Park Chan-wook names the directors he admires: “I feel inexplicably drawn to them”
Even though Park Chan-wook is a distinctly modern filmmaker who stands tall as one of the 21st century’s most prominent auteurs and a force to be reckoned with in world cinema, the directors he admires the most hail from the past.
After two false starts with feature-length debut The Moon Is… the Sun’s Dream in 1992 and Trio five years later, Chan-wook caught fire at the turn of the millennium when Joint Security Area became the highest-grossing film ever released in South Korea, and the mystery thriller template would be one he’d perpetually return to.
Since then, the majority of his work has been defined by labyrinthine narratives, criminality, nerve-shredding terror, bone-jarring set pieces, liberal spurts of claret, humour so dark the audience often feels bad for laughing, and an unflinching determination to tell stories on his terms regardless of how brutal or unsavoury the content may be.
The Vengeance trilogy sent him global when Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance became international sensations, with horror flick Thirst and psychological thriller Stoker, and nightmarish period piece The Handmaiden, and romantic noir Decision to Leave diversifying his output while remaining reflective of his signature style.
His work is unmistakably his own, and part of the reason why he hasn’t earned many comparisons to other filmmakers is because he’s got a novel way of ensuring he doesn’t accidentally or inadvertently pick up any outside influences.
“I don’t watch any movie more than once. I’m not the type of person who plays a movie, replays a scene over and over again in order to analyse how the scene was structured, how the shot was composed,” he explained to Film Comment. “I don’t do that. I don’t study film when I watch film. I’m actually not sure how much influence I get from filmmakers whose works I like, because I even forgot about the films of theirs that I have watched in the past.”
That being said, he did name a pair of Japanese icons as being among those he admires, finding one of them a kindred spirit despite hailing from different nations and making different movies. “Yasuzō Masumura is a film director whose films never cease to amaze me,” Chan-wook said. “He has had a very interesting career.”
Masumura specialised in satire, comedy, yakuza films, and war dramas to name a few, but it’s easy to see why Chan-wook was inspired when he said the director’s best work felt as though “they were made by a crazy, eccentric person.” The second released his final feature just four years after the Oldboy architect was born, but he discovered Mikio Naruse eventually.
Acknowledging how “you might get the feeling that his films are on the opposite end of the spectrum” compared to his own, Chan-wook nonetheless confessed that “I feel inexplicably drawn to them.” So much so, in fact, that he even broke his own rule by watching his best films twice, if not a whole three times.
