Director Park Chan-wook said he was confident in the film No Other Choice's entertainment value and mass appeal despite mixed reviews.
Park Chan-wook appeared on MBC FM4U's Noon Hope Song with Kim Shin-young, which aired on the 29th, and revealed behind-the-scenes stories related to No Other Choice, which surpassed 1 million viewers five days after its release and continues its box office momentum.
He said, "I first read the original novel around 2004–2005. The moment I read it, I wanted to make it into a film," and added, "At the time, the Korean film market was small, so I couldn't bring myself to buy the rights to an American novel. Since then, whenever I finished a project, I continued writing in my spare time."
The film's title also went through twists and turns. Park Chan-wook said with a laugh, "Originally I wanted to call it 'mogaji.' The original title is 'axe.' In Korea they say when something is cut off the neck flies away. But everyone opposed it because of the tone of my previous works."
He cited lines between Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin as a memorable scene. Park Chan-wook recalled, "When a husband who suspects his wife's infidelity asks her, 'How could you do that,' Lee Byung-hun answers, 'Because you're so pretty.' When Son Ye-jin says, 'But you're handsome too,' Lee Byung-hun is left speechless, and that part was the funniest."
As another impressive scene, he mentioned the sequence where Cho Yong-pil's hit song 'Gochujamjari' plays. Park Chan-wook added, "At first the song and the scene don't match at all, but at some point they fit. It comes out around the middle of the film, and I think it's the most entertaining scene."
No Other Choice, which opened on the 24th, tells the story of Mansu (played by Lee Byung-hun), an office worker who felt his life was as if "all was complete" and is abruptly fired, and who prepares his own war for reemployment to protect his wife and two children and to keep the house he worked hard to buy.
Park Chan-wook joked, "Some people say you might need to watch it several times to understand it, but it's a movie you can enjoy even if you watch it just once. I think this should be made clear." Kim Shin-young also said, "There is a misconception that Park Chan-wook doesn't care about commercial appeal. In reality, he thinks about it a lot."
Meanwhile, when a listener asked which of his works he would like to adapt into a drama, Park Chan-wook replied, "The novel version of The Handmaiden is thick. There's a BBC drama too. It's totally different from the The Handmaiden I made. So if it were made into an eight-episode domestic drama, The Handmaiden," drawing attention. <
[Photo] MBC FM4U broadcast capture, OSEN DB
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