Close up... Park Chan-Wook

Trevor Johnston talks to the director of Oldboy about the trauma of imprisonment, revenge and Tarantino.

Oct 13 2004

Park Chan-Wook’s third feature ‘Oldboy’ won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. A startling display of intense emotions and celluloid pyrotechnics, it’s about a businessman who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years. On his release, he’s eager to discover his mystery captor.

The revenge motive that powers both this film and your previous ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ pushes each protagonist to extremes, why does it hold such a spell for you?
Revenge is such a strong and powerful emotion it makes you give up everything else. But even if you succeed in enacting your revenge on someone, the cause is still there in the past. What’s interesting is that even though you know this in advance, you still have to go through with it and re-channel your anger, otherwise it reminds you of the pain. Oh Dae-Su, the protagonist in ‘Oldboy’, says at one point ‘I hope my revenge never ends’, because then he’ll no longer have any reason to live. That’s why I really love Boorman’s ‘Point Blank’, a film that understands this drive towards nothingness.

Strangely though, the trauma and imprisonment that Oh Dae-Su goes through confer on him a degree of self-knowledge he didn’t previously possess…
Very well pointed out. That’s why I made him a drunk at the start. He matures during his incarceration because he writes a diary looking back at his past.There are two sides of the coin though, because the process of self-discovery brings the realisation he has a monster inside. When he smiles after the long fight in the corridor, that’s the evidence he’s getting addicted to violence.

Does the notion of a divided hero, haunted by the past and longing to escape his imprisonment, indicate some political dimension?
It’s not intentional, but I don’t mind people saying that. You know, the Korean people have this mindset that we’re going through great pain, but when we emerge we’ll be born again in a new destiny and we’ll be happy.

Tarantino headed the Cannes Jury, did he say anything to you?
We met at the party afterwards, but I don’t remember everything he said because he talks so quickly! I do remember him mentioning that he cried along with the villain and was surprised by his reaction because he’d spent so much of the film hating him. That seemed to me a very open and innocent response.

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