‘I haven’t toned down my violence’: Park Chan-wook on cultural hegemony, the capitalist endgame, and why we can’t beat AI | film

TThe Korean Wave is being celebrated all over the world right now, but Park Chan Wook isn’t feeling too celebratory. From the outside, South Korea looks like a well-oiled machine pumping out a torrent of pop music, food, cars, cinema (especially the Oscar-winning Parasite) and TV shows, as well as Samsung flat screens to watch them. But Park’s latest film, “No Other Choice,” blew the balloon somewhat. It paints modern-day Korea as a precarious landscape of industrial decline, downsizing, unemployment, and male fragility—with no demon hunters in the K-pop world to save the day.

“I didn’t mean it to be a realistic depiction of Korea in 2025,” says Park, a quiet 62-year-old. “I think it’s accurate to view it as a satire of capitalism.”

The setting of No Other Choice is the comically mundane but almost literal world of the paper industry, in which a recently fired executive plots a deranged scheme to get ahead by killing his rivals to gain a new position, in which he does a very poor job. But it could also have to do with the entertainment industry, which is also more dangerous than it seems, Park suggests: “Although Korean films and shows have become very trendy globally, Korean audiences have not returned to the theater after the pandemic, and there is also talk about how it threatens the TV industry. This decline occurred right after the success of Squid Game and Parasite. I think this gap in itself is very ironic.”

Sarcasm is very much the style of Park’s cinema. The film begins with salaryman Man-soo (played by Lee Byung-hun) congratulating him for having everything: a good job, a nice house, a loving wife, two kids, and two dogs. He welcomes the beginning of the downfall, not realizing that it heralds his own downfall: within days he is on his knees and begging for work, having been made redundant by his new American bosses, which leads him to a deranged murder plan. It sounds bleak, but it’s filled with heavy doses of black comedy, biting slapstick comedy, and senseless violence, including an elaborate plot to eliminate one of his rivals by getting drunk with him – in the very Korean style of… poktanju: A glass of whiskey immersed in a pint of beer. Park admits that he was no stranger to this cocktail in the past, “but I don’t drink it anymore. I realized that I shouldn’t do it to myself.”

Even the title of No Other Choice is ironic: it’s clearly Man-soo He does You have other options. He can go after his employers instead of his peers. Or he could simply put up with being poorer – but he would do anything to avoid losing his home and status, especially within the family. “The audience wants so badly to cheer him on and find a job, but other times, they realize his choices are wrong,” Park says. “These two feelings coexist and the audience exchanges them. This was the goal behind making this film.”

The biggest irony here is that Park is practically a symbol of Korean cultural influence. He’s been at the crest of the Korean Wave for the past 20 years, and along with his compatriot, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho, has broken down barriers to cinema in the country. As with Bong, Park’s films combined festival acclaim with commercial appeal, not least his hit film Oldboy, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 and introduced the world to a new brand of vivid, grotesque, twisted but technically adept cinema – exemplified by scenes in which Oldboy’s protagonist dispatches multiple assailants in a single corridor battle, armed only with a hammer, and in another in which he eats a live octopus. In the United Kingdom, Park’s films have been marketed under a DVD label called “Asia Extreme”, alongside works by countrymen such as Kim Jee-Woon, Kim Ki-duk and some Japanese directors.

Looking back, Park feels uncomfortable: “I felt trapped by this brand. It created an unnecessary form of prejudice.” He’s relieved that this label no longer applies to him, partly because of the “extreme” aesthetic that infused mainstream cinema, but also because Park moved with apparent ease to Hollywood and slightly less violent English-language projects. These include his 2018 John le Carré miniseries The Little Drummer Girl, starring Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgard, and the 2024 miniseries The Sympathizer, about Viet Cong spies in 1970s America, and featuring Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles.

“It’s not like I’m making deliberate choices to tone down my violence to avoid that kind of reputation,” he says. “I don’t know what kind of films I will direct in the future, but they can be just as graphic as my previous films.”

