WHEEL ME OUT - Park Chan Wook

Korean film maker Park Chan-Wook has written and directed eleven feature films, including the supremely baroque Oldboy, which took the Grand Prix at Cannes 2004.

While a UK release date for his latest film Thirst—a priest turns vampire after freaky medical procedure gambit—has yet to be set, he spoke to Alex Fitch about his last feature, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Ok, a romantic comedy following a suicidal teenage girl who wants to be a machine.

Translation by Sinae Lew, SOAS

Illustration by Lynette Niles

You said you intended I’m a Cyborg… to be a lighter project between your Vengeance trilogy and next film. Where did the initial idea come from? I wanted to make a film for my daughter that discusses what teenagers are concerned about. She was twelve when I made this so I thought I could make a film that she could watch with her friends.

Did you find it hard coming up with a storyline that approached the nature of being human from an adolescent point of view? Usually in commercial films people won’t use the term ‘purpose of being’ but tend to express it in an indirect way. I wanted to talk about it directly.

I thought about my adolescence a lot. The questions I had then were “why am I alive?” “Why do I need to live in the future?” “Why shouldn’t I kill myself?” I didn’t think I could make a film that provided answers to these questions but I thought I could make one that looks into them.

What do we know that actually has a purpose of being? Well, it looks like machines do because they have a use and there’s a user’s manual. One could think ‘that’s nice, I wish I were a machine.’ So Young-Goon comes to believe that she is a machine.

A common theme in your films is being human in the face of an uncaring society. Did that theme start to interest you when you were studying philosophy? I’m not sure if I became interested in that topic because I read philosophy at university, but South Korea was under the military dictatorship then and the students’ protest was the fiercest.

Human rights, the right to individuality and freedom were violated and suppressed violently, which was very much a part of daily life for everyone then. I had to observe all that and such experiences must have influenced my film making.

The first film of yours that became popular in the UK was JSA – Joint Security Area about the demilitarised zone in Korea. Was that a story you’d wanted to tell? Yes, because the two most important problems in South Korean society, I’d say, are the division of the country into North and South and the class conflict within South Korean society; the ever-increasing polarisation between the rich and the poor. I tried to discuss these problems in my first two films, JSA and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance.

The iconography of your films seems to be influenced by American and Japanese cinema. The scene in I’m a Cyborg… where she cuts her wrists and inserts the wires is similar to imagery in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Also the idea of mental patients living in a science fiction world has been explored in movies like Twelve Monkeys and Slaughterhouse Five… I guess you can see those influences but those films are not what I thought of when I was making this film. In fact, I was worried about finding any traces of other films and when I noticed anything like that, I tried to erase the influence.

Nevertheless, there are cases when there’s an accidental similarity. I happened to watch Donnie Darko when I was editing I’m a Cyborg… and there was this guy with a hare costume and it was talking about the end of the world. This was similar to my film, but it was a coincidence.

Presumably pop culture interests you since Oldboy was based on a manga and the imagery of technology in I’m a Cyborg… is similar to computer games and The Matrix? Compared with other people I am relatively ignorant of pop culture. I tend to listen to classical music mainly and also read classical books. I don’t really watch recent films, mostly old ones. I’ve never played a computer game!

However, I am very interested in new technology so I’m trying to employ it in my films and am very positive about using computer graphics. In I’m a Cyborg… it’s quite visible that I relied on CGI, compared with my previous films where the CGI is invisible.

I also filmed it with HD cameras and used digital projection. In fact, it’s closer to my intention that people watch I’m a Cyborg… with digital projection rather than with a film print. Well, that has its own advantages, but the digital projection would be better. WMO

Fun and games at the I’m a Cyborg site

www.d-o-e-s.com/collection/cyborg/

Enjoy the blood lust in this Korean trailer for Thirst. Submit a translation to editorial@wheelmeout and we’ll enter you in a draw to win one of five I’m a Cyborg… posters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=sG2NCsz1mFc

Listen to an extended version of this interview

http://panelborders.wordpress.com/2008/
04/13/reality-check-genre-crossing-directors/