LOVE IS A mixed up thing in the world of Hur Jin-ho. As one of South Korea's best-known filmmakers, Hur's slow-paced, reflective melodramas - Christmas in August (1998) and One Fine Spring Day (2001) - have won him fans across Asia.
Now he's combined with South Korea's most popular actor, Bae Yong-joon, for April Snow, which is set for release all over the region this month in one of the biggest openings for an Asian movie.
April Snow is the story of a man and a woman brought together through tragedy - their spouses are involved in a serious accident while having an affair. In-su (Bae Yong-joon) and Seo-young (Son Ye-jin) meet outside the operating room of a hospital, waiting anxiously for their partners to recover. After a few days of waiting, In-su and Seo-young discover they've been betrayed by the people they love. Gradually, their shared sorrow unites them. 'I wanted to show the irony of affairs,' says Hur. 'The difference between an ugly affair and a beautiful romance is just point of view.'
It's been four years since Hur's last film. Originally, his main focus was on a project called Happiness, a kind of anti-romance about two people who meet in a sanitarium. But casting and timing problems kept Hur from making progress.
Then, last August, he read a script that interested him. It was about a con job, and the accident at the heart of the story was an insurance fraud. But Hur focused on the characters' relationships, and began to rewrite. He soon convinced Bae with a short outline of the story that would become April Snow.
'Because of the kind of films I make, in order to appeal to the public, it's important that I have top names,' Hur says.