Soo Hugh

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.  Today I’m happy to welcome Soo Hugh, the showrunner and writer of the Pachinko, a compelling series from Apple Plus that spans four generations of a Korean family living through war, occupation, and displacement. Based on Min Jin Lee’s novel,  Pachinko follows the journey of Sunja, a young Korean woman whose life is changed in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation of Korea. She becomes pregnant by Hansu, a wealthy and (as she finds out later) married man. She faces a choice that will reverberate through her family for decades to come: She can stay in Korea, where Hansu will always make sure she is taken care of financially  or accept an offer of marriage from a minister  Isak and immigrate to Japan, where she will almost certainly struggle to make ends meet but will be able to give her child a family.  Knowing she might never return to her homeland, she moves to Japan  where she and her family confront the widespread bigotry against Koreans, struggling to survive and thrive in a society that views them as second-class citizens.

The series weaves between two timelines: one that follows Sunja from her youth under Japanese rule through World War II and its aftermath, and another timeline in 1989, where her grandson Solomon faces his own challenges as a Korean raised in Japan attempting to make it big in the world of finance. With its exquisite production and brilliant acting across the board, Pachinko is epic in scope but intimate in focus, highlighting themes of survival, belonging, and legacy across generations. With the Season 2 finale airing this week,  Soo Hugh joins me to talk about the emotional heart of the story, the challenges of filming with an international cast, across three countries in multiple languages, and how Pachinko captures the universality of this family's specific experience.

Soo Hugh, welcome! Thank you for joining me.

Soo Hugh: Oh, thank you.

Jo Reed: Soo, I can't think of another show, another television show that I've been so emotionally engaged with as "Pachinko."

Soo Hugh: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

Jo Reed: Some of those characters are more real to me than my neighbors. And so, there's so much I want to talk about here and I want to begin with-- season one is subtitled “ home” and season two is subtitled  “family” and in some ways, I really think that does set up season two. So, why don't you talk about why it's unfolding under the umbrella of family?

Soo Hugh: I love that you were able to just really root that out. I mean, if season one is not just home, but the loss of home, right? It's season two feels like a chance for our characters to find out how they can create a new home and I think for us, we always keyed in this idea that at the end of the day, whether you're in a country that doesn't want you, no matter what the times or circumstances, that a family built a home together and that's one of the reasons why we changed that opening title sequence for season two, because we have so many more characters and this idea that they've really brought this family together to create this second home.

Jo Reed: I'm curious how the tone of season two changes as we move into an historical period more of us perhaps are familiar with. That is World War II, the occupation and after the occupation. That's a lot to grapple with.

Soo Hugh: What's interesting-- one of the things that I discovered when I was starting this project was I thought I knew World War II fairly well. You get really confident about certain things in history because you've been so exposed to them and especially in movies. But then you realize "Wait, we don't know this story at all from the other perspective," right? Having grown up in the States and taking history classes here, it's really humbling to know just "Ah, my experience of some big historical event is very, very limited." So, all of a sudden, we had to reconfigure our knowledge of World War II from the Japanese point of view, specifically our characters, who were on the home front and just really shocking to all of a sudden just learn everything all over again.

Jo Reed:  Well, the series moves through two parallel timelines—it’s not told chronologically. The story of the older Sunja and her grandson Solomon takes place over one year 1989, whereas the historical part of the story moves through 40 years.  I wonder how this adds to the dynamic of the show.

Soo Hugh: So, I always loved this idea of the present day feeling almost like-- each season of the present day in 1989 is one season in a year-- so, spring, summer, fall, winter-- and especially because in Asian art, seasons are so important and so, I wanted to pay homage to that tradition. But then in our past storyline, I very much wanted to feel like this rocket ship that you're traveling in time. It's so fast and this idea is eventually at the end of our show, the two timelines will collide into one another, the past and present.

Jo Reed: Here's the thing, though, because even though things are going so rapidly in the historical part of the series, I love the way you give the characters time to breathe. The care that's taken with making rice, for example. You just give them that moment that's so important.

