Park’s reputation for violence also ignores the remarkably human sense of humor with which he creates his dark poetry. The director isn’t as well known for his jokes, but I think he should be. one of his personal favorites is from “Lady Vengeance”: A group of parents gather, each having lost their child to the same murderer. The Lady Vengeance of the title has captured him and tied him up in the other room so they can enact their revenge. Dressed in rain gear in anticipation of the horrific bloodletting to come, each of them holds his or her own weapons. one man, though, seems to be holding just a small stick. But then he begins assembling a massive ax from materials hidden beneath his clothes — making the biggest weapon of them all.
PARK IS an autodidact, a self-taught auteur. This wasn’t just by choice; the 1980s Korea in which he came of age had only a few film schools, and no serious cinematic culture for him to either engage with or ignore. He had only the American Forces Korea Network, a television channel famous for airing foreign movies, often without subtitles. (If there were subtitles, they were in English, not in Korean.) Park remembers watching these on his family’s black-and-white television. Later, he had his university’s cinema club, which showed bootleg VHS tapes of foreign films. “When you say you go to a film school in America or France, you would probably go to a lecture where they teach you about German ｅxpressionism and show you what these German ｅxpressionist films are,” he says. “But in Korea there was no systematic education I could be exposed to. It was sporadic, haphazard. And maybe that’s why my films have ended up in this strange form, where it feels like it’s a mishmash of everything.”
He recalls a James Bond film he saw in the theater as a boy — he doesn’t remember which one, but it excited him so much, he began imagining his own Bond films. But not just the stories: He saw them in his head, shot for shot, thinking of how lighting, angles and editing told stories, and he began formulating his own. When I asked him if he felt anything was lost in translation, he shook his head. “I still understood them,” he said. “When I finally watched some of them again, with subtitles, I knew I had understood the faces, the things they did.” He credits this kind of watching — only being able to grasp ｅxpressions and actions, not language — for developing his sense of visual storytelling. There is a well-known anecdote of how Park was inspired to become a film director after seeing Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” in college, and this is true, but he was already thinking like a director long before that, thinking of how to tell stories on film — image by image, face by face, not outside of language, but with more than language.
Amy Adams Greats Cover
Park Chan-wook is featured on one of the covers of T's Oct. 22 Greats issue.
See the other six coversBut being a film director was not a viable career for a Korean at this time. When Park proposed to his wife in the late ’80s, he lied to his future mother-in-law and told her he was going to be a professor, like his architect father. He then set out to make his first film, which was so unsuccessful that Park himself was its only reviewer. He did so in disguise — a film critic friend allowed him to publish a review in his name after first saying he couldn’t review it because they were friends. (“Maybe he had nothing good to say,” Park says.) He wrote film reviews and criticism to earn money until he made his second film — and after that film also failed, he struggled along again. “This is an exaggeration,” Park says, “but I came to think, ‘Is the whole industry in cahoots to really ridicule me? Is everyone conspiring to ridicule me until I collapse from exhaustion?’ ” In 1999, he was given a chance to make a short film, “Judgement,” inspired by the collapse of a shopping center in Seoul, and this time, he engaged the help of a troupe of stage actors, and held his first script reading where he listened to the actors instead of just telling them his thoughts. “I realized actors are not puppets,” he says. “Let’s say in the screenplay, there’s one line of dialogue, and I couldn’t come up with a better one. As a director you can talk to the actor honestly, and say, I couldn’t come up with anything better. Can you think of something to say? This is a kind of luxury a novelist cannot enjoy.”
Park expanded on this approach as he made his third feature film, “Joint Security Area,” the story of four soldiers who guard the border of North and South Korea, two on each side, and the forbidden friendship they strike up, and the tragic result. He and the actors not only shared notes, but also became friends. “We were all young back then,” he says. “We would shoot until nighttime and then afterward, spend all night drinking, sleep only two or three hours, come back to work the next day.” The film’s success — it became Korea’s highest-grossing film after it opened — confirmed the value of collaboration for Park, and so he has worked this way ever since, with some refinements — more sleep, less drinking. His films are built out of conversations with his core crew that begin well before he begins on a script. As soon as he begins drafting he also begins working out music ideas with his composer, who has collaborated with him since “Joint Security Area.” He never has to go very far for these talks: The composer is his next-door neighbor.
WITH “THE HANDMAIDEN,” Park uses sex with the same deliberate force as he once used violence. He was initially drawn to the intense eroticism of “Fingersmith,” about a lesbian con artist in Victorian England, as well as to the English countryside setting, but for his adaptation, he instead set the story in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. Park was interested in the way Japanese sympathizers believed Japan would rule forever, and hoped to erase their Korean identities. The result is a lavish stereoscopic historical fiction about the difference between obsession and love, even as it is also subtly a story about what it means to be Korean, when the world, and even your own self, is trying to take that from you. Sookee is the daughter of a famous thief, determined to make a score that will let her leave Korea and travel the world. She has been hired by a young grifter, Count Fujiwara, to help him seduce the Lady Hideko, a young Japanese noblewoman raised in almost complete seclusion by her Uncle Kouzouki, who intends to marry her when she’s of age and take possession of her considerable fortune.
