspects might share commonalities. Actually, that's my personal view, so I can't say it's entirely right or wrong, but from my small personal observation, that came to mind," he cautiously explained his thoughts.
When asked about his efforts to portray the Chungcheong dialect, Ryu Seung-beom said, "I didn't have a teacher, but as a Korean, even if you can't speak the dialect well, you know parts of it. At first, I just wrote the lines down as they came to me. I checked them with friends from Chungcheong, asking, 'Is this the right way to say this?' If a friend said, 'The original expresses this kind of thing like this,' I used that as a reference and refined it. I wasn't trying to authenticate the Chungcheong dialect. If the lines died and only the dialect's characteristics remained, I cut them; if the characteristics enhanced it, I added more."
He added, "I changed only the nuance without altering the essence of the lines. Even a single nuance can be a big change, and changing more could risk deviating from the director's intention. I was a bit careful about that."
Meanwhile, Good News was released on Netflix on the 17th.
[Photo] Netflix
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