Soo Hugh: We always called it the breathing space in the edit room. There are times when you really just want the audience to feel immersed in a scene and you only get that if you control the editing. So, you don't cut away. As someone who just sometimes feels like modern day storytelling, modern day cinema just feels so fast and I think there's definitely a time and place for that style. But for this show, we looked at a lot of paintings as references, interestingly enough, as opposed to some movies and with a painting, you give the viewer the power to linger on an image and we really wanted to capture that experience in the show.

Jo Reed: Well, you've made this over a number of languages, three languages, three continents. So many of the actors had to be multilingual and move from Korean to Japanese and back again, often in a single sentence. How did that complicate casting for you?

Soo Hugh: Oh, it was a headache. But at some point, we threw it away. At first, we were trying to find our unicorn. "Who's that unicorn that's going to be able to speak one or two or three languages?" and then you realize at the end of the day, the performance needed to trump everything else. So, we asked actors just to audition in the language they felt most comfortable, whatever their native language in and then we just really trusted the process with all of our language coaches or dialect coaches. We had this army of just language historians and so, when you look at someone for like Eunseong, who plays little Mozasu, eight-year-old Mozasu in season two, Eunseong, who just stole the show so many times, in real life, he speaks only Korean. But so much of his dialogue is that back-and-forth ping pong between Korean and Japanese and I was really worried whether or not this nine-year-old child was going to be able to do this and he nailed it. He was so professional. It was amazing to see him on set just effortlessly go through all of it.  You know what's really funny? When you think about it, it in some ways works with our show's themes, right? The adults, we complicate things. We create war. We create these battle lines and these boundary lines between countries and there's something about our child actors that make it feel just language so effortless. So, you feel like if you followed their lead-- boundaries, languages, all of it would just be so easy.

Jo Reed: There are real differences in the way films and television are made in the US, Korea, and Japan. So, how did you navigate all these cultural differences?

Soo Hugh: Oh, I mean, I always wish there was a documentary crew following us around, especially in the first season, because it would be a comedy, which would be funny because it would be so much of us learning from our mistakes and that cultural difference that you talk about. Again, it's that transcendence of the human experience, where you start set and you're hearing all these languages and everything takes so long. I know a scene normally would take two hours to shoot takes four hours to shoot because of all the interpreters on set and everyone's pulling their hair out wondering "Is this person understanding what I'm saying?" and then within a few weeks, you just see how everything settles and it's this natural rhythm that happens where all of a sudden, people are finishing each other's sentences in a language they don't even speak and someone could just point at something already like "I get it." I thought it was really inspiring. I was moved so many times on set just seeing all these differences, all the wrinkles work out, if that makes sense. The western crew learned so much from our Japanese crew or Korean crew and likewise, I think they learned a lot from us. So, by the end, it was this melting pot of just experiences and practices. It just worked.

Jo Reed: The acting is truly amazing—academy award winner Youn Yuh-Jung, am I saying her name correctly?

Soo Hugh: Yeah, YJ. I call her YJ 

Jo Reed: I'll do that too. YJ as the older Sunja and Lee Minho as Hansu, the father of Sunja’s older son. They are both stars and give extraordinary performances. But then there's this glorious unknown actress Minha Kim who plays Sunja throughout the historical part and ages from teenager to middle-aged woman and she's one of those actresses who just draws you in immediately. How did you find her?

Soo Hugh: I mean, it took us a while. For Sunja especially, she was one of the later roles cast and I have to say I was panicking at some point in season one when we hadn't found her. We auditioned so many really, really strong actors, but none of them felt like they were Sunja yet, especially when you have someone like YJ. It had to be someone who's going to be able to hold up that character in the past storyline and then our casting director, Su Kim, in Korea, texted me one day and said "I'm going to send you a tape. Watch it now. I think we found her," and I was very skeptical when I got that text, by the way, because I was starting to become a little bit despondent about whether we had to settle on another actress and then I saw the tape, Min-Ha's tape, and she was reading the scene where Hansu tells her he's married and this unknown, she's sobbing on tape and she has just her face. There's nothing performative about it. She was really in it. We brought her back quite a few times and we really put her through the paces because she's never done anything on this scale before. I don't think she'd ever done a TV show before in Korea and there's something about taking the responsibility of being number one on the call sheet that I think is really important that actors understand and so, having seen her multiple times, we were really pretty convinced she was the right Sunja for us.

