Art, of course, imitates life. For Hwang Dong-hyuk, the creator of Squid Game, you can draw a straight line between reality and his brutalist spectacle of financial desperation. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Hwang explained that he began coming up with the Netflix show, a bona fide global sensation, when he was in dire circumstances following the economic crash in 2008.
“I was very financially straitened because my mother retired from the company she was working for,” he explains. “There was a film I was working on but we failed to get finance. So I couldn’t work for about a year. We had to take out loans — my mother, myself and my grandmother.” Beyond serving as what many see as a broad critique of global capitalism, the show makes reference and is partly inspired by the widespread debt crisis in South Korea.
