Oldboy

Programme Notes

In amongst the ballyhoo surrounding Michael Moore and his Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for Fahrenheit 9/11 was Park Chan-Wook, busy picking up a major award for Oldboy, a firm favourite of Jury President Quentin Tarantino.

It's easy to see Quentin's point : sharing some of the violence of Kill Bill, but none of its rococo verbosity, Oldboy gives us a man kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years during a drunken night out, released without explanation, but with threads, cash and a cellphone, and a need to find answers and revenge.
But he's not been finished with yet …

Park is big on revenge, as viewers of his earlier and similarly bloody film Sympathy for Mr Vengeance may already know. What they won't suspect is the leap into world-class film-making that Oldboy displays. At the centre is a masterful performance from Choi Min-sik, playing the kidnapped Dae-su with alarmingly disheveled hair and a rare commitment, as the film's most notorious scene attests when Dae-Su eats a live octopus in a sushi bar.
But Oldboy is a sharp intake of breath from beginning to end, from its arcade-game back-and-forth pans across violent revenge, to its graphic flat-pack-style on-screen annotations during a hammer assault.
Asia Extreme is one of the cauldrons of creative world cinema just now - you're unlikely to find a film more on the boil than Oldboy.


SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: After graduating from Sogang University with a degree in philosophy, Park Chan-wook began his career as a movie critic before becoming an assistant director in 1988 on "Kkamdong" and then making his directorial debut in 1992 with "Moon Is ... Sun's Dream." But Park's name really took off in 2000 with "Joint Security Area: JSA," a mystery-thriller about North and South Korean border guards along the Demilitarized Zone that became the highest-grossing film ever in Korea at the time. Park followed that up with "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," a much darker film about a kidnapping that goes horribly wrong and a father looking for revenge. "Vengeance" won much critical praise but performed poorly at the boxoffice. His most recent film, "Old Boy," finally pulled together critical and commercial success with its rich, twisted tale of a man who finds himself suddenly abducted and imprisoned for 15 years without any explanation. When he finally is freed, he is left to try to discover who jailed him and why.

Park spoke with The Hollywood Reporter's Korea correspondent Mark Russell. - Published 14 May 2004 of which the following is an extract.

The Hollywood Reporter: What was your reaction to "Old Boy" being selected for Cannes?
Park Chan-Wook: It greatly surprised me. Many selections in that festival are screened Out of Competition. The fact that I was asked to go straight to the competing category even though I was never even invited for the Out of Competition section was something I never dreamed of. A friend of mine joked, "That's like being accepted into college without an elementary or junior high school diploma."

THR: What was the biggest factor in your becoming a director? Influences?
Park: Originally, I intended to become an art critic. That was the reason why I majored in philosophy, so I could study aesthetics in depth. But the philosophy department at Sogang University, where I entered, was a citadel of English analytical philosophy at that time. For four years, they offered only one course in aesthetics. Naturally, I was unable to settle in to my major, and after roving around aimlessly for a while, I joined a photography club and started engrossing myself in photos. Then one day, I saw Hitchcock's "Vertigo." During the movie, I found myself screaming in my head, "If I don't at least try to become a movie director, I will seriously regret it when I'm lying in my deathbed!" After that, akin to James Stewart when he was blindly chasing after some mysterious woman, I searched aimlessly for some kind of irrational beauty. It is clear that Hitchcock's movie had a great impact on me at the beginning. Now, however, the influences that keep spurring me on are people like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Austin, Philip K. Dick, Zelazny and Vonnegut.

THR: Future plans?
Park: Currently, we are in the process of working on "Three, Monster," a project involving three Asian countries. It is due for release in August. Miike Takashi and Fruit Chan are with me on this project. My episode lasts for about 45 minutes. In November, I will be working on a new feature. The only thing I have decided on is the movie's title, which will be "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance." Following "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and "Old Boy," this will be the concluding chapter in my "Vengeance" trilogy and will feature a woman in her mid-30s mercilessly dealing with vengeance. It will have a story consisting of a sharply contrasting variation from the kidnapping motif in "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and the imprisonment motif of "Old Boy." I am planning to write the script in a hotel in Cannes. Following that, I am planning to start shooting "Live Evil," a movie involving vampires, at the end of next year.

THR: The theme of vengeance recurs in your films. Any particular reason?
Park: With the development of civilization and the rise in education levels, people have had to hide their rage, hate and grudges deep within them. But this does not mean that these emotions go away. As relationships become more and more intricate, the rage only grows more and more. While modern society is burdening the individual with a growing sense of rage, the outlets through which people can release their rage are becoming narrower. This is an unhealthy situation, and it's probably why art exists. In reality, however, the vengeances represented in my movies are not actual vengeances. They are merely the transferring of a guilty conscience. My films are stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves. Therefore, rather than movies purporting to be of revenge, it would be more accurate to see my films as ones stressing morality, with guilty consciences as the core subject matter. The constantly recurring theme is the guilty conscience. Because they are always conscious of and obsessed with their wrongdoings, which are committed because they are inherently unavoidable in life, my characters are fundamentally good people. The fact that people have to resort to another type of violence in order to subjugate their initial guilty consciences is the most basic quality of tragedy characteristic in my movies thus far.

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