Oldboy, Decision to Leave director Park Chan-wook on BTS, being blacklisted and creating female characters
- Park Chan-wook, a Korean filmmaker who vaulted to international attention in 2003 with Oldboy, talks about his latest movie, Decision to Leave, and his career
Park Chan-wook knows he has a reputation for shock.
The South Korean filmmaker vaulted to international attention 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 psychiatric ward (I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK; 2006), to a perverse family portrait (his first and so far only English-language film, Stoker; 2013), to the 2016 lush erotic thriller The Handmaiden, set in Japanese-occupied Korea.
Park, who is currently directing an HBO series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer, spoke 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 says. “It’s only when the emotion kicks in that you actually get a full picture of what a person is conveying.”