Jo Reed: Absolutely!  The scene I’m about to discuss has already aired, I think it’s the second episode, so no spoilers if you’re caught up. But the scene in which we see Isak, Sunja’s husband, return from prison and he's a dying man. He’s come home to die. First, that episode is just heartbreaking.  But I also really appreciated the camera work.  I think, in some ways, the shot echoes season one, the first time Sunja and Isak make love. Only this time he's dying. It's just a beautiful, emotional scene and they're both wonderful in it. Can you talk about filming that?

Soo Hugh: I'm so glad that you picked that up. That was directed by Leanne Welham and shot by Ante Cheng and Ante was with us on season one as well and shot that episode that you're talking about, where Sunja and Isak for the first time make love once they get to Japan and we talked about how this feeling of life and death, this cycle, we wanted to really bring some poetry to the similarities in some ways. So, the camera work is exactly the same, just like you picked up on. So, that's amazing. Thank you. Especially with Steve who plays Isak, I remember when we shot the lovemaking scene in season one, just in season one in general, Steven, he was so nervous. He hadn't done that many roles yet either. He was fairly new, as an actor to the film scene and how nervous he was in season one and then watching him in season two, I mean, just how much more of a confident actor he was in that scene. He knew he had such a huge task of wanting to be authentic and they were like crying on set. It was a really emotional scene to film.

Jo Reed: I'm sure it was. It’s a very emotional series.  In season one, when Sunja is leaving for Japan and saying goodbye to her mother who she may never see again, that clearly just tore at the heart. But what was unexpectedly moving for me where I was full out sobbing was the scene in Osaka shortly after Sunja had arrived and her sister-in-law had washed her clothes and Sunja starts weeping because the smell of Korea in her clothes is gone. Oh my, that was so vivid. Anyone who has ever been homesick will understand that immediately.

Soo Hugh: I mean, so, it's interesting that you say that because I remember worrying about that scene, whether it would be too intellectual of an idea, right? I get it on an intellectual idea, but will the audience get it on an emotional level that this woman is crying over something as silly as laundry and when Min-ha did that scene, I remember her that how close she put that piece of whatever clothing was up to her nose. She couldn't even separate it from her body and so, I had a feeling "Ah, I think it's going to work." So, I'm so glad to hear that it was emotional for you.

Jo Reed: Oh, very, very. We mentioned World War II.  Sunja's brother-in-law is in Nagasaki and so, we clearly know we're going to engage with the dropping of the bomb at some point. Talk about the way you approach that.

Soo Hugh: There were a lot of conversations about Nagasaki. I mean, I had not seen "Oppenheimer" yet and I'm curious if they had the same conversations on "Oppenheimer." There was something about Nagasaki that gave me pause as to whether or not this is one of the failures of cinema, right? The failures of the visual representation mode is “can the camera possibly pick up or create the same horror that it really is or does it feel like it's entertainment for the sake of entertainment?” There's something just false and dirty about that. So, we had lots of talks about " Do we put archival footage in, historical footage in instead?" and at the end of the day, we decided just to stay on Isak’s brother and sort of have the camera just go to this bright light and do it as simply as possible because I think there's just no way. I think there's no way the camera's going to be able to pick up the true experience of what it was to live in that moment. So, I just didn't want to try.

Jo Reed: And you were also filming in black and white.

Soo Hugh: No, we didn't film in black and white. We filmed in color and it wasn't until we edited in color, all of it was in color and it wasn't until very, very late in the process, what we call the color grading process. So, once the whole episode's been edited, we go into the grading suite with our grader, Joe Gawler and that's when you fine tune the look of it, the color of the episode and Joe had just done a black and white film that looked gorgeous and then it was like "Let's look at it. Let's just try it." So, it's almost like, really, at a push of a button, you take all the color away and it just all of a sudden it was really transformative.

