Park Chan-wook knows he has a reputation for shock. The South Korean filmmaker vaulted to international awareness in 2003 with Oldboy, a lurid, exhilarating revenge drama about a man inexplicably held prisoner by an unknown captor for 15 years, then just as inexplicably set loose. His subsequent work has ranged from a romantic comedy set in a psych ward (I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK), to a perverse family portrait (his first and so far only English-language film, Stoker), to the lush erotic thriller The Handmaiden, set in Japanese-occupied Korea.
His latest film, Decision to Leave, is restrained in comparison, a love story tucked inside a murder mystery. It stars Park Hae-il as Hae-joon, a devoted Busan cop, and Tang Wei as Seo-rae, a Chinese home-care worker whose husband dies in what might or might not have been an accident. Park, who’s currently directing an HBO series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, spoke to me through an interpreter about being a filmmaker who has always been interested in the mechanics of cross-cultural communication. “When you’re having a conversation, it’s not just about the definition of the words,” he said. “It’s only when the emotion kicks in that you actually get a full picture of what a person is conveying.”
You’re a Hitchcock fan. Is it fair to say that Decision to Leave is your Vertigo? There are plenty of similarities, from the bifurcated structure, to the mysterious wife and dedicated cop, to the fear of heights.
When you put it like that, it sounds like all the puzzle pieces coming together, but it wasn’t my intention. The fear of heights doesn’t really come from Vertigo — it comes from my own fear of heights. What is very similar is the two-part story structure where, in the second part, time has passed. The man who was shattered reunites with the woman, who has now turned into someone totally different. I realized that the structure itself is so cliché, so typical of noir films. At the end of the day, you’re bound by the genre. In order to get beyond that, I decided to add a new section that turns from a mystery into a love story.
But I do genuinely love Hitchcock. Vertigo is the film that made me want to become a director.
What struck you about it?
That scene where the man is driving through the streets of San Francisco and following the woman. It really felt like being sucked into a daydream. Also the moment when the woman is sitting in the museum and we notice the resemblance of how she tied her hair to the woman’s in the portrait, that element of visual motif when you figure out the connection between what seemed like irrelevant people or objects.
When I was growing up, we didn’t go to movie theaters a lot. Instead, every weekend, the newspaper would say which movie would be playing on television and I’d wait with an excited heart with my parents for that. What I watched on TV at the time was mostly older French films or classic Hollywood movies. Of the Hitchcock films, I remember my mother liking Rebecca; she liked those romantic movies. I also remember my father saying he really enjoyed North by Northwest — that he didn’t know what it was about but enjoyed it regardless.
So no Korean films?
There were good Korean films and films that did well commercially, but I wouldn’t say the ’70s and ’80s were particularly a golden age of Korean cinema. I developed a tendency, subconsciously, to look down on Korean films until my freshman year of college when I came upon Kim Ki-young’s Woman of Fire, which changed my life. Meanwhile, we couldn’t see a single Japanese film at the time — they were banned by the government.
Were there any Japanese films you wished you could have seen earlier or ones that became an influence when you were able to see them?
Obviously, films by Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse. I especially think Ozu and Naruse’s works are good to go back to every ten years — though I haven’t been able to myself. You’ll discover new things as you grow older.
By the time you went to college, the pro-democracy movement was under way, fueled by student activism. Were you involved in the protests? Were your friends?
I didn’t participate in it myself — it didn’t go well with my personality. But I had a lot of friends who were involved. I witnessed conflicts with the police, which were a big shock to me, and felt respect for the heroic actions of students who tied themselves to buildings and risked their lives. There was freedom in finally speaking the words that were banned by the government, our slogans. And there was helplessness and anger when the police did come and begin attacking, as well as the guilt I felt from watching friends get arrested, knowing they might get tortured while I was here safe. I felt this complex mix of emotions throughout college, as did everyone who grew up in my generation.
What did you do in the years before that, right after you graduated from college?
After a gap year, I served in the military for a year and a half, returned to school, and then began working as a set PA right after graduation. Then I worked as a first assistant director, then began working at a small company that imported foreign films. I was in charge of various tasks there, ranging from selecting films to designing posters. Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo is one of the films I dealt with for work.
You made your first feature, The Moon Is … the Sun’s Dream, in your late 20s, but you didn’t have a hit in South Korea until your third film, Joint Security Area, which came out in 2000. Arguably, Oldboy was the first film of yours to get more attention in the West. It has several famous sequences that linger in the mind of anyone who’s seen it; the scene where Choi Min-sik’s character eats a live octopus is on a level all its own, and the single-shot scene in which his character fights his way along a hallway past a group of hired thugs has inspired imitators. Do you feel your work is perceived differently here than at home because of Oldboy when it comes to expectations of extreme content?
