Out for revenge: Park Chanwook on Oldboy

Kidnapped, locked up for 15 years and then released for no apparent reason, businessman Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik) goes on the rampage, eating live octopus straight from the sushi bar, extracting vengeance from the jaws of his jailer with a claw hammer and cutting out his own tongue with a pair of scissors. With Quentin Tarantino presiding over the jury at Cannes, it’s easy to see how South Korean revenge fest Oldboy scooped this year’s Grand Jury prize.

But to focus solely on the film’s violence or sick and twisted plot – double incest, since you ask – is to sell it short, because Oldboy also features virtuoso direction and editing, mesmerising performances and a relentlessly creative exploration of the revenge motif its director Park Chanwook terms “the most dramatic subject in the world”. No wonder Cannes jury member Tilda Swinton warned Park that Tarantino would “steal a lot” from the film.

Half Greek tragedy, half existential thriller, Oldboy skips and slices between horror and action, thriller and absurdist comedy as its shock-haired everyman plays cat-and-mouse with an enigmatic persecutor. As in Kill Bill, the tone balances on a knife-edge between danger and dark comedy, though unlike that film Oldboy poses as many philosophical questions as it severs limbs. “When my vengeance is over, can I return to the old Dae-Su?” asks our hammer-happy hero, expressing just one of the many metaphysical dilemmas philosophy graduate Park crams into his high-concept screenplay.

South Korea is one of the few places in the world where homegrown films outsell Hollywood product, the country’s current creative and commercial boom following the end of military dictatorship – and censorship – in 1992. Park’s career began in the same year, though it wasn’t until 2001 that he made the thriller Joint Security Area, the nation’s most successful film ever, set against the escalating tension between North and South Korea. A disaster at the box office, Park’s next film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) also touched on political themes – such as the country’s economic crash.

The second instalment of this revenge trilogy, Oldboy is very different in both its style and the way it treats its subject. If the hardboiled and minimalist Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance described the ultimate destructiveness of revenge, Oldboy, says Park, “explores the positive side that brings people catharsis.” Here the lush score, rich art direction and flashy cinematic techniques describe a much more abstract story: the surreal guessing game between the bestial Oh Dae-Su and his omnipotent kidnapper Lee Woo-Jin (Yu Ji-Tae). Still, even without the overt politics of Park’s previous work it’s tempting to see Oldboy as representing the return of the repressed on a national as well as a universal level: an acting out of violent fantasies that was impossible under the old regime.

Much of the new cinema coming out of South Korea seems to have Oldboy’s unsettling mix of graphic violence and absurdist humour. But ask Park Chan-Wook why he thinks there are so many hyperviolent films made in South Korea, and he replies: “I think it’s down to what western distributors choose to show the west.”

“I think flashbacks lend films the surreal quality of dreams. When people remember things in films you always wonder ‘Is that true?’, and there’s always this ambiguity in the flashbacks in my own films.

“I try to avoid using other filmmakers’ ideas and if something reminds me of another director then I cut it out. But there are a few scenes in which I consciously reference other directors — including the scene here where Oh Dae-Su chases his younger self on the school stairs, which comes from Hitchcock’s Vertigo via Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill. Vertigo is the film that made me want to be a director.”

“This is my favourite sequence, mainly because the editing is so abrupt: like cutting tofu with a sharp knife. Hollywood editing is smooth and seamless but here everyone can see it and I really like that. I also like the way the gas mask makes you think of a battle scene.

“Oldboy was advertised in Korea as a story with lots of hidden secrets, so I knew the audience would be trying to second-guess the twists and turns, which meant I had to plant some red herrings. This scene makes you wonder about a lot of things. Is Lee Woo-Jin in love with Mido? Is she a substitute for his dead sister? Has he hired her as a spy?