Jo Reed: Well, Sunja and her family are fortunate enough to be evacuated to the country and so, spared the horrific bombing. I was really so cognizant of "Oh, we're in the country for the first time when we're in Japan," because we're always in a city in Japan and it made me think of Korea and those beautiful countryside scenes in Korea. I love those farm scenes. Can you talk about those when she and her family are evacuated?

Soo Hugh: Yeah. I'll tell you, it's a funny thing. So, we always said when we're looking for the rice fields-- because we knew that we had to take over a rice field to shoot. So, when we found that rice field, we had to plant all of our rice, our crew did. But we saw this one rice field early on when we were location scouting because it's such an important location in season two and this one rice field that we saw was just gorgeous. It was one of those terraced rice fields that had the sunset that went forever and ever and it just felt like that picture postcard perfect view and everyone was like "This must be it. This must be the right rice field," and yet, I really thought "This is not it," and they're like "Why? Look how beautiful this is. You can't get anything more beautiful." I was like "That's the problem. It's too beautiful." Because I think the reason why the rice field is so important in our show in the second season is not only does it represent escape and survival for Sunja, but we had to show that it wasn't supposed to be paradise, right? Because the war was still happening in the background. So, the rice field was too idyllic, was too just beautiful. Then somehow you felt like we're in a fairy tale of a story. I always called it "Let's not do Disney World for our rice farm." So, when we got to the rice farm to shoot, it was hard. There was bugs and mosquitoes and it was just a very, very hard set in some ways. But I think you see, even though it is a beautiful locale, you also see the hard work that goes into it, which I think is really important in the show.

Jo Reed: Well, you had an impressive lineup of directors for both seasons. So, how do you ensure continuity and vision and tone across the various directors while maintaining the core, the vision of the story?

Soo Hugh: I'm so grateful to our directors. We had two in the season one and three in season two. They spend months with us, right? It's not just fly in and do an episode and fly out. They're with us for prep and production through multiple countries and it really does become this collaborative family. What I love about this show is that when you look at all of our directors, they're very different. They're very different artistically, stylistically, temperamentally, even, and I think that really brings a lot to our show that we have such diversity. But I think the thing that really connects them all together that's crucial for "Pachinko" is that I feel all of our directors are true humanists, meaning they privilege the human experience, the human emotions over anything and I think you really see that in the work.

Jo Reed: Did you film all eight episodes at once in each season?

Soo Hugh: So, yeah, we shoot almost like a movie. So, we cross-board the entire episodes. So, all eight are shot together, meaning in one day of shooting, you can be shooting an episode from episode two and then the next scene that you shoot is from episode eight and it's because we just had to take advantage of the locations to shoot at the locations. So, it's really nutty, I have to say. For the actors, it's a huge challenge and again, it's a testament to them of how good they are, that they're able to really just flex that way. So, they're able to be Sunja in one year in one scene and then quickly change, quickly change and then rush to the other set and all of a sudden play 10 years later. It's amazing.

Jo Reed: I'm curious about the kind of adjustments or creative changes you and the team made from season one to season two, especially because now the cast and the crew are so much more familiar with the project and with the cast, especially the characters. You mentioned Steve playing Isak..

Soo Hugh: Yeah. There's always so many changes. I mean, season one, we shot in Vancouver-- for some of them, Vancouver, we moved to Toronto. This is interesting. I think it's something that most people won't pick up on. But season one was shot on a much wider aspect ratio. So, if you look at season one, the framing is much wider and in season two, we went to a little bit of a not as wide frame and I think that's because when I was in post, it's gorgeous. But so much of our show works on the closeups and I always said our closeups have to feel as epic as the widest landscape possible. One of the concerns I have from season one was that our closeups could have been more powerful, I think, just because of all that negative space around the face. So, in season two, that was a decision to go closer in and I really think you do feel it. I feel like it feels more intimate in season two with our actors and our characters. I'm not sure you can tell me if you felt that way, but it feels more intimate to me.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I think it does, too and I think when they're in their home or in the Korean ghetto, if you will, in Osaka, the narrowness of everything. You feel very close to it.  Min Jin Lee's book is more than 400 pages long, but it also spans more than 60 years. So, it really can only accommodate but so much attention to any given period. How did you fill in that space? How did you go about doing that, especially in season two?

