Lee Byung-hun in a scene from No Other Choice.Elevation/Supplied
A good piece of advice to anyone working in the global film industry: Do not make enemies with Park Chan-wook.
Over the course of three decades-plus, the acclaimed South Korean filmmaker has dabbled in mysteries (Joint Security Area, Decision to Leave), psychological thrillers (Stoker, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), hardcore action movies (Oldboy), even romcoms (I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK). But there is one theme coursing throughout his filmography, no matter the genre: cold-blooded revenge. Simply put, this is a man you do not want to cross.
Vengeance comes to the fore once again for Park in his new film No Other Choice, a loose adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, which follows a veteran business executive (Squid Game star Lee Byung-hun) who, after being laid off, goes about murdering competitors in the job market. The film, which could have been titled Sympathy for Mr. Severance, is typical of Park: bloody, surprising, hilarious, and beautifully, ingeniously composed, every other shot a master class in technique and timing.
The film also has, surprisingly, a strong Canadian connection. When Park was first developing the idea years ago as an English-language thriller to be made in North America, he did so along Don McKellar, the Toronto-based multihyphenate (actor, writer, director) behind everything from Last Night to Slings & Arrows, and who would – years afterward – reunite with Park to work on the HBO miniseries The Sympathizer. But when that plan fell through, the director shifted the concept to his native South Korea.
“I don’t remember all of the changes, but one thing that was lost was that one of the victims would have been killed by a bonsai plant,” Park recalls with a laugh during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, talking with The Globe and Mail through a translator. “We also would have had a change in the scene where we meet the first victim. I think there would have been one fewer victims.”
Also not in the earlier McKellar-penned version: The presence of artificial intelligence. Late in the film, the terrifying efficiency of AI is introduced as kind of brutal sight gag. “That was pretty recently incorporated before we started production,” the director says, noting that the original vision for the film was that of an English-language project, which necessitated its own alterations to fit contemporary Korean society.
“In terms of masculinity or the role of men, that was a change specific to Korea. The idea that men have a specific responsibility as a husband and a father,” the director says. “Such a kind of worldview does exist in the United States and the rest of the world, but it’s especially stronger in Korea.”
Scuttlebutt around the production of No Other Choice was that Park had gone above and beyond his typically elaborate cinematic set-ups – including spending an entire day to capture a half-second of footage of Lee holding up a piece of paper to the sky as the sunlight hit it just so.
“I think that was an over-exaggeration,” Park says with a laugh of the on-set gossip. “But when we decided to turn this into a Korean film, it did come with a couple of privileges, including having more shooting days. “It didn’t work out as an American film because I couldn’t find the right level of budget in the context of an American film. Which I mean as not enough shooting days.”
A scene from No Other Choice.Elevation/Supplied
No Other Choice also marks something of an inflection point for Park – not only as to whether he sees himself working more in English or Korean, but whether it’s in feature films or television. In addition to The Sympathizer, Park directed the 2018 AMC miniseries The Little Drummer Girl (as well as executive produced the small-screen version of Snowpiercer, based on the film by his contemporary Bong Joon-ho).
“I have no particular preference. If I’m drawn to a longer story with many characters, I would be attracted to a television series,” Park says. “But if I find a good story, it doesn’t matter what I’ll be shooting, or whether I’ll be shooting it in the U.S. or Korea or Japan or even Mars.”
Park is firm, though, when it comes to genre. While No Other Choice could easily be labelled a comedy – as the Golden Globes recently classified it, giving it a nomination for Best Motion Picture in the Musical or Comedy category – the filmmaker sees no differences regarding his approach.
“Humans conceptually label drama and comedy as two different entities, but I’ve always viewed it as one single entity. There’s this automatic assumption that they are two different things,” says Park. “For instance, if you consider a film like Modern Times, Chaplin portrays the devastation of the labour in the system of capitalism, and comedy and drama has never been separated in that film, either. So I thought of this film in that direction.”
“It’s also why I loved working with Don McKellar,” he adds. “He had that same attitude toward the subject, maintaining that bitter sense of comedy all throughout the film.”
All of which means, Don, if you’re reading, you’re safe from Park’s wrath. For now.
No Other Choice opens in theatres Dec. 25.