Film-maker Park Chan-wook on subverting the detective genre: ‘The world has enough clichés already’

Park Chan-wook likes to surprise. Over a three-decade career, the vastly respected South Korean writer-director has made a signature of intricate and beautiful cinema, goosed with eye-popping shocks. (His 2003 masterwork Oldboy is still the benchmark — a dizzying revenge story that also featured the devouring of a live octopus.) And then, as with so many gifted modern film-makers, came television.

In 2018, Park directed The Little Drummer Girl, a well-regarded six-part BBC adaptation of the John le Carré novel, starring Florence Pugh. Now, however, he is back at the movies with a new film, Decision to Leave. A heady romantic thriller filled with flights of visual invention, it could only have been directed by a man desperate to make cinema again: one driven back to the big screen.

“Well, yes and no,” Park, 59, says with a smile when we meet in London. More no than yes, it turns out. For one thing, he saw The Little Drummer Girl as almost a movie anyway, making it with every bit the same painstaking eye for detail. In South Korea, it was even screened in cinemas. “What is most heartbreaking as a film director is not being able to give space to every small back-story that gives a narrative life. TV has room for those. So actually, I find working in TV a relief.”

Bang goes that theory. Still, Decision to Leave lacks no richness of character. The virtuoso style is still intact as well. The mayhem of Park’s early films has grown less confrontational, but you could still pick any shot at random and hang it on your wall.

Yet all that only comes after another twist on expectations. In the six years since his last movie, The Handmaiden, South Korean film and TV has achieved a stellar global profile. In 2020, the Best Picture Oscar was won by Parasite, directed by Park’s longtime associate Bong Joon-ho. Netflix monster hit Squid Game followed. And in the wake of those successes, the streamer has released an endless string of South Korean crime series, moreish variations on a cop opera theme.

Now the first scenes of Decision to Leave seem designed to mimic them: a weary detective tackling an underworld murder case. “I intended to totally mislead the audience,” Park says. “I wanted people to think they were about to see a traditional police procedural, before taking them somewhere unexpected. And I wanted those first moments to feel so sincere they could have been part of a regular crime drama. I wouldn’t be the one to release it, though. The world has enough clichés already.”

The script was drafted with regular writing partner Jeong Seo-kyung; Park only had his trick opening in place when she joined him to plot the rest. The film duly shape-shifts from whodunnit into love story, a chaste but obsessive romance between the married detective and Seo-rae, a murder suspect originally from China, played by Tang Wei.

You may be reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film Park has named as a formative influence. If audiences and fellow film-makers alike were first dazzled by his sheer technique — Quentin Tarantino was an early admirer — important too has been Park’s place as a reminder of a time when movies were undisputedly art. He is a former film critic, and his passion for Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and a hundred other great auteurs is a subtle but constant presence in his films.

Another surprise? Decision to Leave also makes wildly inventive use of that most banal modern prop, the phone. Apps and lockscreens become key plot points. Park’s love for the masters of the past is mature enough to know they would urge him to keep pace with the present.

“At first I resisted,” he says. “I didn’t want to use a single text message. I felt the love story I wanted to make should involve letters handwritten with Mont Blanc pens. But ultimately, who wants to make a romance so out of touch with the world as it is now? And I have developed a habit in my career, which is that when I am forced to do something I originally didn’t want to, I turn around and embrace it to the maximum.”

One of the many roles Park finds for a phone is an AI interpretation app, used when Seo-rae doubts her ability to express herself in Korean. You wonder how much that resonates with a director whose films have led a double life: made for both Korean and international audiences, subject both to cultural differences and the vagaries of translation. In his acceptance speech at the 2020 Golden Globes, where Parasite won Best Foreign Language Film, Bong Joon-ho spoke of subtitles as a “one-inch barrier” for English-speaking audiences. They also, of course, leave a storyteller as exact as Park at the mercies of paraphrasing. (Though he speaks conversational English, he still has a human interpreter accompany him to interviews.) “Language and translation have always fascinated me,” Park says. “And of course, mistranslation too.”

A wider idea of international relations has touched his recent films as well. The Handmaiden saw Sarah Waters’ novel of Victorian London, Fingersmith relocated to Korea and adapted as a tale of early-20th-century Japanese colonialism. Now Decision to Leave is bound up with the place of Chinese immigrants in Korea.

Park says he had no deeper reason to make Seo-rae Chinese than wanting to cast Tang Wei, the talented actress who made her debut in Ang Lee’s 2007 wartime romance Lust, Caution. But that apparently simple casting call is not unloaded. The sexual frankness of Lee’s film saw Tang blacklisted by Chinese authorities, the actress only rebuilding her career after years off-screen. Park says that after casting Tang, he added “layers” to her character, revealing a family connection to Korean émigrés in China, first exiled during independence protests in the 1910s. With Park, there are always layers.

And yet, as he points out himself, the credit is rarely his alone. Decision to Leave is the sixth film he and Jeong Seo-kyung have co-written. Even now, Park says, people make simplistic assumptions about his co-writer only being responsible for female characters. “In fact, our voices are so entwined throughout that a single line might have a noun written by me and the verb by Ms Jeong.” The one problem, he says, is that she alone recently wrote Little Women, a Netflix adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel set in modern Seoul. The series has been a huge hit in South Korea. “So now she’s a star and will be even busier. It’s a headache for me.” He is, you suspect, only half joking.

Once his co-writer is free again, Park’s future will involve more projects in both English and Korean; further platform-hopping between film and TV. But life can be circular too. He is aware that new audiences for his work may likely come to it first as fans of Parasite or the South Korean Netflix series, a cultural explosion he helped lay the groundwork for. Does he feel the world looks differently at his work now?

“I don’t believe my films are seen differently. But I do sense an important change. Now outside Korea, film industry people always say how nice it is to meet me — then ask for the email address of the director of Squid Game.”

‘Decision to Leave’ is in cinemas from October 21