When Han Jun-hee binge-watched “House of Cards,” the series struck him as a game changer. It left him with one ambition: to make a story no one had told before, but that many people would watch.
Delivering a masterclass at Netflix’s Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), the director of “Coin Locker Girl” and military drama “D.P.” spoke in conversation with Kim Kijae, a longtime creative executive at Netflix Korea. The session came ahead of the Nov. 20 Netflix release of his Korea-Japan thriller “The Blue Road.”
“I think you need to make bold choices so that the story is interesting,” Han told the audience. “In Korea we call those gambles ‘go or stop.’ If you only make extremely safe choices, those safe choices can end up becoming the bigger risk.”
His projects take on subjects that could be too niche, like Korean military service (“D.P.”) or high school violence (“Weak Hero Class 1”). “For ‘D.P.’ we used the buddy-movie format; for ‘Weak Hero’ we wrapped it in action,” Han said. “But when wrapping the material in genre, you have to wonder: does that genre neutralize its uniqueness and make it too ordinary? That collision is ultimately the defining moment of the work. I believe there is no story that cannot be made into a film or series.”
Some of his bets have been made from outside the director’s chair. In recent years, he has often worked as a creator and producer on series that others direct. “Weak Hero” is a case in point. Some worried the hit series would only appeal to male viewers because of its violence, but Han believed anyone could relate to it. “I had a strategy. There were three young actors. I thought among the three, at least one would be a crush for someone,” he said, referring to leads Park Ji-hoon, Choi Hyun-wook and Hong Kyung.
Han also thought he wasn’t the best person to direct it, and helped launch the career of Yoo Soo-min, then an emerging director. With debuts getting harder to land in Korea, he said, backing new talent matters for the future of the country’s creative industry.
More recently, he created “Dead-End Job,” a Netflix mystery-horror series that premieres Oct. 30, and oversaw its creative development while Kim Da-min, who wrote the Netflix series “A Killer Paradox,” directed. In the series, a young man buried in debt takes a part-time job paying 50 times the minimum wage, at a staffing agency where every shift could kill him. The project packs in horror, black comedy, disaster, action and mystery. “It’s about the harsh reality of earning a living, but told through a fantasy wrapper,” Han said, adding that they looked for a very energetic director to meet this “reckless” challenge.
“The Blue Road,” which screened at Busan, marks Han’s return to the director’s chair, though he does not see it as a comeback, since he never stopped working behind the scenes. Adapted from “Blue Road,” a Korean-Japanese manga written by Edogawa Keishi and drawn by Kwon Ka-ya in 2002, the co-produced series stars Son Suk-ku and Nagayama Eita, and is screening in BIFF’s On Screen section. “Rather than massive VFX or scale, I wanted to create a project driven head-to-head by the actors and their acting,” Han said.
On set, Han worked with both Korean and Japanese crews. “In Korea we’re very flexible, adaptable and fast. In Japan they prepare everything very meticulously and are very precise in their execution. It’s very different,” Han said. “You need to figure out how to mesh those styles together.” Misunderstandings at the start gave way to compromise, and he said each crew learned from the other. The project kept evolving along the way, too: the ending was rewritten many times, and Han said the series was “like a living creature.”
Han called luck one of the most important things in the industry, and closed with advice for aspiring filmmakers. “We always want to make a masterpiece, be the best from the very start,” Han said. “But don’t be afraid of criticism, keep writing. That is the preparation. If it doesn’t work, try again. Artistic work is still work. If you’ve been doing your best to prepare, luck will come, and when that luck comes, you’ll be able to capture it.”
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