He adds that directing in English wasn’t as easy as it seemed, especially in his first Hollywood feature, 2013’s Stoker, a Hitchcockian thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode. “I was afraid at first, especially about having conversations through an interpreter,” he says. His representatives helped him. “It actually wasn’t that different, probably because Nicole did her best to adapt to me.” He explains that Kidman prefers to do her own preparations, while he prefers to sit with the entire cast and work on the script line by line. “I suggested, ‘Why don’t we try it?’ And in the end, she said it was very helpful.”

He is not fluent in English and speaks through a translator today, but “my English is good enough where if I feel like something is not translated correctly, I can point it out,” he says. “Another problem that can arise is misunderstandings caused by linguistic or cultural differences, but I have really tried to use that to my advantage, because I can offer a perspective on British or American communities that people within the community may fail to see.”

Now, like Bong, he’s mixing it up: some projects are in English, some are in Korean, and others are a mix of both. His sumptuous lesbian thriller The Handmaiden transported Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith from Victorian England to early 20th-century Korea. Likewise, No Other Choice is based on The Axe, a novel by American crime writer Donald Westlake, but set in Ulsan, a coastal city in southeastern Korea. He explains that Park had been trying to adapt the story since he first read it in around 2005 – around the same time that a French-language adaptation of the same story was released. “Initially, this film was intended to be an English-language American film, but many fruitless years passed and it was eventually turned into a Korean film.”

The delay at least gave him the chance to cast Lee, who first worked with Park on his 2001 hit film Joint Security Area, and more recently starred in Squid Game and voiced the lead demon in KPop Demon Hunters. Park describes him as “Korea’s Jack Lemmon” — handsome but expressive and versatile, a relatable everyday guy. “Previously, he was too young for this role, but since so much time has passed, he has reached just the right age.”

Despite the story’s age, the themes of economic insecurity and masculinity—and the victims of neoliberal capitalism turning on each other rather than the true villains—still resonate, especially in Korea. But Park has given it a 21st-century update: the specter of artificial intelligence looms large in this new industrial landscape, adding another level of irony to the tale. “While the original novel depicted competition between humans, I added artificial intelligence, which is so powerful that you can’t even compete with it anymore,” he says.

Once again, these concerns are not limited to the paper industry – even if they can be seen as a metaphor for the dying age of analog devices. Park is well aware that AI is coming to his own profession as well. “It doesn’t seem serious right now, but given how quickly it’s developed in the past year, I’m very concerned about how many people in our film industry will have their jobs replaced by artificial intelligence.” He says he’s worried about his colleagues, “but I’m also worried about a situation where I have no choice but to embrace AI — for example, if studios decide to cut AI budgets.”

Either way, he is unlikely to beat his rivals in a no-choice style. Especially Bong Joon Ho: They’re both old friends. In fact, Park gave Bong his first job. “I asked him to work on a script for me, and we had discussions, but it never happened.” The two used the same actors, including Parasite star Song Kang-ho, and Park co-produced Bong’s 2013 sci-fi film Snowpiercer. “Our wives are also very close, so we meet often. And Song Kang Ho – his family is also very close to our families. So we often hang out together,” he says. “When I wrote the first draft of No Other Choice, I shared the script with them [Bong] He asked for his feedback.”

This is probably part of the reason why Korean screen culture has been so successful recently. Not only do they not fight each other, but their work often views economic success and the capitalist model with suspicion, if not outright pessimism. There seems to be no Korean equivalent of the American dream. You could say that No Other Choice directly addresses the same paradoxes and inequalities as Bong’s Parasite, or the recent sci-fi comedy Mickey 17 — with a cloned Robert Pattinson playing the ultimate expendable worker. Or even Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game, which has a do-or-die, winner-takes-all game show setting, which was inspired by Hwang’s own experiences with economic hardship after the financial collapse of 2008. Perhaps Korean cinema offers perspectives that we Westerners fail to see.

This does not mean that Park has any declared agenda, whether on a philosophical, thematic, or even geographical level. As if to prove the point, he says his next two projects are US-backed, but one is sci-fi (an adaptation of the Japanese manga Genocidal Organ), and the other is a western (Brigands of Rattlecreek – it sounds very violent).

“If I get an offer for a good story set in France or a country in Africa, I’ll go there,” he says. “I just follow the good stories.”