Four short fables in which characters collide with fate – and each other – comprise THE AIR I BREATHE, an ambitious and absorbing drama from debuting director/writer Jieho Lee. Boasting a brilliant ensemble cast, the film is inspired by a Chinese proverb that breaks life down into four key emotions – Happiness, Sorrow, Pleasure, and Love – and each vignette is built around a character who embodies one of these key emotions.

In “Happiness,” 2006 Best Actor Oscar Winner Forest Whitaker stars as a timid banker who impulsively bets every cent he has, and then some, on a supposedly “sure thing.” In “Sorrow,” Sarah Michelle Gellar is a rising pop star whose contract falls under the control of a ruthless crime boss (Oscar-nominee Andy Garcia), and his corrupt nephew (Emile Hirsch). In “Pleasure,” Brendan Fraser stars as a man who can see into the future of everyone he meets, but is totally blind when it comes to his own; and in “Love,” Kevin Bacon plays a doctor who pines for a woman he can never possess (Julie Delpy), only to find that he suddenly holds her life in his hands. Though each of the characters believes that his or her life is governed by hazard and chance, their unbridled emotions, impulsive choices, and reckless moves all prove one universal truth: character is destiny, and each of us makes our own fate.

For his feature directorial debut, THE AIR I BREATHE, writer-director Jieho Lee has created a forceful, four-part meditation on character, destiny, and the subtle connections between the two. Inspired by an Asian proverb suggesting that all of humanity is connected through four emotions— Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love—the young Korean-American filmmaker has assembled a superb ensemble, including Oscar-winner Forest
Whitaker, Oscar-nominees Andy Garcia and Julie Delpy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar, Emile Hirsch, Brendan Fraser, and Kevin Bacon. Together, they enact a quartet of tales, linked yet distinct, each dedicated to dramatizing one of these four fundamental emotions.

“The impetus for making the film,” says Lee, “comes from my journey as an Asian-American. Born into a bi-modal world with often contradictory points of view, I’ve always been fascinated by the pursuit of one’s individuality and how that relates to the people around you. For me, America is a culture that extols the individual, and all the beauty and freedom that comes with the discovery of who you are as a unique person. On the flip side, my Asian heritage always puts the collective first, and emphasizes the incredible strength that comes from being part of a whole.” It was in trying to combine and reflect these two opposing world views, or, as he jokingly puts it, “to have my yang and eat my yin too,” that THE AIR I BREATHE came about.

Interestingly, Lee took this relatively philosophical departure point and developed it into what is essentially a gangster story, with a crime boss (played by Garcia) weaving through the film’s individual parts, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background. In “Happiness,” a clerk (Whitaker) gambles everything he has, and then some, on a horse; in “Sorrow”, a rising pop-star finds herself at the mercy of the same mobster who has ensnared Whitaker; in “Pleasure” the mobster’s enforcer (Fraser) has premonitions about his victims (two of whom might be Gellar and Whitaker) but is unable to foresee his own future; and in “Love,” a doctor (Bacon) worships a woman (Delpy) from afar until he is faced with the challenge of saving her life. Catching these people at pivotal points in their lives, Lee is intriguingly ambiguous as to whether his characters control their destiny, or whether destiny controls them.

The Asian proverb told to him by his mother is just one of Lee’s inspirations. A graduate of Wesleyan film school, he acknowledges a number of significant cinematic influences that explain his choice of an underworld setting. “I was raised on a strict diet of film noir,” he says. “Sam Fuller, Otto Preminger, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Siodmak along with Hitchcock and Scorsese (“Mean Streets” was a huge inspiration as well.) One of my favorite films is “Criss Cross” by Siodmak, as well as “Naked Kiss” by Sam Fuller. These dark and twisted tales of morality set against a desperate search for love are the films that make my heart race. Ironically, the black-and-white world of film noir is compelling to me because of the world of greys that the characters live in. Nobody is good, nobody is completely evil, and the consequences of the characters’ choices is the only reliable truth in this hard boiled world.”