Soo Hugh: I mean, this is why I think television is an extraordinary medium. In some ways, it's a really lovely cousin to the novel. I can't imagine "Pachinko" as a feature film two hours, it just, I don't think it's possible. And there's something about the translation to jump from the book to television, where in television, you can live with these characters from week to week, but also from years to years in future seasons that gives you -- we talked about breathing space earlier, but we don't have to rush so much. You talked about that rice scene and have the camera have time to linger in that bowl of rice. It was amazing to be able to think of scenes that aren't in the book that really help you get into our character's psyche. The Hansu earthquake episode in season one is an example of that. If we didn't have the luxury of television time, we wouldn't have been able to get into Hansu's backstory. But it feels so crucial to jump in there for us.

Jo Reed: Hansu is such a complicated character. He is the father of Sunja’s eldest child. He’s a gangster. He can be kind, but he is so deeply vicious and he lives in Japan among people who despise him because he is Korean and we see shades of that duality in the 1989 story--with Solomon, Sunja’s grandson as well.

Soo Hugh: I think, I mean, what you're pointing out, that rhyming, what we always call it on set is "How are we rhyming with one another? How is this character rhyming with this character?" Or "How is this timeline rhyming with this timeline?" We talk a lot about Hansu and Solomon rhyming with one another, in some ways. It's interesting that Solomon has no blood line similarities to Hansu and yet, he does feel like he's genetically-- he's somehow spiritually the heir to Hansu. I mean, for us, the question of Solomon is which path is he going to follow? He's caught between Hansu's worldview and his grandmother Sunja's worldview and that's always been his dilemma.

Jo Reed: The show explores themes of identity, belonging, family, loss over multiple generations and I wonder how you and the writers brought your own family experiences into the writer's room and how that influenced the story that you're telling.

Soo Hugh: I think I'm so lucky to have had, in both seasons, writer's rooms where it was filled with not just great writers, but people who came from such varied backgrounds. It was very important to me that we didn't just have Korean and Korean American writers, that we didn't have that very narrow point of view. We had a Nigerian playwright. We had a poet who had never even written a screenplay before. We had novelists. We had Chang-rae Lee and David Mitchell, who don't come even from the film and television backgrounds, just so many different writers from different modes and different experiences of different ages and different immigration backgrounds and yet, the thing that I think is so interesting was how similar so many of our stories were to one another, right? Everyone can remember that moment when they're watching over a parent and not knowing what to do because the parent's getting older and it really speaks to the universality of so many of our human emotions and I hope "Pachinko" speaks to that, that even though it's a story of this one specific family who lived in one specific time period, that there's also this feeling that "Ah, I know this family because this family resembles mine as well."

Jo Reed: Yeah, for sure. Can we just take a step back and tell me what inspired you to write for television and when and how did that begin for you?

Soo Hugh: So, it's this funny story. I always say I wish it was one of those things I could say "Oh, television and I were made for one another from day one." I was actually a terrible snob and I thought I wanted to be a movie writer and I wrote movies that never got made and I really disdain television, which is just ridiculous when you think about all this great television that was around me at that time and someone said "You should write for television." I said "No, I'm a movie writer. I'm not a television writer," and then my agent sent me the script for "The Killing." This is the US remake of the Scandinavian show and the pilot, I read it and I just got chills. I was like "Wow, this doesn't feel like a TV show." Again, my ignorance and I was really fortunate enough to have been hired on that show and what's amazing about television is you're in this writer's room with other writers and you don't do that with feature films and all of a sudden, you're in this community and it's really sacred being able to talk to other writers and go over a story and then a few weeks later, you're on set seeing actors actually say lines that you wrote. It's incredibly satisfying.

Jo Reed: The opening credits of "Pachinko" became iconic in season one and you introduced a new song for the opening credits in season two. But let's talk about the process of creating such a memorable sequence and how you wanted it to set the tone for the show because it's one of the first things we see every week.

