Park Chan-wook is one of cinema’s great contradictions: a director whose films are saturated with cruelty, moral corrosion and transgressions yet who approaches his work with philosophical, pedagogical meticulousness.
For more than 30 years, the softly spoken, mild-mannered Korean auteur has been examining violence, power and moral complexity, navigating effortlessly between arthouse extremity and genre fun and games.
In Oldboy, which was the runner-up at Cannes in 2004, a man imprisoned for years without explanation is suddenly released and hunts for the reason, with awful consequences. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and its sequel, Lady Vengeance, follow poignantly ordinary people drawn into cycles of retaliation after kidnapping, murder and injustice. Joint Security Area, his international breakthrough, from 2000, explores a deadly incident between North and South Korean soldiers rooted in a secret friendship.
Few directors have managed such consistent quality over such varied films.
READ MORE
No Other Choice, Park’s 12th feature, channels his pet preoccupations – confinement, bumbling ultraviolence, bad decisions – into a scathing anti-capitalist satire. The pitch-black comedy, which follows an executive who embarks on a killing spree after he’s made redundant, took two decades to bring to the screen.
“I was able to work on this film for 20 years because, no matter who I told over the two decades, they’d always relate and say, ‘It’s such a timely story’. That gave me the confidence to think it’s a film that will eventually get made.”
Simultaneously cartoonish and sickening, No Other Choice is adapted from The Ax, Donald E Westlake’s workplace-horror novel from 1997. “Director Park”, as they call him on set, is the second film-maker to take a crack at the material. Costa-Gavras, the politically charged, socially conscious Greek icon behind the movies Z and Missing, leaned into the absurdity of neoliberal labour markets for a French-language version starring José Garcia in 2005. No Other Choice is dedicated to the 92-year-old film-maker.
“He allowed me to make the film,” Park says. “In fact, I heard that he initially didn’t want to give the rights to anyone else, but he had a high regard for my filmography, and he was the only person who could grant me the rights.
“I have enormous respect for his films, especially Missing. I cried a great deal watching it, particularly in the context of growing up in Korea under an authoritarian society.
“Having him – or, more specifically, his wife – as producer, and having the freedom to make the film the way I wanted to, was something I was very grateful for.”
Even with that support, it was a tricky script.
“The novel is written in the first person, so it shares the character’s thoughts directly,” Park says. “Costa-Gavras used voiceover, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to show psychology only through action and dialogue. That is the challenge of cinema: how to communicate inner life without explaining it.”
Park’s adaptation retains Westlake’s focus on economic precarity but relocates it firmly to contemporary South Korea, highlighting the anxieties of automation, downsizing and late capitalism’s vagaries. “You know what I think now?” the hero marvels as he barbecues an eel at an idyllic family picnic. “I’ve got it all.”
The film pivots around the increasingly unhinged Man-su (played by the Squid Game star Lee Byung-hun) in his desperate struggle to support his wife, Miri (Son Ye-jin), and their two children in his hard-won, well-appointed home.
Once extremely satisfied with his high-flying life in the paper industry, Man-su endures sudden dismissal from his job. Months later, when the family are faced with losing their Netflix subscription, he dreams up a dark, desperate, elaborate scheme to win back an executive role. Imagine Kind Hearts and Coronets if the main character found bloody uses for bonsai gardening.
“Anyone might imagine wanting to eliminate the person who has the position they want,” Park says. “But the original story goes further. If that person dies, the company will simply hire someone else, and thousands of unemployed people will apply for the job.
“To eliminate these competitors, he comes up with the idea of creating a fake company and posting a job listing to collect resumes. As a victim of the capitalist system, he ends up doing exactly what the system did to him: gathering people and eliminating them.
“Killing someone who already has a job feels less horrific than killing off potential competitors, because they are just as unemployed and pitiful as the main character. It becomes very difficult for the audience to empathise with him at that point. That aspect really interested me.”
It’s a huge ask for Lee Byung-hun, the star of such Korean gems as The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw the Devil. The actor walks a tightrope between relatability, Looney Tunes carry-on and savagery.
“We shared a lot of laughter while shooting,” Park says. “What’s interesting is that Lee Byung-hun never thought of this as slapstick comedy. He never exaggerated his actions or tried to make things funnier. He was always truthful to the character’s emotions in every moment.
“I think that sincerity is what makes the scenes hilarious for the audience. He wasn’t playing anything for comedy. He was simply reacting as the character would in that situation.”
Park also credits Lee and his co-star Son Ye-jin with helping him to find financial backing for the project. He and Lee previously collaborated on Joint Security Area, while Son headlined The Truth Beneath, a 2016 crime thriller that Park and others wrote with its director, Lee Kyoung-mi.
Speaking after No Other Choice premiered to raves at Venice International Film Festival, Park noted that the film’s lengthy gestation allowed him space “to create this amazing group of cast. And thanks to them, I was able to get the funds and investments needed.”
Over his long career, the film-maker has created quite a troupe, including Song Kang-ho, Choi Min-sik and Shin Ha-kyun. Other recurring players include Kang Hye-jung, Yoo Ji-tae, Park Hae-il and Kim Min-hee. These collaborations have enabled Park to create such unforgettable cinematic spectacles as, in Oldboy, Choi eating a live octopus.
“For my last two films, I held about 10 table reads per sequence,” the director says. “We would go through the script line by line, not just at the level of action but of intention. I would explain the meaning behind everything and check whether the actors felt it was acceptable.
“If they didn’t, we would discuss it until we reached an agreement. If we still couldn’t agree, and the actor wanted something different, I would revise the script so that it felt right.
“My goal is always to make sure the actors feel comfortable and able to perform every scene truthfully. I don’t give big, abstract directions on set. I focus on small, specific details.”
What fascinated me was the idea that losing a job could be equated with losing one’s masculinity
— Park Chan-wook
Park was born 62 years ago into an artistically inclined Seoul family. His father was an architecture professor and university dean, his mother a poet. As a child he developed a fascination with cinema by watching foreign films broadcast on American Forces Korea Network television, often without subtitles.
He initially aspired to become a painter, but he instead enrolled in the philosophy department at Sogang University in Seoul, where he joined photography and film clubs. Here, after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Park married philosophical inquiry with cinematic form to become a film critic and, later, a film-maker.
Ethical dilemmas inspired by Park’s Catholic upbringing continue to shape his work. In Thirst, an infested priest wrestles with faith and vampirism. In Lady Vengeance, the wrongfully imprisoned heroine joins a Christian group and performs acts of kindness, allowing her to gain allies for a meticulously planned revenge against the child murderer who framed her.
The dialectics underpinning No Other Choice are similarly spicy.
“What fascinated me was the idea that losing a job could be equated with losing one’s masculinity, or one’s authority as a father or husband,” Park says. “Anyone can think that far, but the story presents a very striking way of showing how that lost authority is recovered – through murder.
“When his son is arrested by the police, the main character has regained enough confidence to ‘solve’ the problem. His solution is to instruct his son to lie to the police. By forcing this morally corrupt act on his son, he revives his authority as a father.”
Like his much-admired Decision to Leave, from 2022, No Other Choice finds Park back working in his home language, after anglophone projects such as the John Le Carré adaptation The Little Drummer Girl, featuring Florence Pugh, for the BBC, from 2018, and Stoker, his star-packed English-language debut feature, from 2013 – a project he selected over Evil Dead and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
“I think the cultural specificity helped with No Other Choice,” he says. “Bonsai just wouldn’t make sense for an American.”
- No Other Choice is in cinemas from Friday, January 23rd
