Before becoming the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il served as the head of the country's Ministry for Propaganda and Film. While in this role in 1978, he kidnapped and held captive South Korea's most famous actress, Choi Eun-Hee, and her ex-husband and director Shin Sang-Ok, forcing the duo to make films for North Korea. Paul Fischer's (Flatiron Books, out today) tells the absurd, harrowing, and true story of Choi and Shin's ordeal, which reveals the importance of film as propaganda to the North Korean regime and adds context to the debacle over last year's The Interview. The below excerpt details the time Choi and Shin secretly recorded a two-hour-long conversation with Kim Jong-Il.

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The opportunity to record Kim proved remarkably elusive. After a spate of parties, Shin and Choi now found themselves seeing less of Kim. For three months he was only intermittently in contact; he would call to ask their opinion on a play that was in development, or a Mercedes would turn up to take them to a film event. Now and again gifts would arrive from the Dear Leader: Estée Lauder cosmetics for Choi, a Rolex for Shin. Unbeknownst to them, Kim Jong-Il, paranoid about American spy satellites, had recently started spending just sixty-five to seventy days of the year in Pyongyang, dividing the rest of his time between his new countryside villas and resorts.

While they waited for Jong-Il to feel safe enough to return to the capital, Shin and Choi watched North Korean films—120 or so films in three months, Shin calculated—acquainting themselves with the country's idiosyncratic filmmaking. He found My Home Village a very good film, though the quality had steadily gone downhill after that, with Sea of Blood and The Flower Girl the two possible exceptions. North Korean movies, Shin later wrote, "were not made for entertainment or for artistic purposes but were used as a political tool. Political power and movie making were inseparable." And while the Soviets had employed much the same approach, in the process they had created timeless masterpieces and had innovated, unlike the North Koreans. This, Shin now understood, was the problem which he had been "hired" to resolve, and he set his mind to doing so, partly because he loved a filmmaking challenge, but principally because appeasing Kim Jong-Il was his and Choi's only hope of ever escaping North Korea. Shin needed a slacker leash, more freedom of movement, and Choi had told him the only way to achieve that was to play along, by impressing their captor and pretending to aspire to the same goals.

Shin and Choi's routine became the same day in and day out as, confined to the house, they watched an average of four films a day. The movies were chosen for them with no consultation and included films from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as two American films, Dr. Zhivago and, oddly, Papillon, about a Frenchman unjustly sent to a brutal penal colony in French Guiana, where he endures solitary confinement and eventually escapes after a first failed attempt. Shin never learned why those two particular films were chosen for them. Perhaps the answer was that both had been adapted from books, a popular trend in both Koreas at the time, especially the North, where original scripts were a rarity. But both films were fiercely individualistic in content. North Korean movies didn't favor the love-against-all-odds theme of Zhivago or the one-man-versus-the-system message of Papillon. They couldn't, surely, have been intended as examples?

The days ticked by. Shin requested meetings with Kim several times, in vain, and worried that he was being toyed with and ignored. In fact, Kim was touring China with his father. It was the first time the leader-in-the-making had shadowed his father on a state visit. When he returned in May 1983, a propaganda documentary covering the visit was brought to the villa for Shin and Choi, not to critique but, Shin thought, to make them aware Jong-Il was now more than just a Leader in name: he was openly involved in policy-making. For two more months Shin's pleas for a meeting went unanswered. Then, on August 19, the phone finally rang. As always, Kim opened with a question about Shin and Choi's health, then he told Shin that he had set up their offices and work was ready to commence. He was sending a car to get them right away.

The car took them to the center of Pyongyang, to a two-building complex, one building five stories high and the other three. Jong-Il had moved into what had been his father's offices seven years before, in 1976, when Kim Il-Sung had moved his own quarters to the opulent new Kumsusan Palace that Jong-Il had built for him. The building Jong-Il personally used was the smaller one, purposefully placed so that the taller one could block unwanted eyes from seeing what happened on the inside. Though luxuriously ornamented, with high ceilings, and what looked like marble floors, and elaborate granite reliefs, both buildings were in fact all iron and concrete. Their outside walls were almost a meter thick, designed to withstand bombs. The complex had seven entrances, an automatic gate at each of them, remote-controlled from a guard post on the inside. There were allegedly underground tunnels, wide as roads, leading from the building to one of Jong-Il's villas in case he needed to escape at short notice.

Shin and Choi exited the Mercedes and were welcomed by several members of staff. The five-story building had been the home of the Paekdu Creative Group (Kim's previous top filmmaking staff), but they had been moved out to make room for the new talent. The entirety of one wall in the ground-floor lobby was a mural of Mount Paekdu. Off the lobby was a large and comfortable three-room office for Shin and Choi's personal use, with its own bathroom. The whole second floor was a state-of-the-art conference room, to be used only by Kim Jong-Il and his associates (at that point, Shin was told, Kim had yet to ever make use of it). The wall in that room boasted a mural of Kim overseeing the filming of Sea of Blood, his most famous "Immortal Classic." The mural for the largest wall on the third floor was a medley of scenes from Sea of Blood, The Flower Girl, and Destiny of a Self-Defense Force Member. The rest of the floor was occupied by a huge screening room.