Soo Hugh: So, what's interesting, when I was first thinking about the title sequence and I was talking to the producers about it, they were at first like "Wait, we don't get it. For such a serious show, does this feel tonally out of whack?" and I think that was exactly the point, which is life shouldn't feel one noted emotionally and that title sequence for me was really important because it really shows the full language of life, that joy is equally important as mourning or solace or any of the heavier emotions we sometimes deal with. Just also on a practical level, it's probably the happiest day of our shoot, both seasons. I remember both days really, really well when we shoot our title sequences and it's the first time our entire cast gets to come together. Our past and present actors never see one another, except for the day of the title sequence shoot and it really is just extraordinary.

Jo Reed: You launched the incubator program ‘Thousand Miles’ to support emerging Asian and Asian American writers. Tell me more about that program and sort of how it aligns with your vision of fostering new voices.

Soo Hugh: It was something that I was able to do through Universal and UCP when I had my deal there. We went through one cycle. I regret I'm no longer there, but I really have to give them a lot of credit because it wasn't a cheap program and they really put their money where their mouth was and we were able to foster over 35 writers. The goal of this program was to help people give them their first step forward because I know how hard it is to take that first step and I remember the people who helped give me mine and all we did was just give them, in some ways, a room of their own. Three of the writers were paid to write a script and I can't tell you how important that first paycheck is. The first time I got actually paid to write was the first time I legitimately felt like a writer. I think that paycheck, whether it's $10 or $100 or $1 million, it doesn't matter because it validates being a writer and that was really important to the program.

Jo Reed: And you also formed your own production company, Moonslinger.

Soo Hugh: We started Moonslinger about two years ago, my producing partner, Margo and I, and again, with this idea that we want to create film and TV that feels like it's made forever. What that means is that I grew up on movies that somehow endured and that felt like they were going to last beyond one season or one cycle. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to create hits. But I think there's a way, if you can, to create hits that also feel like they're going to speak to the future as well and not just for the time.

Jo Reed: And what do you hope "Pachinko" will mean to viewers years from now, to your children and grandchildren?

Soo Hugh: I think to my children, that's a really important thing. They don't watch "Pachinko" yet. They're a little too young to understand "Pachinko," but one day they will watch "Pachinko," I hope. They're mixed-race children and they have one step, not just in America, one foot not just in Korea, but also generationally, they're in this second, third generation. So, they're really out of this strange Venn diagram of not knowing what part of them belongs where. I hope "Pachinko" gives them a little bit of shading. I just hope "Pachinko" gives them a little bit of a richer sense of where they've come from, that helps them figure out who they are. I think it helped me. "Pachinko," without a doubt, helped fill in so many things for me as a person, beyond just a writer of who I am and where I came from. I hope it does the same for my daughters.

Jo Reed: We have two seasons to go. Am I right in assuming you have them all mapped out?

Soo Hugh: We're lucky enough to have future seasons. We definitely have more story to tell and we feel like they're urgent stories to tell.

Jo Reed: Well, with two seasons done, what have been your biggest takeaways as a showrunner and as a writer?

Soo Hugh: I think the biggest takeaway is these shows are possible. When I started almost five, six years ago, this idea of doing a multi-language, multi-national show, it felt like we were set up for failure. But now, again, through the universal language of cinema and filmmaking, it's not easy, but it's totally doable and it's worth it because I can't tell you just what it feels like to step on set, whether you're in Japan or Korea or Toronto, and seeing people from all over the world come together to tell a story and our crew really cared and that was also something that was really meaningful to me is it didn't feel they showed up on set for something that they weren't proud of being part of. They cared about being part of "Pachinko" and Pachinko couldn't be as good as it is without them caring. So, I think that's given me a lot of confidence as well.

Jo Reed: Okay. I think that's a good place to leave it, Soo. Thank you so much. Thank you for "Pachinko," truly.

Soo Hugh: No, thank you for your support and thank you for watching. It means a lot. It's important. Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was showrunner and writer Soo Hugh talking about the series Pachinko. The season two finale is airing this week on Apple Plus. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and if you like us leave us a rating! For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.