There’s definitely something like that. A lot of people still say, “That’s my favorite film.” But a lot of my other films have that kind of extreme violence as well, so I can’t complain.
With that fight scene, I just wanted to try something different from the same old action scenes I’d seen before. The octopus was the result of my search for the right expression of the character’s loneliness and fatigue. I had no idea it would become such a famous scene. You never know what my next film will be. It might be more violent than Oldboy. Who knows?
Decision to Leave almost feels like a reaction to that.
I didn’t make Decision to Leave so I could get rid of such impressions. There’s no, Oh, this is a new chapter and a new era, and I’m moving on. Decision to Leave is about characters who conceal their emotions. In order for the audience to understand the hidden emotions that are going on, they have to observe the delicate changes of their facial expressions, which is why I got rid of elements like violence and nudity that might take them away from that. This was not me trying to say, Oh, I can make softer movies, too.
You have said that Oldboy changed how you approached female characters in your films.
In Oldboy, the female character had to end the story without knowing the truth about what’s been going on. And in Joint Security Area, compared to the male characters, the female character doesn’t feel as human or as dynamic. I reflected back on this, and that’s why Lady Vengeance — the film I made after Oldboy — had to be about a woman, and the actress in Joint Security Area, Lee Young-ae, had to play the lead. Decision to Leave could have ended after part one. A lot of people and reviews have said that Tang Wei is playing the role of a femme fatale. I’d expected that response, which is why we needed part two of the story.
I find the second half of Decision to Leave to be as strong of a reversal as the reveal that the characters in Oldboy were a father and daughter. You graduate from the noir genre, and you move away from the male gaze as well. In part two, Tang’s character, Seo-rae, does not merely make an appearance as the object of the man’s perception. We see scenes of her alone. The woman is the one observing the man.
How did you end up casting her?
We’d wanted to cast Tang since watching her in the Ang Lee film Lust, Caution, but we never had the opportunity — there was no role she could play because she didn’t speak Korean. When we were writing Decision to Leave, I came in with ideas for the detective already, but for the female character, we were starting from a completely blank page.
Her character has a particular fondness for historical K-dramas.
I wanted Seo-rae’s expressions to sound very classical and elegant, and I thought about how a Chinese person living in Korea would learn Korean. She would learn Korean by the book; she wouldn’t pick up colloquial terms. To reinforce this point, she watches period dramas, so it’s almost like hearing a foreigner who has learned English through Shakespeare plays. The drama we see on the television in the film is a fake one that I made myself because I wanted to have scenes where Seo-rae watched it so many times that she uses a quote from that exact drama when speaking to the detective, Hae-joon.
Would you say languages and language barriers are a particular interest of yours? In your last film, The Handmaiden, whether a character spoke Korean or Japanese said a lot about their situation.
I am interested in such issues. Even in Lady Vengeance, we see a mother-daughter relationship being hindered by a language barrier where the mother has to use a dictionary to talk to her child. In Joint Security Area, which takes place around the DMZ, there’s that difference between North Korean and South Korean.
In Decision to Leave, there are complex elements that come out of the differences in language. Seo-rae is proficient in Korean, but when she hits a block, she has to turn to her translating app. When I first discussed this idea, many people objected because the audience has to wait while Seo-rae is talking in Mandarin. You can tell she’s desperate from her expression. The audience may be curious but may not have the answer immediately. Some may say this is a bad thing. But I’m the kind of person who would say this is a good thing.
I also heard a lot about how the film was quite long. Others told me that if we got rid of that translating bit, that could have made the film shorter.
I loved the translation parts.
The frustration the audience feels parallels how Hae-joon is feeling. Seo-rae is so heated, and you really want to know what she’s saying. The AI-like voice is completely flat and dry, and I purposely chose a male voice so it feels more emotionally distant. When the audience is hearing this AI voice, they feel a big sense of something lacking, and in order to satisfy that, they have to combine what they watched earlier with the meaning of what the translating app is saying. They get to experience a more active form of movie watching.
Decision to Leave is South Korea’s submission to the Oscars this year — the first time a film of yours has been chosen. Do you share your fellow director Bong Joon Ho’s feelings that the Oscars are a “very local” affair?
After he won for Parasite, I think the Oscars actually got a lot less local. You can see it as a reciprocal relationship: Because American society opened up more to the rest of the world, Parasite got so much recognition at the Oscars. At the same time, because Parasite was such a great film, it opened up the Oscars to more international work.
