Vengeance has dominated the work of director Park Chan-wook’s last three films, but it seems his obsession with the subject which has kept audiences on the edge of their seats - with their stomachs churning - is at an end…
Speaking at a question and answer session after a preview screening of Lady Vengeance at the Curzon Soho on February 9, Park said his next movie will probably explore religion, God and the devil.
Or maybe, if Hollywood gives him a tap on the shoulder, he’d be keen to direct a western. But then he’d like to make a science fiction movie, too…
Given his prodigious output in the past five years - from the film that made his name in Korea, JSA: Joint Security Area, to the vengeance trilogy of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy and Lady Vengeance - he could probably knock them all off by the end of the decade.
He was a relative unknown in Korea until JSA, and attributes the film to his success, saying if it wasn’t for the reputation he garnered from that, he wouldn’t have been able to get funding for his other films, or to recruit some of Korea’s top talent to work with him.
In conversation with Alan Jones after the screening through an interpreter, Park said Korea’s nurturing of young talent through funding and screen quotas for Korean films played a big part in his success. Now the quota’s being scrapped, which Park says will eventually destroy the flourishing industry.
“To compete with a Hollywood blockbuster you need a budget of at least $20 million,” he said. “It won’t make much difference to Korean film in five years, but in the medium to long term it’s not good. Actors and film makers are in the streets protesting in Korea.”
It may seem strange, then, that while he feels Hollywood’s a threat to the Korean film industry, he’d entertain the idea of making a Hollywood movie. But growing up in Korea he was heavily influenced by the films he watched as a child “old films by Hitchcock, westerns and old gangster films.” The film he cites as his biggest influence on Lady Vengeance as Edward Scissorhands - its mythical, fairy-tale quality -as well as lashings of snow - bringing a feeling of unreality, a half-remembered dream, or a (rather twisted) bedtime story to the film.
The narration adds to this: Park says he envisaged the narrator as Jenny, the daughter of Lady Vengeance herself, as an adult. “I like to think of it as Jenny looking back at about 60 years old, telling her mother’s story.”
The fairy-tale look of the film was carefully considered. “If you come to my set when I’m filming you’d think I had complete say in everything that goes on, because I’ll be asking the cameraman to move 15 centimetres to the right.” But Park says the collaboration takes place much earlier - he maps everything out on storyboards and it’s planned and talked through before the cameras start rolling.
But sometimes not everything goes to plan - originally the film was conceived as beginning in colour, then slowly moving to black and white. Beginning with a scene outside prison when Lady Vengeance is released after 13 years, it would slowly, almost imperceptibly, fade. “People would end the film and think ‘was that a black and white film?’.” It was screened that way in a few digital cinemas, but Park decided to release it as a completely colour version. “I liked it in colour, and I liked it in black and white, but I didn’t like what happened in the middle.” A lot of fans liked the fade version, though, so it’s been included on the DVD release. “Now I wonder if I made the right choice,” he said.
The vengeance trilogy is probably noted most for its violence - there’s a lot of it in Lady Vengeance, but it’s more implied than on screen. Still, it’s unsettling stuff -and more unsettling for the fact that much of it is also suffused with humour. “I think sadness is part of life, and there is humor in violence and sadness some times.” Park said he believes revenge is stupid, and the films serve to show how pointless exacting revenge is. The question he was posing, he says is: What if someone is so evil, so bad you can’t feel sympathy for them - do they deserve what happens to them?” but he doesn’t think they’re fatalistic: “Old Boy ends with an embrace, and so does Lady Vengeance.”
He’s so involved in his films, is there anyone in them he identifies with, or he modeled himself on? “The cowardly husband who doesn’t like blood,” he smiles.
(Tania Hall)
Park Chan-wook was in conversation with Alan was part of the Kubrick masterclass series, in association with the National Film and Television School and The Script Factory.
The series is supported by The Stanley Kubrick Foundation through Warner Bros. Studios and by Skillset through the Film Skills Fund.
