30/5 — 5/6/2024
64th International Film Festival
for Children and Youth
2. 9. 2021

Seung-hwan Lee & Jae-wook Yoo about LIMECRIME: “Connected with the old-school hip-hop feel from our youth”

During a school music exam, Song-ju shows off his rapping skills; the teacher rewards him with an F. But on the other side of the classroom, Joo-yeon finally discovers a soulmate, someone who loves hip-hop as much as he does. While Song-ju is a troubled boy living in a multi-home house on the poorer side of town, perfect student Joo-yeon lives in a fancy uptown apartment. 

Despite different backgrounds, they bond over their shared passion and decide to form a hip-hop duo called LimeCrime. After a successful underground club performance, they can work their way up, if only they play their cards right. But with his friends from the hood sinking deeper into trouble, Song-ju’s loyalties start to split.

Film screening during the 61st ZLÍN FILM FESTIVAL:

MON | 13.09 | 17:00 | GOLDEN APPLE CINEMA, projection hall 5

Details of the projection can be found here.

 

Directors Seung-hwan Lee and Jae-wook Yoo did indeed meet over their love for ‘90s hip-hop and for a while LimeCrime was a new sensation in the Korean rap environment. Nowadays, they’re making films together, this time using their backstory as the basis for a socio-musical drama.

 

Rapping in Korean sounds perfectly cool!

Seung-hwan Lee & Jae-wook Yoo: Thank you for listening to Korean rap! Hip-hop culture has evolved a lot since the mid-1990s when the genre travelled overseas from the US and further developed in different countries. In Korea, a pedigree of rappers like Verbal Jint have refined the Korean rhyme structures. When we first heard hip-hop in a language that we could actually understand, we were completely mesmerized. We listened to it all the time and started writing our own lyrics. It would be great if our movie had the same effect on some young people.

 

Is there room for hip-hop in the Korean music landscape?

Lee & Yoo: When we started rapping in middle and high school, hip-hop was not a very fashionable style in Korea. You couldn’t make money from underground hip-hop and you felt somehow culturally despised. That status has completely changed. Hip-hop nowadays is accepted by the mainstream music industry; you can make a lot of money in hip-hop; rappers live in luxurious houses and drive fancy cars, true to the image of the genre. For us as teenagers, it was our hobby and our obsession, but we couldn’t even imagine doing it as a job. Now, becoming a rapper has become a dream for many youngsters, shaken up by the yearly hip-hop TV contest SHOW ME THE MONEY. The situation nowadays is very different from the time when we wrote the first draft of the script.

 

LIMECRIME is partly based on your own story. Can you reveal some elements that were almost literally taken from life?

Lee: ‘LimeCrime’ was the name of the hip-hop duo that we formed as teenagers. The movie is set in our hometown, in the neighbourhood where we grew up, and many locations and situations in the script are 100% authentic. Back then we recorded songs like ‘LimeCrime’ and ‘Life and Dreams’ and uploaded them on a Soundcloud-like Korean music site; we had to re-design the webpage to make it look true to that era. We worked side by side at my desk, using my mother’s stockings as microphone filters. The MNG club still exists, and an old friend selling ‘Burberry’ products in the film turned into a gang selling ‘Supreme’ clothes. Like in the film, in a club toilet a rapper named Defconn stood peeing in the urinal next to me. Totally excited, Jae-wook asked him to put an autograph all over his back. Just like Joo-yeon, I made this compilation CD with my favourite tracks and designed the sleeve with a paint board, and I remember Jae-wook being really moved by this heartfelt gift.

 

Who created the beats and rhymes for the film?

Lee & Yoo: We asked a good friend from our student days; Jong-yeon Kim wrote most of the songs. Musicians were everywhere… Min-woo Lee (playing Song-ju) is a well-known Korean underground rapper, Yoo-sang Jang (playing Joo-yeon) too knows how to rap. They wrote their own lyrics; through the beat and rhymes we kept connected with the old-school hip-hop feel from our youth.

 

How did you transmit the dynamic energy of the music into the editing?

Lee & Yoo: Many efforts went into editing on the music. Every song came with a different concept, for example in ‘Life and Dreams’ the main characters introduce themselves while at the same time launching a kind of dialogue. ‘LimeCrime’ mainly had to give you the idea of attending a live performance, as if you were there.  The MNG rehearsal scenes are an epic and story-driven musical sequence, underlining a series of violent gang actions and combining all the film’s tragic elements; social class barriers, lingering ambitions,… The song ‘To E Sens’ is produced in the form of a music video, which seemed the most appropriate way to tell the success story of a boy becoming a rapper.

 

These two kids have very different social backgrounds.

Lee & Yoo: The secondary school is the place where children from ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ first meet, after spending their elementary school years with friends from the neighbourhood. Everyone reacts in their own way. It can create conflict, or it can fuel curiosity; overcoming conflicts can take your friendship to another level. Celebrating friendship, based on a broader understanding of each other’s world, is an important issue in our film.

 

Your social class even seems to define your ambitions. As if you’re only allowed to dream within these limitations.

Lee & Yoo: Even when striving for a world without social barriers, people’s minds seem to be impregnated with this ‘upper class’ idea. Joo-yeon’s options for studying were always obvious since childhood, but not for Song-ju. He has to pay a high price in terms of pride and morality. These pre-occupations are still rooted too strongly in the minds of our parents’ generation.

 

Is there room for subcultures like hip-hop in Korea’s rigid school system?

Lee: During my school days, hip-hop was my haven, a place for me to breathe, but that haven was profoundly threatened by the school system. “Do you think this will put food on the table?” “What a waste of time.” “You’d better invest your energy in your studies.” Even if nowadays the educational culture has changed a bit, hip-hop is a way of life to be freely enjoyed, and I don't think schools will ever understand its power in any way. Instead of trying to annihilate all connections with subcultures – which is impossible – nowadays they try to institutionalize them. That is our bittersweet reality.

 

Both main characters seem to have a clinical, almost dysfunctional relationship with their parents. Is that symptomatic for today’s society?

Lee & Yoo: This goes indeed for Joo-yeon, but for Song-ju it was our intention to depict a good relationship, despite the difficult environment. On a Korean scale they have a close bond, but apparently this might not be clear to a Western audience, which is painfully interesting. It reflects how relationships between parents and children in our society are often fundamentally alienated.

 

Working with two directors, how did you share tasks and responsibilities?

Lee: We have been working as a team for a long time, we know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and we speak each other’s language – I can easily estimate the weight of Jae-wook‘s words. I wrote the screenplay, directed the actors, and supervised most musical elements, but it was mainly Jae-wook holding the camera. Our responsibilities are shared and often entwined. We are a team, just like we were as rappers, and we both know when to argue and when to give in.

 

Is there anything better than Wu-tang Clan?

Lee & Yoo: Let’s talk about Korean rappers! Verbal Jint and Defconn both have followed their own path and in 2001 both made a revolutionary album, respectively the ‘Modern Rhymes EP’ and ‘Straight from the Streetz’. Among today’s artists we found E Sens’ album ‘The Anecdote’ truly inspiring; he is Song-ju’s role model in the film. Among foreign rappers, we were totally fascinated by Eminem’s quirky storytelling lyrics on ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’; at the heydays of our hip-hop passion, that album was a revelation. 

Thanks to our Belgian co-worker Gert Hermans for the interview.

 

 

 

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