Shin and Choi spent the next few months getting settled in their offices and, as always, waiting for Kim. There was still no meeting planned. And then finally, on October 18, Shin's fifty-sixth birthday, Jong-Il, who had a penchant for celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, called Shin in to wish him a happy birthday and ask him and Choi to supper. It would be their first formal meeting.

Shin made sure he had the tape recorder at hand.

Shin was prepared to talk cinema with Kim, but he also intended, for the first time, to ask directly why he and Choi had been kidnapped. He wanted reasons, but he also wanted evidence, in case he and Choi made it out of North Korea, that they hadn't defected. Otherwise his and Choi's accounts might not be enough to exonerate them. He needed proof direct from Kim Jong-Il's mouth.

Secretly recording either of the Kims was an extremely serious crime. Shin had already spent time in a reeducation camp, and being caught now, after months of feigning cooperation and commitment, would eliminate all hope for the future. Without a doubt, he would be executed.

The plan called for the tape recorder to be hidden inside Choi's handbag, with Choi starting and stopping the recording as needed. Before the meeting the couple experimented with how she could do this discreetly, what position the recorder needed to be in to get a recording of the highest quality, and whether Choi could get away with keeping her handbag partially open for minimal audio interference.

At roughly 5 p.m. on October 19, Kim Jong-Il's personal limousine took Shin and Choi to Kim's office at the Central Committee Headquarters. In the back of the car Shin silently rehearsed his questions over and over. The Mercedes drove to a side entrance and through two heavy iron gates decorated with the symbol of the hammer, sickle, and writing brush, then pulled up to a stop. Kim's office took up the whole of a small building, separate from the main building and heavily protected. Inside, an armed security guard sat at the reception desk; he sprang to his feet, saluted the distinguished guests, and ushered them through, without searching them. Shin and Choi were shown to the elevators and sent to the third floor.

Kim Jong-Il was waiting for them when the elevator doors slid open. He greeted them with a big smile. "It's been a long time!" he exclaimed. "I've been so busy I haven't even had the time to get together with you. I really must apologize." Photographers were with him to commemorate the meeting. After a few pictures, the Dear Leader waved away the photographers, told Shin and Choi's minder to wait outside, and went into a reception room alone with them.

Choi reached into her handbag and switched on the tape recorder.

The reception room was huge. On one side there was a large desk, on the other a few easy chairs and a round glass table. To the right of the desk, positioned to be viewed by the person seated behind it, were six television monitors. As soon as he entered, Kim turned on one of the televisions, bringing up the news on KBS, the South Korean Broadcasting Service. Immediately he switched it off, explaining that MBC, the other major South Korean network, "has a drama on at this hour" and flicking on another monitor. "Sa Mi-Ja is a good actress," he added, instantly recognizing the relatively unknown actress in the scene. Having demonstrated his knowledge of foreign television, Kim then switched it off, turned back to his guests, and asked them to sit down as a young waiter brought in soft drinks and laid them on the table. "Let's talk for about an hour," he said, "then we'll have dinner together."

Kim spoke for two hours with barely a pause, of which Choi was only able to record forty-five minutes—a full side of the cassette, which she could not flip over. (Much later, when the tape eventually hit the media, it was a sensation, the first time the general public had ever heard Kim Jong-Il in candid private conversation.)

Kim Il-Sung's adviser Hwang Jang-Yop once recalled that Jong-Il spoke extremely fast, to the point that many of his elders found him hard to understand "unless you completely focus," Hwang said. Shin and Choi's experience of him was the same. "[Kim's] words poured out in rapid fire," Shin remembered, "like a machine gun. . . . His voice was high and he spoke rapidly. He rambled on, often speaking in partial, ungrammatical sentences, moving to a new thought without ever finishing the previous one." This was not the polished Dear Leader whom Shin had met on more public occasions. "He was completely different from when we met at the party. Perhaps because he was excited, his voice was like that of a man having an argument. . . . [He] launched into a long discussion that ran the gamut from his reasons for kidnapping us and the preparations for the kidnapping to the status of the North Korean film industry and the reasons for its backwardness. He never stopped to rest and the words just kept cascading forth in a stream. Once Kim started speaking, it was almost impossible for us to get a word in."

