In Stoker, renowned Korean film-maker Chan-wook Park brings his Eastern sensibilities to a very strange part of the American South. So is it about vampires, then? 'It's about jealousy,' the director tells TARA BRADY
A FANGIRL WRITES: I’ve been lucky enough to interview Chan-wook Park five times in 10 years, a fact I never tire telling anyone who’ll listen. Even now, it’s hard to accept the person of Park – as softly spoken and mild-mannered a film-maker as you’ll find – as the writer-director behind the Vengeance Trilogy. Try as I might I can never picture him writing and shooting the scene in Oldboy wherein actor Choi Min-sik violently devours a live octopus or orchestrating the child- hanging sequence in Lady Vengeance
Director Park – as his crew call him on set – does speak English though prefers to do so through his interpreter and co-producer Won-jo Jeong. He’s has just directed Stoker, his first Hollywood picture, in that way.
“It didn’t provide as much hardship as I thought,” says the 49-year-old. “It’s fine when you have a good translator. Just look at us now.”
A philosophy graduate, Park talks in measured, thoughtful verses and will hardly ever raise a point without politely considering the virtues of its antithesis. The moral of his oddball 2006 romance I’m a Cyborg but That’s Okay was “give up hope and cheer up”.
He’s modest about his achievements though he’s won countless awards including two from Cannes: OldBoy took home the Grand Prix in 2004; Thirst won the Jury Prize in 2004.
He can even make allowances for sweltering heat.
“With everything things are light and dark,” he says of Stoker’s American shoot. “If you go to Nashville, Tennessee, to avail of a great tax rebate and keep your movie under budget, you can’t complain about the heat in in August. It’s all part and parcel of making an American film. I can’t complain. It’s up to me to adapt. It’s up to me to learn how they do things over there, and do them.”
On reflection, this is precisely what we should expect from the director of OldBoy. The great trick of Park’s Vengeance Trilogy – comprising Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, OldBoy and Lady Vengeance – is that it’s an Anti-Vengeance Trilogy. Revenge fantasies are supposed to be cathartic; in Park’s milieu, revenge is hollow and corrosive.
The new film scratches at a different underbelly entirely.
“It’s about jealousy,” says Park. “I liked the idea that it takes place inside a residential house where three members of a family exchange a subtle flow of emotions and how jealousy moves around in family relationships.”
Stoker, an Oedipal psychodrama, picks up where the sex and death of Thirst – Park’s reworking of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin as a vampire romance – left off. It’s one of what Park calls his “hot and cold” pieces.
The film maintains a delicate balance between erotically charged Southern Gothic and buttoned-up chamber piece distance. In it, Mia Wasikowska plays India Stoker, a teenage girl mourning the tragic death of her father (Dermot Mulroney). At the funeral and subsequent wake, India and her mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) encounter India’s hitherto unknown Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who charms his way into the household and promptly unpacks his bags. India is both intrigued and repulsed by his presence and by his shenanigans with her otherworldly, remote mother.
They’re certainly an odd bunch. During the opening sequences, one half suspects they’re a vampire coven. The truth is more earthy and more monstrous.
“At first, I was worried because I had made Thirst,” says Park. “I wanted to jettison some of those scenes. But then I started to play with the tropes of the vampire movie and work that expectation into the script. At times you can think that Uncle Charlie is a manifestation imagined by a young girl. Or a vampire.”
Stoker is not an obvious choice for Director Park, who has previously turned down high-profile English language projects, including the incoming Evil Dead remake and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The screenplay, written by English actor and Prison Break star Wentworth Miller, was voted to the 2010 Black List of the 10 best unproduced screenplays making the rounds in Hollywood. In recent years the same chart has alerted studio executives to the existence of Juno, Argo, Slumdog Millionaire, The Kings Speech and The Descendants.
“It was a very good script,” says Park, who originated all of his previous films. “And a lot of the things people think I wrote into it were already there. I’ve made films before that are adaptations of novels or comic books. The process wasn’t much different.”
What did he change in his rewrite I wonder?
“The beginning, the end. The hunting. The motif of the predator. Uncle Charlie’s weapon of choice. And the idea of India as a baby bird breaking out of her eggshell.”
He laughs: “Incarceration in an eggshell informs every aspect of the film, from the dialogue to the production design.”
Stoker plays out in striking images and strange balletic sequences not unlike those found in Hitchcock films. Park, who decided to become a film-maker after seeing Vertigo at university, says he “can’t help it” but that many of Hitchcockian overtones – Uncle Charlie is named for Joseph Cotton’s character in Shadow of a Doubt – can be traced back to Wentworth Miller.
“I didn’t add anything Hitchcockian in the process of writing and directing,” says Park. “It was already Hitchcockian. And that was a very conscious decision from the writer.”
Some critics and commentators have noted a different set of influences – American influences – coming into play on Stoker. A mysterious opening sequence with voiceover and hazy sunlight is immediately redolent of classic Terrence Malick. “I wasn’t conscious of it all when I was writing and shooting,” says Park. “But it’s interesting because someone said the same thing just the other day. I’ve heard it a few times now – that the voiceover at the beginning of the film was an homage to Terrence Malick. I’m glad. I welcome it. I love when people find references and make connections that I wasn’t aware of.”
Chan-wook Park has been making films since 1992. In 2000, Joint Security Area – his fourth feature – provided the director with his first international hit. His Vengeance Trilogy, starting with 2002’s Sympathy, would prove instrumental to the popularisation of Korean cinema, as western distributors and imprints – including the now sadly defunct Tartan Asia Extreme – latched on to a new wave of South Korean film-makers.
“I hope Tartan didn’t go under because it picked up so many Korean films,” he laughs. “It was quite moving that the people at Tartan would see Korean films and love them. But there are always two sides to everything. The labelling of Korean cinema as Asia Extreme – as much as that encouraged and introduced Korean titles to new audiences, it also created an unnecessary prejudice over the kind of films that were made in Korea.
“There’s a great diversity in Korean cinema but the focus and funding fell to films that were more visceral. I can’t really complain. My films are visceral too.”
The same new wave that exploded into European cinemas 10 years ago is currently storming the US. A Tale of Two Sisters director Jee-woon Kim has just made his English-language debut with the Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Stand. Park, additionally, has just produced Snowpiercer, an adaptation of a French graphic novel starring Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton, with Bong Joon-ho, director of The Host, behind the camera.
“It’s a very international story, so it needed to be told in English,” says Park. “It’s a big deal in Korea as all three films are been released within a year. In the case of Kim and I, our American films are being released a week apart in Korea. But that’s good because we’re all friends and now we call each other up and swap Hollywood stories.”
Stoker is at JDIFF tonight and is released next Friday
