3:07 p.m. | Updated CANNES, France — Another Cannes, another Hong Sang-soo film. By now a new work by Mr. Hong, the prolific South Korean director, is as much a Cannes ritual as standing in line or drinking a midday glass of rosé. Eight of his 13 features have shown at the festival here, three of them — including “In Another Country” this year — in the main competition, and he won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section in 2010 for “Ha Ha Ha.”  Features, news, interviews and more.  Features, news, interviews and more.  With a sharp, deadpan eye for doomed romantic entanglements and lust-fueled bad behavior, Mr. Hong is often called the most French of Asian directors. His 2008 film “Night and Day” was shot in Paris (and involved an encounter with the Courbet painting “Origin of the World” at the Musee d’Orsay). For “In Another Country,” he works for the first time with a non-Korean lead actor.  The French star Isabelle Huppert (who also appears in another competition entry, Michael Haneke’s “Amour”) plays a different character in each of the movie’s three parts: a well-known filmmaker, the wife of an executive on business in South Korea and a woman whose husband has left her for a Korean woman. In each section Anne, as all three women are named, visits the same beach town and stays at the same inn and encounters some of the same characters, including an affable lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang). The film has been acquired by Kino Lorber for distribution in the United States later this year, according to news reports.  Few filmmakers are as precise or obsessive as Mr. Hong in finding variations on a theme. A playful formalist who’s frequently accused of making the same film over and over, he once again uses repetition compulsion here as both the subject and form of his movie. Given to good-natured equivocation when discussing his work — he said “I don’t know” more than a dozen times in a half-hour conversation — Mr. Hong spoke to us (in English) about “In Another Country” at the Carlton Hotel on Tuesday. Here are edited excerpts:  Your new film is on one level a comedy of culture clash: did you draw on your observations of foreigners in Korea or your own experiences of being abroad?  I’ve seen encounters between Koreans and foreigners many times and it has struck me always as superficial. Whether because of time limit or because of shyness, people will smile and say nice things, but really, they don’t exchange a lot. I don’t know why. I wanted to dig into this kind of encounter until I got something out of it.  So the point of the film was to go beyond that?  Not necessarily beyond it but somewhere else. It’s up to each person to find where that is. By the end as we see Anne walking away, I hope the audience wonders: Where is she going? Where is she now? Is she Korean? Is she French? Everything blurs.  How did you end up casting Isabelle Huppert?  When Isabelle came to Seoul for her photo exhibition last year, she said something nice about me in a newspaper, so I called and asked her to lunch. I told her that I wanted to shoot something in a few months but didn’t know what and asked if she would join me. That was in May last year, and we shot for eight days in July. Just three weeks before shooting, I had the idea that she should play three different women with the same name.  Does the structure of the film usually come early on, before you start on the outline or the script?  On “Oki’s Movie” [Mr. Hong’s 2010 film, made up of four interconnected stories], I didn’t know anything and the structure was found during the process of making the film. That was shot during the semester at the university where I teach, and I wanted to experiment with a new way of working. I usually work with three people but I started working with four. I didn’t have any script, and it was really going day by day. But for “In Another Country” I knew it was going to be three chapters.  I understand that you write very quickly and sometimes on the spot.  I write the morning of each shooting day. On this film I woke up at 5 a.m. and wrote for four or five hours, for the day’s shoot. It’s usually only three hours but maybe this was longer because there was English dialogue.  Given what the film is about, did you exploit the communication gaps between Isabelle Huppert and the Korean cast and crew?  Maybe unconsciously. Isabelle told reporters here that even though there was translation for the Korean dialogue, she didn’t read it carefully. She wanted to really be the character, who can’t understand what the Koreans are saying to each other. Maybe I was doing the same thing. I didn’t have many gatherings with the Korean actors and Isabelle. I let her be alone in her room all the time.  When directing performances, I don’t usually say much. From the moment that I decide to work with a particular actor, something starts. I try to form some kind of impression about this person — it has nothing to do with their previous films — and I try to keep this personal impression like my treasure. It can be a very wrong impression but I don’t care, as long as it’s strong. And it’s something I keep to myself.  Many of your early movies had a two-part structure, but lately you’ve been experimenting with more unusual repetitive forms that leave us wondering how the episodes within the films are connected: four stories from different perspectives in “Oki’s Movie,” the circular time-warp feel of “The Day He Arrives” (2011) and with “In Another Country” a story told three times with a mix of constants and variables.  It’s not really conscious but one of the reasons I stopped doing the mirroring must be that I had done it many times and wanted to get away from it. The idea of variables and constants in this film, I don’t know why. I just wanted to see the result, what would come from doing that. I think that through repetition I can show something in a very effective way. Going through a repeating structure you feel things that cannot be experienced with a linear structure.  The first Anne is a filmmaker, like many of your characters. Do you see her as an alter ego? Or did you have any real-life directors in mind?  My characters are of course based on some real-life models. But I never transpose a model just into one character. When I was 23, I tried to write about something that really happened to me and I couldn’t finish this script. Since then I’ve been conscious of needing freedom from that and having a kind of distance from a real life model so I can feel free. I don’t know that many French film directors. Maybe Claire Denis, she’s a friend of mine. She’s visited a few times. She likes Korea, I think, for a reason I don’t really understand.  The first Anne does seem reminiscent of Claire Denis at times.  Really? I was not doing it consciously.
Talking with Hong Sang-soo at the Cannes Film Festival, where 8 of this 13 films have been shown.