But it was a less heartening incident that inspired him to make movies. “The Gwangju Uprising affected my psychology a lot,” he says of the response to the military coup d’état that installed a dictator in 1980, when he was at university. “I was at a sensitive age. South Korea was under dictatorship and political despotism. There was no freedom of expression. Anyone who was anti-government would be imprisoned. There were civilian police in the school campus and everywhere. Some of my friends went to demonstrate, they got beaten up and imprisoned, and they disappeared,” he recalls. “The social sentiment was extreme anti-communism, and almost all university students were extreme leftist.” Park remembers how talking about Hitchcock and French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard would invite revulsion. “I was treated as some revisionist. I felt trapped [between political activism and my artistic pursuits]. What I liked, I couldn’t express freely—I had anger in my heart.”

The uprising ended in the massacre of hundreds or even thousands of students who had demonstrated against martial law. “In the 1980s, I didn’t do much compared to my friends who went to fight and got tortured. I wasn’t brave enough. I’ve always felt guilty about this, so now I strive to express myself more with my movies,” he says. “I began to ask myself: what is a good life for a young man like? What is the value of art?”

After graduating with a philosophy degree from Sogang University—where he had set up a club called Sogang Film Community—Park started working as an assistant director to several South Korean directors, including Kwak Jae-Yong, who helmed the massive 2001 movie My Sassy Girl. But he felt “a director has to have charisma, leadership, fighting spirit and no grounds for negotiation. I didn’t think I had that.” He thought of becoming a professor, like his father, in art history, but ended up landing a job as a film critic instead—a job which proved more arduous than anticipated.  “You have to write a lot but still you don’t earn enough, especially when you have a wife and a daughter to feed,” he says.

In the early 1990s, while continuing to write for film magazines and journals, his love for auteurs such as Hitchcock and Kim Ki-young, known for his psychosexual, melodramatic horror films, motivated him to give directing a second shot. He was not a success: his 1992 directorial debut, The Moon Is ... the Sun’s Dream, and another feature five years later, Trio, were box office failures. “Sometimes when life got hard, I would regret my decision and envy people who get monthly salaries,” he says with a bitter laugh. “I felt like I really should have been an art historian instead.”

In case you missed: Karena Lam on the lack of gender equality in the local film industry, and her ambassadorships with French May and Hong Kong International Film Festival

But he struck gold in 2000 with his mystery thriller Joint Security Area, which portrays a fictional investigation into the death of two North Korean troopers in the Korean Demilitarised Zone. The film received rave reviews and became the highest-grossing Korean film to date at the time of its release.

Two years later, he proved once again he had the golden touch with the release of crime thriller Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, the first chapter in his famous Vengeance Trilogy; the other two are Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. These productions thrust South Korean cinema into the international limelight, and began global film award judges’ love affair with Park’s work. Over the years, he has made a mark at pretty much the most prestigious film awards around the world, winning such gongs as the Grand Prix, Jury Prize and Best Director at Cannes; Venice Film Festival’s Little Golden Lion; Bafta’s Best Film Not in the English Language; Blue Dragon Film’s Best Director; and Asia-Pacific Film Best Director.

Read more: Hong Kong Director Ann Hui Talks Winning The Golden Lion Award And Her Filmmaking Journey

Park loves to tell stories and portray his characters’ psyche through a combination of a film’s colours and mood, framing and close-ups on the actors’ faces. While he also puts a lot of effort in crafting the dialogues and narration—due in large part to both his parents having been interested in studying the Korean language—his stylistic choice of leaving a lot of things shown and unsaid is reflective of the brazen and controversial nature of his subjects: lust, incest, extramarital affairs, mariticide and matricide, taboos from which society flinches. “I’m very interested in people who are oppressed. They want to express the desire and make [their fantasies] happen, but then they are always suppressed,” he says.

Characters in many of Park’s films are presented as neither fully hero or villain, and by the end of the movies, the audience is forced to confront the fact that human nature encompasses all manner of behaviours and impulses, including those usually suppressed in the name of decency. His vampire murderer in Thirst liberates herself from the oppression of an exploitative mother-in-law and denigrating husband to pursue her genuine love for a priest. In Lady Vengeance, the families of murdered children have the same dark side reveal they share the killer’s dark side, finding pleasure in torturing a human, instead of seeking judicially approved justice, the “civilised” response. Park sees his onscreen presentation of extreme violence as depicting a breaking down of systems he sees as unjust or illogical: the patriarchal expectations of marriage in South Korea in Thirst, for example, or the power dynamics between class and race in The Handmaiden (2016). “I quite identify with them. That’s why I think [violence] is necessary for those characters,” he says.

Not all of Park’s presentations of violence and oppression are physical, however; his 2003 short film Never Ending Peace and Love addresses the exploitation of foreign labourers in South Korea. It is based on the true story of a Nepalese labourer Chandra Gurung, who was mistaken for a Korean citizen who suffered a mental health crisis and was sent to the psychiatric hospital for six years. His new historical drama series The Sympathiser, slated for release this year, dissects how a half-Vietnamese, half-French spy for North Vietnam painfully navigates his dual identity as he befriends South Vietnamese military officials and a United States CIA agent. The drama is based on the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and stars Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr.

While Park has made his name with gore and almost an unimaginable amount of violence, he believes that his art forces us to be honest with ourselves about who we are and what we truly desire. He hopes to heal wounds by baring them to us. “If films have any magic at all, it is that they allow you to enter those whose minds we consider delusional and nonsensical according to our ‘normal’ standards. But it is in films that we’ll find that their worlds make sense."

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