Yong Ok Lee

The interior spaces and exterior facades make up the physical composition of a house. However, it is the personal items, decorations and overall visual aesthetic that can turn that house into a home. For a film like Minari, the details within the home are essential in creating a successful representation of the family and the film’s Production Designer, Yong Ok Lee, did a masterful job at creating this beautiful portrait.

In an exclusive interview with Interiors, we spoke with Yong Ok Lee, who is the Production Designer for Minari. The photos and concept art are courtesy of Yong Ok Lee.

INT: First off, we were curious how the opportunity to do the Film, Minari, came about? What was it about it that made you want to work on it?

I met Christina Oh, the producer of Minari, through my agent. She was looking for a Production Designer with a Korean cultural background, Korean-American if possible. When I met her, she mentioned how she believed in the script because it was universal and not just specific for Asian-Americans. And then I talked to the director Isaac Chung who explained how he conceived ‘Minari’ from his personal experiences, which gave it the specificity to make it universal. I was touched by his family story, since I guess I realized I never really knew what the Korean immigrant experience was like.

I love working on projects that are challenging, and contrary to my expectations, Isaac didn’t ask me about the Korean cultural details as I’d anticipated but asked me what I thought about Arkansas farmland, geography and rural life in America in the 1980s. Being an area I’d never quite delved into, it caught my intrigue right away. Add that with the fact that I needed to get the Korean cultural period details right, I knew this was the kind of challenge for me.

INT: Minari was shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma and includes so many incredible locations and exterior environments. What was the process like finding these spaces? Did certain locations or areas change or evolve or time?

It was quite a challenge to make the farmland change over time. It was very important information for the audience to know how their life changed from the humble beginnings of an empty field to successfully harvesting crops, then building the barn only to witness it burning down to the ground. Another challenge for Isaac and I was finding the right kind of farmland. It needed to match the Arkansas landscape and the color of soil along with certain aspects like needing a rural road connected to the trailer home, a nearby Minari creek - walking distance for the kids and grandma - and a spot suitable to build the barn. Also, it needed to show the scale of this film while also being able to reflect immigrant life. There really was no way I could grow crops from sprout to harvest and show the entire process within the limited time we had - only 5 weeks of prep - and budget. So we had to find two separate locations that could show different stages in the timeline. One needed to be empty and have enough space to set our trailer home set, flat ground to build the barn and blocked by tree lines from the other location so we could cheat the barn wasn't built from scratch. We also wanted to have woods with a pond behind our trailer home. The other location needed to have fully grown crops while being similar to the landscape with the first location which had an empty field. I truly thought it would be impossible to find these exact specifics. We scouted so many fields and drove everywhere in and around Tulsa. Luckily, we found an almost perfect empty field but not the crop field. With Lachlan Milne (Director of Photography) and Lee Isaac Chung (Director), I looked at all possible options, large and small crop fields owned by locals. Finally we got a crop field which matched the scale, but the landscape and the type of crops were not what we expected. So as it usually goes, we had to frame out and cheat. I was disappointed we couldn’t show the full process of harvest due to the previously mentioned limitations. Despite having to compromise, I was relieved we could at least show a cultivated field and how our protagonist Jacob first planted the sprouts of his ‘American dream’ on it. Lachlan did an amazing job with the frame, making the field seem much larger than it really was.

And now for the main set, the trailer home: At the initial stages of this project, Isaac showed me a photo of his family shot in front of their trailer home. It was a cookie cutter trailer home without much character so I opted to look for a 60s vintage trailer home with some interesting elements to it, depth of the space, window frame and real wood material, a Cinematic Space. I narrowed my choices down to two, one with a really unique design which had been abandoned a while so required some work but burst with potential, and one which was more plain but had enough space, the right layout, scale, and similar to Isaac’s family home trailer. I was struggling because I knew I was falling in love with the former, purely from an aesthetic perspective. How can you say no to so much character and beauty? But eventually I chose the latter, which the only character it had was practicality, because I knew it would be the choice Jacob would make - a Korean man, who would definitely put practicality over everything else. He wouldn’t care how unique the trailer was, he would only look for convenience, space, and wouldn’t want it to stick out. I became Jacob in a way when I made my choice.

The next step was to make the home believable and realistic but also interesting. I went into this phase of mad craze digging into all abandoned trailer homes looking for any and all details - hardware, flooring, window frames, ceiling lamps and even the toilet cover. Anything to make this home interesting, I looked for. Found some 1980s wallpaper rolls from an abandoned trailer? Great, now it’s on our set. A built-in radio? Cool, now it’s built-in. A 70s washing machine and old style window frames? Done, installed. I hoped it was enough to make our trailer interesting while being grounded.

