The reason why my work was categorised as ‘violent’ or ‘grotesque’ is purely the fault of the British,” says Park Chan Wook, flashing a knowing smile in my direction. He smiles again, a minute later, when a translator repeats his words back to me. The revered South Korean filmmaker is joking, but may have a point: when Park first became a sensation in Western cinephile circles, in the early 2000s, it was British distributor Tartan that chose to market his films – Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance – under the banner of “Asia Extremes”.
“It wasn’t just Korean films, but Asian films – mostly horrors – that were included in that category, as well as my works,” Park says, sitting, legs crossed, on a sofa in a central London hotel suite. Admittedly, Park’s own macabre imagination was never much help in beating the extremity allegations: across his first few films, the director explored such winsome scenarios as murder, incest, child kidnapping, organ harvesting, live octopus consumption, botched penknife harakiri, and dental mutilation. “As I made more movies, and became more internationally known, I think I naturally grew out of that label – of being on the outskirts of what’s mainstream,” he tells me. “But I didn’t try to escape those old labels. I simply continued to do what I’ve always been doing.”