The tape recording is simply extraordinary—so much so that, while it has been authenticated both by the CIA and KCIA, conspiracy theorists would later question its validity. It took no encouragement for Kim to explain, almost boastfully, their kidnappings. He had been informed, he told Shin, calling him sunsaeng (teacher), and addressing him throughout in formal pronouns rather than the familiar (much like vous and tu in French), "that you were the best director in South Korea. We were talking about film directors, and Choe Ik-Gyu said you're the best. And knowing that you were born in North Korea"—another propaganda bonus—"it helped us to decide." On the tape the Dear Leader can be heard laughing, with Shin and Choi joining in. "We learned your situation wasn't very good in the South. You were having problems with Park Chung-Hee and we figured that Park was going to try to hang on to power for a long time and that it would be difficult for you to work in the South and you would try to work abroad. . . . We heard you wanted to go abroad to make films."

"That was when my business license was canceled," Shin helpfully offered.

"Yes, that's right," answered Kim. "So I thought, I've got to bring him here. But it's going to be impossible to bring him here because he's a man. Impossible, so we try to find a way to lure you, to entice you to come here. We needed something. So we brought Teacher Choi here to tempt you." Again Jong-Il laughed and the couple joined in. "Frankly speaking . . . I absolutely needed you. So I began to covet you but there was nothing I could do. I told my comrades, if we want to get Director Shin here, we have to plan a covert operation to bring you here." Just ten days before this conversation, on October 9, 1983, Kim Jong-Il had ordered an assassination bombing operation in Rangoon targeting South Korea's president, Chun Doo-Hwan, while he was on a state visit to Burma. Chun, delayed in traffic, had survived, but twenty-one others died. "[But] even after bringing him here," Kim continued without pause, "how do we make him feel at ease and happy? Then there was the unavoidable situation—I'm going to be very candid with you, so please don't think badly of me—the fact that we kept the two of you separated from each other. It wasn't my original intention. My comrades thought that if Madame Choi comes here, Teacher Shin will naturally come. But as you know, our working-level officials are too subjective and bureaucratic, so in dealing with the matter they did not handle it properly. . . ." This was Kim's attempt at an apology, blaming his underlings. Jong-Il assured them both that the people responsible had been punished. "There have been a lot of problems. . . . Our comrades on the inside, and especially the comrades who carried out the operation, have fallen into subjectivism. They have gone through a great deal of self-criticism as a result. I've also conducted my own self-criticism. Because I never told my subordinates in detail what my plans were, I never told them just how we would use you. . . . I just said I need those two people; bring them here, so my comrades just carried out the operation. So in handling you, they put you in different guesthouses and treated you like prisoners, criminals. As a result, there have been a lot of misunderstandings."

Kim had wanted them as guests, he explained, and he saw them as equals; the disrespect with which they had been treated was not his fault. He had faced reluctance from comrades, he continued, who did not believe that Shin and Choi truly wanted to "assist in upgrading the North's film industry" but were here solely to please him. "My belief is that South Korean people— filmmakers—come to this side and feel real freedom, well—in making films, without trouble . . . my thoughts—well—for me—" On the tape Kim seems to get lost in his own speech and hesitates. There is a pause. "Take our country," he finally continued. "North and South are facing off. . . . For a Communist country people can only travel to places that share our ideology. It's impossible to go anywhere else. We are trading with Japan, but in practice, if we want to send our technicians there to learn and adopt new skills, Japan won't accept them, because they have to make a show of a hostile attitude toward us. So I was thinking—yes, only in my head—my intention was, well, I hadn't talked to anyone about this . . . I thought, what people have mastered Western skills that we don't have here . . . who could come here to produce something with my support? Then we could flip the situation so we could culturally penetrate the West. . . . As you've seen in this country, people here only see inside this country. They are happy with what they are able to see. They're not able to compare it with what others have on the outside.

"We're on a lower level," he added. "To speak honestly, South Koreans try hard to get things done—here people are different. Things are given to them. North Korean actors aren't improving. They have no acting skills at all. In the South when you introduce a new actor, you make sure they'll be better from film to film. When new faces are shown here, we cannot expect they'll be any better in the next film. Here are two things I've analyzed. It's needed that we invest in directors and in our actors and actresses. And, those people should work hard or else they can't survive in the industry. Hard work is key to success."

"I have felt that as well," Shin answered. "I could use the resources here. I could teach technical skills—not just copying South Korean films but also being creative. I think it's possible, so I've been longing for a meeting with you, Dear Leader," he finished.

Kim seemed satisfied. "I told people: Shin and Choi came here because we have a superior system. You came here voluntarily. I didn't say my real intentions. Some people have their doubts. . . . What my intentions were, well—it's complicated. The fact is I am a politician who has wishes and desires. You were demanded by these wishes and desires. So you are here."

