Setup: After a subway ride home, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Nora (Greta Lee) part ways, but they’re in different head spaces. He wants to keep hanging out with her, but she just says she’ll see him the next day and gets on another train. It was mostly a silent scene, with a lot of fraught emotions, but ended up trimmed.
Missing moment: “We shot it exactly as we’d dreamed it,” says writer-director Celine Song. “It was such a hard thing to remove it, because the actors were so proud of that scene; the crew worked so hard to get that scene — it’s a scene we all loved. But when you see the whole film, it’s like, here’s a problem. The ending has to work. The whole film is a knife, and it all has to come to that one gesture of pushing the knife in. Everything in the subway scene happens 30 minutes before the film ends — and it’s that scene again. We blew the tension and uncertainty [for the ending] earlier. The holding of the breath, the silence, the intense look — all of those things in the middle of the film was killing the way it was supposed to happen.”