Sookee will be Hideko’s new maid, and is to fulfill her duty from within the intimate realm of her new mistress’s confidences. But when Sookee first meets Hideko, running to her side after she screams in the night for help, she is immediately drawn to her, and soon falls in love with her. The film proceeds from there in a series of stunning reversals, as the central characters transform themselves again and again.
Hideko is, unknown to Sookee, not the doomed innocent heiress Sookee imagines her to be, but the star of her uncle’s rarefied erotic cabaret, appearing in readings of erotica staged for his Japanese and Japanese sympathizer friends, who sit dressed in white tie in his elegant library, in lustful awe of Hideko as she performs. Her uncle is so enamored of Japanese culture he has become a naturalized Japanese citizen. In the film, Japanese is spoken to assert cultural power or privilege; Korean is spoken as an assertion of intimacy and camaraderie. one of Park’s favorite scenes in the film is when Hideko climbs a cherry tree to hang herself. She lets herself drop, ready to die, but falls only a little: As the camera pans down, you see Sookee, defiant, holding her feet, crying out from love for her. As Hideko and Sookee confess their true feelings to each other, and the lovers escape, they begin speaking Korean in private, eventually forgoing Japanese almost entirely.
“The Handmaiden” was such a phenomenon that Yongsan CGV, a massive multiplex at one of Seoul’s most popular malls, has dedicated one of its theaters in Park’s honor. The theater is kept to the director’s specifications, with a plaque on the outside in his likeness, and a gallery where he can display his photos and props from his films, including one of Lady Hideko’s suitcases, looking almost as if she forgot it there. Located near one of the main American army bases in South Korea, it is a fitting tribute to Park’s childhood spent watching movies on the American Forces Korea Network: a personal monument, but also a celebration of the Korean cinematic culture that he once longed for, now growing up with and around him.
THE DAY AFTER WE first meet, Park leads me around his home in Heyri, an artists’ community in Paju. Every house here has a distinctive contemporary look, but Park’s, designed by one of Korea’s most renowned architects, Kim Young-joon, stands out. It reimagines the traditional Korean home as two main structures, side by side, joined by a series of walkways. one side is for Park and his wife and daughter, the other for his parents (who have since moved out). The space is both cozy and homey even as it seems to be entirely made of sightlines. In several places, you can see from one side of the house all the way through to the other. Along with his composer, his neighbors include the Seoul Action School for stuntmen. He has to push a stunt motorcycle out of the way as he takes me through his garden.
The room where Park writes his screenplays is very small, almost a long closet, with a window looking out onto the street, furnished with just a desk, a chair and no ornaments except for a 1970s Dieter Rams clock that only ticks when it is wound up. It is a serene place, though its close confines are faintly reminiscent of one of Park’s signature scenes, from “Oldboy,” in which the imprisoned man at the heart of the film fights his way, guard by guard, through a claustrophobic hallway, armed only with a hammer.
He takes me to the other side of the house. The downstairs is mostly empty except for a humidifier. Upstairs, he has made what feels like a kid’s clubhouse. A bottle of Scotch sits on the bookshelf. His graphic novels, genre novels and children’s picture books are here, and I look for things I recognize. I notice a book titled “The Leopard,” though the name of the author is in Korean. I ask him if this is the same book by the Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
“No,” he says. “That’s another Leopard.” He laughs. As an afterthought, he adds, “Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ is my favorite film.”
The 1963 adaptation of Lampedusa’s 1958 novel tells the story of a Sicilian nobleman in the 1860s whose class status and entire way of being is threatened by civil war. Park both is and isn’t the prince Burt Lancaster plays in that film, watching as Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon enact the aristocracy’s forced embrace of the rising middle class. on the one hand, he’s too down-to-earth for that. on the other, Korea has changed more in Park’s lifetime than it has in all of its previous history, and in much the same way Italy did in the 19th century. When I ask him why it’s his favorite film, he says, “Getting old, getting behind in the fast changing times — it’s the most elegant observation about these things.” He doesn’t seem like someone languishing behind the times, but as we continue talking, he strikes me as the calm center of his own work, a fulcrum between tradition and experimentation, intense violence and sexuality, and high romance.
But the greatest sense I have of him comes at the end of our day. We walk to a nearby cafe to finish our conversation. The proprietress shows us into a closed dining room for privacy and leaves us with iced coffees. As I set up my recorder, Park stands at the back of the dining room, gazing out the window with such fondness and focus that I want to know what he’s looking at. Nine cats are arranged on the deck, including a mother cat and her nursing kittens.
When we’re done talking, Park wanders over to the window again. It’s really this, isn’t it, I think. Mr. Vengeance loves cats. I don’t know what it means — perhaps that’s all it means. He isn’t photographing them or trying to do anything more than just beam. He stands there, I don’t know for how long. I don’t dare interrupt it. And then wistfully, finally, he turns away from them, and together, we leave.