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The cinematographer behind “Decision to Leave” and “Squid Game” Season 2 asked director Lee Chang-dong to change the scene’s setup, a choice that ended with crew members shaking the trees with ropes.

Delivering a masterclass titled “Cinematography of Possible Love: Quiet, Yet Deeper” at Netflix’s Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Kim detailed how he and Lee built the film’s look around natural light, and how much preparation that choice required.

“Possible Love,” Lee’s first film in eight years, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice last month and is South Korea’s submission for the international feature Oscar. It screens in BIFF’s Icons section ahead of its Netflix launch on Nov. 6. The drama follows two married couples from opposite ends of the economic ladder: Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

For all the film’s naturalism, almost nothing in it was left to chance, not even the weather on the day of the climax.

The team prepared for every windy day announced by Lee’s favorite weather YouTube channel. “And every time, the director would say, ‘There is such a thing as a film ghost,’” Kim told the audience. “But that ghost only appears and helps once we have prepared thoroughly past 100% and put in all our effort.”

The ghost never showed up. Instead, everyone on set except the five or six crew members needed to shoot went into the woods, tied ropes, hung onto them and shook the trees. “The film ghost did not appear. But our staff ghosts on set created this,” Kim said, calling it one of the most memorable moments of his more than 20 years in film.

That tension between the natural and the constructed ran through the lighting too. “Ultimately, the balance was centered on supporting natural light, using film fixtures only to assist,” Kim said. In day scenes, film lights were only used where natural light fell short; at night, the team relied as much as possible on existing streetlights and lamps.

That meant designing around the locations. Lee found the site of rich husband Sang-woo’s vacation home on a real estate YouTube channel, and the team built the house during two months of pre-production, down to the direction and size of every window. “To create that kind of result requires an enormous amount of calculation, planning and preparation,” Kim said. “Compared to any film I’ve worked on, this is the one where we worried, debated and planned the most to make it appear that way.”

Kim’s credits also include effects-heavy productions such as “Ashfall.” “Being human, a certain style inevitably emerges,” he said. “For this project, I wanted to strip those away.”

“Possible Love” was shot handheld with a single camera, except for two dialogue scenes. “If it’s too close, it feels exaggerated, and if it’s too far, it feels like we are cropping, cutting up the frame and peeping in,” Kim said of the camera’s distance from the characters.

With Ye-ji’s documentary at the heart of the story, separating her footage from Lee’s film was another question. “Is making that distinction really necessary?” Kim said. “So we decided not to set it in stone.”

“I wanted to blur that boundary,” he said of the shots from the documentary team’s cameras and his own, which become harder to tell apart as the film goes on. “The reason is hard to explain in words, but it was an intuitive sense that it felt right.”

As for the forest, Kim hasn’t given up on the film ghost. “If I get another chance to work with the director in the future, I hope we can definitely meet it then,” he said.