Hollywood influences aside, Lee still drew from real life to create his four lead characters. “Each of these stories is based on real people or events in my life,” he notes. ‘Happiness’ came from my time as a salary man in Korea, where I was overwhelmed by a nation of subway riders so fierce that I remember being picked up by the crowd and swept through the train doors, my feet hovering inches above the ground the entire time. ‘Sorrow’ is based on a pop singer in Korea whom I knew very well. The music industry in Korea is controlled by gangsters, and my friend was struggling to free herself from a contract. ‘Pleasure’ is derived from a gangster I knew as a music video director and, while he didn’t necessarily have ‘visions’, he did come from a line of ‘shamans’ and had a powerful spiritual awareness about him. Finally, ‘Love’ is a story based an actual Korean woman who tried to kill herself by jumping from a rooftop, only to land 20 stories below on a doctor’s car. The car was smashed to smithereens but she miraculously walked away without a single broken bone!”

In striking contrast to Lee’s affection for these tabloid tales of tough guys walking down noir-ish mean streets, is his avowed indebtedness to the classic fairy tale, “The Wizard of Oz,” which serves as another major narrative and thematic influence on his film. As Lee points out, THE AIR I BREATHE is about, “four individuals who set out on a journey to find out who they really are,” just like its L. Frank Baum/ MGM antecedent. “On the one hand,” he notes, “you have this Asian belief that we are all connected—no matter who we are—through four emotions. The belief also implies that you cannot know one emotion without knowing the other three. To know Sorrow is to know Happiness, Pleasure and Love, and vice-versa. On the other hand, you have a story inspired by ‘The Wizard of Oz’ wherein four individuals set out on a journey to find out who they really are. Funnily enough, it seemed to me that the four Western protagonists—the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy—all need each other in the exact same way as they fight to find out what they’re made of when they’re forced to stand alone.”

“The Wizard of Oz” also informs the structure of Lee’s film, and he sees Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character, “Sorrow,” as his Dorothy. “’Oz’ is a great archetype for me and it’s from there that we pulled the idea of four separate yet intrinsically linked characters, and motives, together to help bring one person home.” Pointing out that, in his script, “each person, each character plays a specific role in the development of another,” Lee stresses that the AIR I BREATHE is different from other such multi-strand, multi-character dramas about interconnectedness as “Crash.” “It’s not just using different people to illustrate different ideas about the same theme,” he observes. “Each story is delivering a different idea, and these all build toward a comprehensive arc that weaves into the larger arc of Sarah’s character, or Dorothy, if you will.”

In lieu of the Emerald City, Lee sets his film in a generic metropolis that amalgamates elements found in several contemporary American locations, but that is strange and stylized enough to match the heightened tone of his screenplay. “Originally,” he tells us, “this film was financed and prepped to be shot in Seoul, Korea. When my representatives suggested I try making it here, my writing partner, Bob De Rosa, and I began localizing the script for a U.S. city. It was fascinating for me to discover what translated well and what didn’t, and there were things that seemed absurdly farfetched here that were very real and commonplace in Asia—and vice versa. At the end of it all, we tried to stick to what was truthful, and that’s what helped us walk the razor’s edge between creating a ‘timeless study’ and making it relevant to today’s society.” Ultimately, the majority of the film was shot in Mexico City, where the subtle differences in topography and architecture create an aura at once familiar and exotic. In this respect, Lee is able to create, especially in his nocturnal scenes, an atmosphere that recalls the film noir studio films that so inspired him. As he puts it, “we ended up creating a wonderfully rich intersection where both a heightened reality and a gritty authenticity co-existed in the same place.”

Ever the cinephile—and film student—Lee cites one more round of cinematic influences: “Fellini’s ‘Nights of Cabiria’ has always been a film I return to over and over again as a source of inspiration and humility, and as a reminder of the humanity I hope to infuse into every story that I tell…no matter how dark the material. In fact, the last shot of my film was directly inspired by the last shot of ‘Cabiria,’ where Giulietta Masina walks down the street, her face going from tears to a smile. That, to me, is one of the most brilliant, one of the most incredibly beautiful, shots in all cinema history.” Then, finally, in keeping with his “bi-modal” perspective, Lee acknowledges his indebtedness to fellow Asian filmmakers. “Asian cinema,” he concludes, “and my own life in Asia, have had a profound influence on how I see the world aesthetically. Wong Kar Wei, Park Chan-wook—these are directors who have a unilateral voice of such pronounced uniqueness. The way they shoot their images creates a tone that can only be described by the Korean word, ‘Jung’… a sentiment that fuses sorrow, love, happiness, and pleasure into one.”