Original-Cin Q&A: Decision to Leave's Park Chan-wook on Noir, Hitchcock and Femmes Fatale

By Jim Slotek

Park Chan-wook earned his reputation as one of the great purveyors of filmic violence with his “Vengeance Trilogy,” the centerpiece of which was the shocking thriller Oldboy.

He’s dialed back the explicit violence with Decision to Leave, a moody film of ache and longing, about an obsessed South Korean police detective (Park Hae-il) who stakes out a mysterious Chinese woman (Wei Tang) who may or may not have killed her husband. The movie opens in theatres Friday, October 28.

A murder, a femme fatale, and a plethora of night shoots – not surprisingly the word “noir” has followed the film, which debuted at Cannes (where Park was named best director). He demurs at the description.

Park Hae-il and Wei Tang in Decision to Leave

“When I make a movie, I don’t necessarily define a genre for my film and then give myself a set of conventions I need to follow. I don’t do that,” he said through an interpreter, in a roundtable interview during the Toronto International Film Festival.

“But I believe my film is still within the wider scope of what defines a thriller. Even though I didn’t think of this film as a noir film, I did think that this where the audience will follow the process of one detective encountering a case and trying to solve that case.

“And at the same time, the other access is the love story. And this structure was in my mind from the very beginning.”

He’s walked his demurral back a bit at comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock, saying that after the fact he recognized parallels to Vertigo. “Subconsciously, I am always under the influence of Hitchcock. (But) with my co-writer (Jeong Seo-kyeong) I talked about (David Lean’s) Brief Encounter to be the reference, just for the ambience.”

But he also names other Asian influences, filmmakers known for the often dark nature of their storytelling.  “Mikio Naruse, the Japanese filmmaker, is the one who made me want to learn how to make a film where the characters try to hide their feelings but are quite transparent to the eye of the audience.”

And there was Kim Soo-yong’s moody 1967 romance Mist (the pop theme song for which plays repeatedly in Decision to Leave). “That particular film was another influence.”

Director Park Chan-wook

If Park’s work has changed markedly in any way, it may be in his approach to female characters. He admits that when Oldboy was released, it was brought to his attention that the female lead was the one character who didn’t know the truth. It’s pointed out that, conversely, in Decision to Leave, Wang’s character Seo-rae is the only one who does know the truth.

“I did recognize that in Oldboy, (although) the story required Mi-do to be oblivious to the truth. But all in all, I felt bad for her. Because as a creator, your character becomes your children, your own.

“After Oldboy, after that awareness, I tried to put the female characters more at the forefront of the story, and give (them) a more active role in driving the narrative forward, give her more power, if not the same power, as the male characters So, after Oldboy, I tried to find a female co-writer and I found Seo-kyeong Jeong, and that’s where that journey began.

Jeong joined Park to co-write Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the third of the Vengeance trilogy, and they’ve co-written ever since.

“She is one of my best friends and we have written on many different films for a very long time. And there is something amusing about how we work together. Usually, when there is a woman character, I try to make her as cool and chic and smart as possible. And she always tries to give something faulty to the character, to make her a little bit unethical. And it’s the opposite situation when we are writing about a male character.”

A wave of films by now-internationally known directors like Park and the Oscar-winning Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) suggests a film movement of sorts. Park says it was simply South Korea’s time.

“I think this recent boom of Korean film and content is a part of a process of maturation. If you see the history of American cinema during the Hollywood studio era, they already perfected their technology and techniques and esthetics during the ‘40s and ‘50s. They achieved so high that is almost seems like they are kind of coming down even.

“But in Korea of course, we were colonized (by the Japanese), then there was the Korean War, and then a dictatorship (the Third Republic) with strong censorship, which meant that there was no freedom of expression.

“It only when we reached the ‘80s that finally we were able to have the freedom of speech. And then of course to make a film you need a lot of money.

“So, all that: technology, capital and freedom of expression. Those three elements are the basic foundation to flourish. And I think that happened in the 2000s when Korean films really started to tack on those three basic foundations.”

What genre is Park tackling next? “There are a couple of projects that have been under my sleeve for a very long time, but I have not received investment. There is a Western film, and there is also a crime film called The Axe.”

But don’t assume anything about the latter. “That film is not about an axe murderer. It’s about firing people.”

CLICK HERE to read Jim Slotek’s review of Decision to Leave.