Interview by Gus Alvarez
South Korea’s Park Chan-Wook is one of the most exciting filmmakers in World Cinema. His stylish and intense films marry a sublime mastery of technique to a penchant for fearlessly extreme subject matter, wowing audiences worldwide. 2002’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance was followed in 2003 by Oldboy, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. His latest film, Lady Vengeance, completes a trilogy of films all based around the theme of revenge and it’s bloody consequences. I met up with Park in London this week to discuss his work.
CLOSE-UP: I read that the idea to make a trilogy on the theme of Vengeance came from a joke made to journalists.
PARK CHAN-WOOK: That’s true, but it wasn’t a joke at all. There were many questions as to why I chose to make a Vengeance story. There was always a tone of accusation: there a beautiful stories to tell, so why should I keep returning to the theme of vengeance? People kept acting me that question. And it made me angry.
CU: If our civilised society forces us to sublimate rage and anger, is there an outlet for such feelings?
PCW: One shouldn’t express our internalized anger or desires in reality. There are many dark fantasies and desires within everyone. But if you were to lash out in reality, the society will destroy you. That’s why art and imagination are becoming more important as a way of venting those emotions. Alone with our imagination, the most violent, or unimaginable extreme sexual acts are all possible, and you don’t get punished for that, so the wilder it gets, the better it gets. I hope that my film helps people to imagine more brutal, more violent punishment upon those they hate!
CU: One of the most bizarre moments in Lady Vengeance is a brief fantasy scene in which the heroine imagines her hated nemesis, Mr Baek, as a dog, but with a human face.
PCW: That’s a good example. Choi Min-Sik (who plays Mr Baek) is the most respected actor in Korea and he’d never played a villain. He came to me and said: “If not for you how do I get the chance to do such things?” I think he found it very interesting
CU: Your films generally feature very extreme performances. What is your relationship like with your actors?
PCW: The first two films I made were not commercially successful, and they didn’t get good reviews. There was a huge gap between those two films and my third film (2000’s JSA: Joint Security Area, a massive hit in Korea.) and the gap comes because of the way I dealt with actors. At first, I was like a student who learnt Hitchcock in the wrong way: I tried to have complete control over actors and didn’t treat them as intelligent people. I came to learn that some actors are very intelligent and full of inspiration. But even the ones who are not like that, I find that if I respect them and pay them tributes I can get the most out of their performances.
CU: Now the Trilogy is completed, certain similarities seem to present themselves: motifs of imprisonment and kidnap, for example, and the betrayal or loss of a child. The big difference with Lady Vengeance however, is that there is a female protagonist at the centre of the story. How did it change your approach to the film?
PCW: The creative process is very complicated and I’m not exactly sure when this emerged, but somewhere along the line, the female protagonist became the key to the whole film. With the decision to put off her own act of revenge for others, she steps aside for other people who she thinks are more eligible for the vengeance. If it were a male character then he would have taken his revenge himself – like in Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy.
CU: Do you think that her willingness to put others before her is necessarily a female trait?
PCW: She steps aside, because they are more qualified to seek revenge. To put others ahead of her interest, to give up the joy of revenge that she has been preparing for thirteen years, this is not easy. She has a strong desire to do it herself. But she puts others first. She yielded for other people to do what she really wanted to do. Yielding opens a complicated set of emotions. She makes the opportunity for other people to take revenge and then later she bakes them all a cake. She conjures up an image of motherhood, caring for others. This is the typical image of a Korean mother: if they are very poor, when there is food, the mother feeds the children and doesn’t eat herself. So she lets others take revenge on Mr Baek’s life, and when she bakes the cake, she doesn’t eat it. On the other hand she is the observer and she observes an execution. And she participates in the revenge as an observer. In this way she can be identified with the audience that watched Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Oldboy. But because she doesn’t do it by her own hand she is devoid of the pleasure of taking revenge. Then she realises that it is not a pleasurable experience anyway. She now realises it’s just another murder. It’s not a happy thing.
CU: In all three films in the trilogy, Vengeance leads to misery. But in this film, there is a sense of hope and redemption.
PCW: That’s why I think it’s a fitting ending to the trilogy, not just Lady Vengeance. That’s why I would like to argue that the trilogy is more hopeful than people think.
CU: Your films have a reputation for extreme violence. You’ve already touched on the fact that there is an inherent morality that is often overlooked. Why do you think a western audience reacts to the violence in your films in a different way to violence in American films?
PCW: I think it’s because I made the violent scenes in such a way that they are not beautiful and that they convey real pain for an audience. The violence is completely devoid of any satisfaction and there are strong feelings that the tormenter is also damaged by the act of violence they carry out. That’s why I think it feels more violent.
CU: I think that one reason why your films have such a reputation for extreme violence has more to do with the intensity of the storytelling and the cinematic technique, which is very visceral, than the amount of violence actually shown.
PCW: The intention throughout this Vengeance Trilogy is to make people think they’ve seen the most violent thing without actually showing it on screen.
CU: There is also a strong strain of absurd humour that seems tied to the violence in your films.
PCW: I think it’s important that humour co-exists with violence and sadness, pain and horror. To me, they’re inseparable. (At the film’s conclusion) people laugh when the most quiet and docile character assembles an axe. They laugh, but at the same time, they are horrified at the sadness of this man who is quiet and seemingly good. The man wields his axe, ready to lash out at Mr Baek but is blocked by his own daughter. The audience think that she is stopping him from committing the act of violence, but in fact she is saying that there are other people waiting, so don’t finish him off too quickly! Straight after that scene, the father and daughter collapse, covered in blood, weeping. They have no satisfaction at all from their revenge, so the audience perhaps feel it wasn’t that funny after all, and perhaps feel guilty for having laughed.
GUS ALVAREZ
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