"It's been difficult to talk about this. . . . We have to admit that we're falling behind. We have to acknowledge that we are behind. I'm in the position to say it. If others said the same thing, they would be in trouble for criticizing the system. I am the only one who can say this. And I can only tell you two. There is nothing challenging when a film is made here. They [the crews] don't try a single new thing, so they can't improve. They repeat scenes we've already made before. We should make films that stay with you and give you something to think about later, an ideology. . . . Why do we only make rubbish?"

Kim promised he would protect Shin and give him whatever he needed. "I will be your shield," he promised. "My intention is for you to show how you make films, and people here will naturally follow your path. You are pioneers." He was getting excited now. "Why don't you do this? You can say, when you meet outsiders, that there is no freedom in the South, no democracy. And that there is too much interference in the creative industries. There is only anti-communism. That's what Yun I-Sang [a respected South Korean composer who was then in exile from his country] used to say, you know."

"Well, I was kicked out from the United States when I was there," Shin contributed.

"Right. You came here to find real freedom—that should be what's said. Freedom of expression. We want to lead our film industry to become even more advanced than that of advanced countries. I think that would sound natural. Well," he chuckled, "better than saying you were forcefully dragged here." He interrupted himself to tell Shin and Choi a story about how, years ago, he had had a North Korean film shown to the Cambodian Film Festival, only for the country's ruler, Norodom Sihanouk, to become offended because he thought the film was a metaphor supporting leftist Cambodian guerrilla groups. "We had to apologize several times because we hadn't thought of that," Kim said. "You see how small-minded we are. We don't have any films we can show an international audience."

The tape is inaudible for a moment, then resumes with Kim apologizing. "I am sorry that we haven't pleased you so far," he told Shin and Choi. "People here . . . they are stubborn. I'm worried we will become the world's worst film industry. It will happen if we don't do something now."

"Dear Leader, how lucky these people are to work under a film fan like you," Shin said.

"They must be pleased," Choi added.

"They should try harder," Kim answered. "They can even use me as an excuse if they try but fail to make our film industry better."

"I'm impressed," Shin said. They started talking about specific films, and the subject of The Star of Korea came up. Kim had thrown all his resources at the epic eight-part film series, going so far as casting an unknown in the lead and giving him extensive plastic surgery to make him closely resemble the young Supreme Leader (and then sending him down to work in production once the film had wrapped, never to appear in another picture again); but the movies were limp and lifeless. "It's embarrassing to talk about openly," Jong-Il admitted. "The Star of Korea is history. It is suitable for those who have a difficult time reading history, but it is not art. It could have been better, in a more artistic, more subtle way." Shin agreed and Kim continued, "The state pays for everything for its people. They don't need to fight for food. So, screenwriting has become just a hobby for the screenwriters in this system, because they don't need to worry about making money to be fed. I told our propaganda workers once that there is a real problem in socialism: no incentive for success."

"Maybe there should be a film award that filmmakers can get excited about," Shin suggested.

"With the creative departments we can give that a go. But what about the crews? They don't even have a sense of saving film rolls. They can waste as much of it as they feel like, because they don't have to pay for it. . . . The North's filmmakers are just doing perfunctory work. They don't have any new ideas. Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn't order them to portray that kind of thing," Kim insisted, again shirking responsibility. "I don't know why they make movies that way . . ."

There was a brief silence and he went on more confidently. "This is only a transitional phenomenon and we'll solve our film dilemma. I'm determined to overcome all the barriers to make people open their eyes to the creative mind. I [can] confess the truth only to you two people. I would appreciate it if you keep this a secret just between us." It was unusual for the confident, authoritative, insolent young Leader to address his elders formally and call them Teacher, let alone ask for someone's advice and follow their guidance; yet this was the surreal situation Shin and Choi suddenly found themselves in. Having spent most of the meeting pacifying his two guests, Jong-Il was now working toward the main point of his lecture.

"For the purpose of developing [the] industry," he told Shin, "you must serve as a model so that our film directors will follow naturally. You will play the role of a pioneer. That was my intent when I brought you here, but your role goes further. It goes without saying," Jong-Il added, "that you must say your defection to the North was of your own free will, and that the South's democracy is bogus. It is a sham camouflaged with anti-communism. There is no genuine democracy. There is only anti-communism and interference in the creative work. You must say that because of the restrictions on art, you defected to the North where you could enjoy genuine freedom, the guaranteed freedom of creation."

So Kim didn't just want Shin and Choi to make movies for him. He wanted them to be a publicity tool for North Korea, personifications of the North's superiority. They would be director and actress in their work but also the leading couple of North Korea's deluded self-narrative.

Kim knew the story might be met with skepticism, especially since the outside world had heard nothing of Shin or Choi for five years. He had a solution to this problem, however. People would not jump to the conclusion that they were imprisoned in North Korea for the simple reason that they wouldn't be.

He was sending them abroad.

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From A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer. Copyright © 2015 by the author and reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC.

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