Once the main set was sorted out our next but biggest issue was the Minari creek. Isaac had a very specific image of it and it was extremely hard to find the right creek in the middle of the hot summer. Minari plants need clear water, not too deep nor too shallow, along with space for dry soil close to it. Minari grows in the water but also along the waterside soil. Also from a practical standpoint, it needed to be easy enough to walk to for an old grandma and a 7 year old kid with a condition. We also wanted it to be in a shaded area with some rays of sunlight to shine through. Not packed but just enough greens. Aside from figuring out how to plant Minari from sprout to fully grown, there were so many things to consider. And finally we found our location. It was part of a man-made park but no one really visited so it was quiet enough to shoot. We were able to plant Minari there and there was a water stream with just enough trees. But then the challenge was the Minari itself. We had to drive to Kansas City and get them from someone who had minari in their garden. But the Minari was already fully grown, and we couldn’t get our hands on any sprouts. So our next challenge was to actually sprout and plant them from seeds, filming two different stages. This unfortunately wasn’t possible due to the limitations we had. I was only able to show them from shorter to taller.

INT: The film begins with Jacob showing his family their new trailer. Over the course of the film, that trailer becomes more of a home with so many personal items spread throughout. What was the process like creating the residential space for this family? What types of items and references inspired you the most?

Before I started, I didn’t know there were so many trailer home types and most of them had different scales and materials as the trend shifted from year to year. The trailer home we sought out for was a late 1970s manufactured style. Jacob bought a used one for his family so I thought there could be some furniture pieces leftover. I chose a big red La-Z-Boy fabric chair (dusty) and a rolling side table as the remaining pieces from an imaginary previous owner. So these pieces weren’t supposed to match well with other furniture pieces that Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) brought from their city house/apartment. The first thing Monica saw when she came into the house was dusty pink-colored curtains hanging from the windows. That’s why she was immediately disgusted and complained about their shitty trailer home. For her, the trailer wasn't a real home and the prospect of rural life was dreary and bleak. So from her perspective, the first impression of the set had to be empty, dusty, a bit abandoned with only a few pieces of furniture. However for the kids, it was unfamiliar and weird but interesting, like when they checked underneath the home they found wheels and darkness. But then the fields around shined in the light and twinkled a green hue from the vast plains. This was their new beginning. At first, we only laid out sparse furniture with unpacked boxes because we wanted to show that Monica wanted to leave the trailer sooner or later. But eventually she gave in and started to decorate the house as her home back in the city. Still she hung onto the bigger pieces of furniture that they brought from the city which didn’t really fit with the trailer home size. But once grandma Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) came to the US to live with them, Monica had to get rid of the big closet in David's room in order to make space for Soonja to share. Now the family finally became one and the same with their rural Arkansas trailer home.

I researched what Koreans brought to the US when they immigrated in the 1980s. That is real and could be the best reference. They usually brought stuff that contained memories of Korea, family and friends. Most Koreans brought as much as they could, from utensils to korean traditional decorations. But for Jacob and Monica, they had already lived in California for a while before moving to Arkansas. So some of their korean belongings were already missing or thrown away, and replaced with American household items which they could easily get a hold of. I also needed to add Korean-specific Christian decorations to showcase Monica as a devout Christian. I referenced Korean-American newspaper ads from the 80s but also looked into American rural photographers like William Eggleston. Of course getting to see photos of my parents, Isaac’s childhood, and other Korean-american family photos from back in the 80s helped as well.

One week into our shoot, Irene Chun, our first assistant editor emailed me to share an old photo of hers - a trailer home which she lived in when she was a child. She was impressed and touched by how our trailer home reminded her of her old family home. She was quite overwhelmed. And you know, that kind of response makes the work I do all worth it.

INT: In a recent Interview, the film’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, marveled over your work on Minari and how you were able to create such an amazing detailed portrait of the family. In terms of Production Design, what aspects are most important when trying to create such a successful depiction?

Our story is about Koreans who went to the US in the 1980s, who worked as a chicken sexer for a living. They didn’t have much money but had to survive with and for their kids. So I started to look for 80s Korean immigrants to see how and why they went to the US, and how they survived. I knew that many Koreans ended up owning small businesses like laundry shops and grocery stores. But without any seed money, how did they become business owners? With this thought in mind, I found an advertisement in an old Korean newspaper. It was a chicken sexer job ad. So if lots of Koreans went to the US for this job, what would their life be like? These questions were the starting point for my design concept. I wondered what Jacob and Monica’s blue collar struggle would be and how it would feel to be surrounded by complete strangers who looked and acted nothing like them. I guess what I want to say is that I tried to put myself in their shoes and see through their eyes. I wanted the Production Design to have a sense of despair, sorrow, dusty wilderness but also hints of hope and love they tried so hard to cling onto. Changing their house from literally nothing/empty to a real lived-in home, a dried-out farmland plot into a field full of harvest was the embodiment of what the American dream meant to all the immigrants, including you and me and pretty much everyone who lives in the US. Because this is the nation of immigrants.

Yong Ok Lee is a Production Designer and has worked on various Films, Music Videos and Commercials.