As for me, well, first things first: I’m a showrunner for The Sympathizer, so I’ve been very busy. But still I’m trying my best with awards campaigning. The director really has a responsibility toward the cast and the crew, as well as to the investors who are a part of this film. All directors think of their work as their child. I really want to see my child get loved and be watched by more people, and I would feel an extreme amount of guilt for abandoning the opportunity to make that a possibility.
Have you seen the one film of yours that’s been remade in the U.S. so far — Spike Lee’s take on Oldboy?
I did watch it, and I was left with this very curious feeling. The story was similar, but the little details were completely different, so it looked familiar but at the same time unfamiliar. The film itself was meant to look surreal, but I think it felt extra surreal to me as the original filmmaker.
There has been a tendency in western media to group different Korean cultural breakthroughs together — to write about Parasite along with BTS and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s show Squid Game. I’m curious about what it feels like to you as an artist to have your work be seen through the lens of an overall national brand.
I understand why you asked that question, and I think I would’ve asked the same question if I were in your shoes. It’s just that I don’t really have much to comment. I’m working as I have before. I don’t consider myself a particular representative of the country, nor do I feel a sense of responsibility to take such a position. Bong and Hwang are superb directors, and I respect them very much. As for BTS, I met RM in person and he was a very intelligent man. He told me he enjoyed Decision to Leave — I think he said he watched it six times.
You were among the thousands of artists and cultural figures revealed in 2016 to have been blacklisted by the administration of former president Park Geun-hye. This meant being blocked from receiving government art subsidies, either due to political leanings or as retaliation for criticism of Park’s regime. What was it like to find that out? Did it affect your ability to get work made and seen?
I was speechless. The situation was so absurd — Korean film was already getting respect and acceptance throughout the world, and the conservative parties exploited this to their own benefit. The system to support Korean filmmakers was established by the left and the progressive party, and the conservatives really exploited it. The government provides seed funds for films, then companies provide the rest of the money — so, naturally, these funds are influenced by the opinions of politicians. I had a proposal for a film that got rejected, and only after everything had come out did somebody who was involved with the funding process tell me they had to reject it because of the government.
But because a blacklist isn’t public, it’s very hard to provide evidence for what’s really going on. The mechanism is discreet collusion. They’re not saying things out loud; they’re looking at each other and trying to feel how the other person is feeling. There’s no explicit email that says, “You shouldn’t hire this or that person.” My brother is an artist who combines art and videography in his works. He had these documentaries that he’d applied for funding for and didn’t get. I assume this is also because he, like myself, leans more politically left. But of course, we have no evidence to prove it.
Do you think film can be an effective vehicle for politics?
I do.
Do you consider your films political?
It depends on the work. Joint Security Area and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance are political films.
Why Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance?
Because it was a film that tackled class struggle. It portrays how even if a capitalist has good intentions, they are not free from this struggle. The Handmaiden is also political but in a different sense of the word.
Yes, and the fact that some of the characters are Japanese feeds into the power dynamic of the period. In Decision to Leave, Tang’s character is Chinese; did that affect how you thought about the power dynamics of the main relationship?
People have interpreted it as a statement on the relationship between Korea and China, though I didn’t intend that to be the case. Regardless of the country, I think any foreigner tends to feel small in their unfamiliar environment. They sometimes feign even more confidence because they don’t want to feel that way.
But all portrayals can have a political meaning behind them. Even if a work was not made with ideology in mind, it’s open to interpretation by the public — which, I think, is the right direction.
What do you think makes for a good political film?
Every film obviously tells the story of individuals. Whether it makes a good political film or not depends on how hard the film tries to make an observation on societal structures. Yet the claims it makes should not be conveyed in words but in the plot and in cinematic form. This is where the difference lies between a political film and propaganda.
Have your own politics evolved over the course of your life? Do you think you’ve become more or less radical?
I’ve been disappointed by radicals countless times throughout my life, but I was never disappointed by conservatives because I didn’t expect anything from them in the first place.
Some of the former heroes of the protests I went to in college went on to political careers and didn’t always have the country’s best interests in mind. Looking back on those days, I feel disappointment and I question to myself what humanity really is. But when you observe history in the long term, you will realize that the radicals have been right. It is undeniable that their radical struggle is what led to the expansion of human rights today. I get disappointed by individual radicals, but I grow optimistic about the future of mankind through the overall flow of radicalism. I believe in its power.
More on decision to leave
- In Decision to Leave, Park Chan-wook Pulls Back
- Oscar Futures: Can She Said Get Voters Talking?
- Decision to Leave Trailer: Park Chan-wook’s in His Romance Era
