My South Korean Adventure: Heading Across the World for <i>Stoker</i>

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This film image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Matthew Goode, left, Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, right, in a scene from "Stoker." (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures)
This film image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Matthew Goode, left, Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, right, in a scene from "Stoker." (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Singer and songwriter Emily Wells created an original song for director Park Chan-Wook's movie "Stoker" and went to South Korea to promote the film. Below, find her diary and captioned photos from the trip.

This was a first for me, writing a song, with lyrics, with my voice singing something I needed to believe from the perspective of a fictional character: the dark and evocative India Stoker of Park Chan-Wook's recent and first American film Stoker. I wrote the beat, the first verse, the hook and the string parts in a Bushwick practice space in the span of a few hours.

Park was in! Now I had to write the second verse, finish the song. I pretended to be a rapper, I thought a lot about Jay Z, I went to the east river and read Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I couldn't put this on, I needed to believe, to see the darkness in myself. I needed to remember when I "did something bad in order not to do something worse" as India's father advises in the film. I thought about method acting.

So, two days later after eating and dreaming in Stoker, there it was, 16 lines or so and I'm recording the final parts of the song, sending it to Director Park and getting in the car to finish a two month tour. I was driving in middle of nowhere a week or so later when the sound editor, Ted Caplin who had initially introduced Park to my work, called me to tell me that Park wanted it for the film. As legend goes he asked in his calm quiet way to hear it one more time, listened and said, "yes, this is it." Nearly a year later the film premiered in Seoul and I was invited to come and perform at both the press conference that would introduce the film, as well as the premiere itself.

Director Park took me under his generous wing, bringing me into his fold of friends, family, filmmakers and actors: the absolute elite of Korean film. In the photos to follow you'll see me attempting to capture in mostly iPhone snapshots, the whirlwind of a trip performing, photo-shooting, getting interviewed, being police escorted and meeting very kind and generous people of Korea in the gothic, modern metropolis that is Park Chan-Wook's Seoul.

All photos credited to Emily Wells and Lauren Ross.

Sound Checking at EBS Space

Emily Wells Korean Adventure

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