“My original intention wasn’t to deal with incest but to take the idea of revenge to the extreme. Revenge is a taboo in modern society: everyone has a strong desire for it, but it’s prohibited. Incest too is a suppressed desire in all of us – it appears in old tales from all over the world, long before Freud. So I also wanted to give my story the atmosphere of an old, heroic tale.”

“Choi Min-Sik was cast as Oh Dae-Su before the script was completed, so he participated in the rewriting process. In an earlier version of the script the pre-kidnapping Oh Dae-Su was much more sympathetic, but Choi Min-Sik suggested it would be better to make him more of a contrast. The drunken salaryman is the persona most Koreans associate with Choi Min-Sik, but he’s classically trained as an actor. So I wanted to give him the chance to portray Oh Dae-Su’s transformation to show off his abilities.

“When we first started work the makeup artist came to me with the idea for this hairstyle, but Choi Min-Sik hated it. But the make-up artist kept on at me and finally Choi Min-Sik agreed to try it. As soon as I saw him I knew it was perfect: the rest of the film came from that haircut.”

“Yu Ji-Tae is famous in Korea for his role in ‘One Fine Spring Day’, so everyone thinks of him as soft and gentle and a bit weak in the head, and I wanted to move away from that expectation. He’s much younger than the part I’d written, but that didn’t bother me because the character of Lee Woo-Jin is like a little boy who hasn’t developed emotionally since his sister died.

“Yu Ji-Tae introduced the yoga scene himself. He interpreted Lee Woo-Jin’s character as being “strong on the outside, but weak on the inside as well as looking both sophisticated and shallow.”

“The original script included a scene where he asked a hypnotist to take care of things after he died. If that scene had remained the sense that he’s an absolute being would have been even stronger.”

“When you first enter a hotel room it feels comfortable and nice, but spend a few days there and it becomes the most claustrophobic space imaginable. I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, so for me it’s not iron bars, bare plaster and a makeshift bed that conjure up the idea of a prison cell, but thick blankets and fancy wallpaper.

“The starting point in my films is ordinary people who fall into extreme situations, and what happens to Oh Dae-Su signifies the unpredictability and injustice of life. The storyline explores existential ideas: someone is thrust somewhere against his will and he must find out why. And the character of Lee Woo-Jin is a god-like figure; he also represents the film director playing god.”

“Lee Woo-Jin calls himself a lonely prince in a high tower, and his penthouse flat represents a modern version of that scenario. Usually when you look at the smart places where rich people live you want to live there too, but here I wanted viewers to feel the opposite. I used exposed concrete to create a cold atmosphere and introduced a lot of water, as in the giant mural of a tsunami — water is usually used to symbolise creation but here it signifies death because his sister drowned.

“After the minimalism of ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’ I decided to give this film an over-stylised look. It’s not a look I like particularly – but I don’t just make the kinds of films I like.”

“When I storyboarded this scene I’d been thinking of using computer graphics. One idea was to steal a trick from a Sonny Chiba fight scene where the shot turns into an X-ray to show the bone breaking. But then I heard that Tarantino was casting Sonny Chiba and I thought he might use that effect. Once I’d scrapped it, I thought, ‘Why am I using all these tricks and references? What are they saying?’ So I got rid of them all and just shot the scene in a single take. I gave the fighters long sticks to resemble the spears medieval warriors fought with. The way the scene is presented underlines how meaningless the fighting is to Oh Dae-Su: it’s brutal, repetitive, maybe a bit boring.”

“I wanted this scene to have a timeless quality, like a classical picture of an ancient battle. So I framed it from a distance so the composition, the light and shade, would resemble a Rembrandt or an El Greco.

“Some directors like to make the fight scenes a separate part of the film, beautifully choreographed sequences that are almost like dances. But I’m more interested in the human causes of violence and its effects: how violence brutalises the perpetrator. My films are not violent compared to Hollywood movies where hundreds of people are killed by hundreds of bullets, but here the audience really gets to feel what happens when the bullet hits human flesh, how it explodes and rips it apart.”