Park Chan-wook’s four favourite movies of all time: “It’s really hard for me”
Bong Joon Ho might have taken Korean cinema to the next level with his Oscar win, but Park Chan-wook was making waves years earlier.
After breaking all sorts of records in his native land with Joint Security Area, he exploded onto the scene with his bloody revenge thriller Oldboy. Since then, he’s gone from strength to strength, picking up recognition and plaudits all over the world, culminating with the release of his most recent picture, No Other Choice.
One of the consequences of becoming a famous director is that the bloodhounds at Letterboxd pick up your scent. The film logging site caught up with Park on the press trailer for No Other Choice and asked him that dreaded question.
“It’s really hard for me to pick my four favourite movies of all time,” he said (translated from Korean). Still, he hitched up his big boy pants and instead provided the interview with the best movies he’d seen in the past month.
First up was a film noir from noted musical director Robert Wise, 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow. “In every aspect, including cinematography, I believe it is the perfect movie,” Park espoused. “I can’t find a single flaw about any part of the movie.”
The film stars pioneering singer Harry Belafonte as a nightclub entertainer who gets caught up in a robbery orchestrated by an ex-cop. The movie tackles issues surrounding race that were prevalent at the time, while also excelling in traditional noir arenas
“I like Western movies a lot,” Park continued, referring to films about cowboys instead of movies made in the West. This led him to introduce William A Wellman’s Yellow Sky as his next pick. Using Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a loose framework, the film concerns yet another bank robbery, this time orchestrated by Gregory Peck. In Park’s eyes, the movie showcases why Wellman is one of the best directors in Hollywood history.
“[It] is served up without any superfluity, pretentiousness, or pretense,” he said. “Displaying the essentials and only essentials.”
Next up came Trafic by Jacques Tati. This comedy is the final film to feature Tati’s most famous character, Monsieur Hulot, who would go on to inspire Rowan Atkinson when he created Mr Bean. In this story, Hulot travels to Amsterdam in a car he designed himself. Park described Tati as “the greatest genius in the history of cinema.” His absurd style of humour is very present in his own work.
Finally, Park continued his European odyssey with the 1976 Hungarian war drama The Fifth Seal. “The overall look was something that I had never seen before,” he said. “It had shockingly beautiful scenes.”
The story follows a group of friends living under the rule of the Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s. The bulk of the runtime is devoted to a hypothetical question posed by one member to the rest of the group, which is used as a metaphor for Hungarian society during the dying days of World War II.
It’s safe to say that Park Chan-wook has probably seen more movies in the past month than most of us have in our entire lives. Let’s hope Letterboxd catches up with him again to see what else he’s been consuming.
