Epic hits screen
South Korean director captures historical tragedy while producing epic entertainment, Xu Fan reports.
South Korean director’s new movie about the fight against Japanese invaders on the Korean Peninsula is expected to touch Chinese viewers with a different approach.>
China’s screens have been flooded by productions on the war against Japanese invaders in recent months. Many viewers complain such films can become stereotyped, and they will feel delighted to see an unlikely epic from neighboring South Korea.
Assassination, the highest-grossing movie so far in the South Korean market this year, will be released across the Chinese mainland’s theaters on Sept 17, about two months later than its homeland premiere. The action thriller will set a record on becoming the fastest South Korean title to reach the Chinese market.
Set in 1933, during Japan’s 191045 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, the tale fictionalizes three talented prisoners dispatched by the exiled provisional Korean government to assassinate a Japanese commander and a traitorous Korean tycoon.
High praise prevailed after sneak previews on Monday. Viewers say it’s refreshing to see a wartime title, which are usually serious in China, produced like a Hollywood action thriller, thanks to many plot twists and occasional humorous lines to ease the tension in several crucial scenes.
“I heard that,” director Choi Dong-hoon said, smiling, at a Beijing media event.
He gave a one-hour interview alongside the two lead actors, Lee Jung-jae and Ha Jung-woo, with Chinese newspapers on Tuesday.
“In South Korea, few movies featuring this subject (Koreans’ fight against Japanese colonists) have earned commercial success before,” he says. The veteran director explains that
Assassination is not a propaganda title pushing patriotism, but one in which he hopes its audiences can sense “something unusual”.
“South Korea had been colonially ruled by Japan for 35 years. It was quite a long time and became a collective scathed memory for us. The characters depicted in my movie want to convey that we never stopped fighting for freedom,” he says.
One scene features the lead actress Gianna Jun’s role (the leader of the trio of assassins) recalling her witnessing of Japanese armies slaughtering locals.
“My mother was shot to death by Japanese,” her character, a sniper, murmurs. “It was not the worst situation ... Some were boiled.”
While some parts of the storyline resonate with Chinese because of wartime memories, shooting major parts of the film in China should make it easier to win the Chinese market.
“When I was conceiving the script, I had been worried about the shooting locations, as most of the historical buildings from that period are hard to find in present-day South Korea,” Choi explains.
The filmmaker found the atmosphere of that period during a visit to Shanghai Film Park, one of China’s largest filming sites.
A number of buildings and streets re-creating 1930s Shanghai in the park impressed Choi.
As a longtime market favorite, Choi is known for his talent to combine commercial appeal with artistic pursuit. His previous four movies — three crime thrillers and one fantasy epic — are all smash hits. Choi’s heist adventure film The Thieves in 2012 was among the highest-grossing films in South Korea.
That record convinced investors to fund a $16 million budget.
The crew spent seven months to build a department store in the Shanghai park and took 24 days to shoot its major scenes featuring Seoul (where the assassination takes place) and Shanghai (which housed the exiled provisional Korean government).
The crew also traveled to Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, to shoot footage featuring the government in exile.
Jun, the lead actress, told South Korean media in an earlier interview that the filming experience in Chinese film studios was like traveling back to the turbulent period.
Jun, a screen goddess to many Chinese fans since her romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (2001), and award-winning actors Lee and Ha highlight the all-star cast.
Lee reveals that he has watched a series of documentaries to learn about the history and studied spoken Japanese for two months.
Jun was absent during the Beijing promotional tour because of her pregnancy, but the whirlwind enthusiasm generated by the two actors seems to foreshadow an optimistic market future in China.
The characters depicted in my movie want to convey that we never stopped fighting for freedom.” Choi Dong-hoon, South Korean director