Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s seemingly endless press tour may finally have come to a close. The Korean hitmaker was among a small group of special guests at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong over the weekend, delivering a masterclass and sharing — all over again — his journey from struggling auteur to creator of Netflix’s most-watched series of all time.
“I think I’ve finally given all the thoughts I can on Squid Game,” Hwang, 54-years-old, but perennially youthful, told The Hollywood Reporter with a laugh when I caught him for a brief chat on the day after his AFA appearance.
“It was an unforgettable experience to receive that much love from around the globe. It opened my eyes a little bit to the wider world, and it made me a better person and a better artist,” he said. “And I think everything I went through with Squid Game has already had a huge impact on my next project, too.”
That next project, already attracting international curiosity, unsurprisingly, will be a feature film loosely inspired by a 2011 essay by the late Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, titled “How Old People Survive.” Hwang says his film will be titled KO Club — as in, “killing old people club” — and that the story will be just as brutally violent as Squid Game, if not more.
Before his Netflix series made him an icon of Korean entertainment’s soaring global appeal, Hwang was already a major filmmaker in his home country, known for his considered engagement with urgent social issues as much as his ability to deliver hits.
His well-regarded first feature, My Father (2007), tackled the real-life story of a Korean adoptee who goes searching for his biological father, only to learn that the man is imprisoned on death row for murder. His follow-up, Silenced (2011), explored real events at a Korean school for the deaf, where students were the victims of repeated sexual assaults by faculty members in the early 2000s. The film dramatized both the crimes and the court proceedings that let the teachers off with minimal punishment, eliciting outrage among the South Korean public upon its release, which eventually led to a reopening of the case and legislative reforms abolishing the statute of limitations for victims of sex crimes against minors in the country. Hwang followed this with a swerve into more lighthearted moviemaking with Miss Granny (2014) — an infectious comedy about an elderly woman transported into the body of her 20-year-old self — and the epic historical drama The Fortress (2017), both of which became local blockbusters.
Squid Game famously fused both of Hwang’s impulses, tackling the urgent global issue of widening inequality and capitalism’s inhumanity, but doing so in an accessible death-game format with an irresistible pop style.
Hwang says KO Club’s preoccupations will be recognizable to fans of Squid Game, but the story will unfold within the more contained and considered form of a theatrical feature rather than that of a sprawling streaming series.
Eco’s essay explores the growing societal tension between generations, satirically proposing a “removal list” for the elderly who occupy top professional positions, forcing them into hiding to avoid being “hunted” by young people.
During his chat with THR in Hong Kong, Hwang shared more on how he’s approaching his new film, his latest thoughts on what entertainment can and can’t do to change society, and the three Korean films that most shaped him as a director.
I know it’s still early, but can you tell us a little more about KO Club?
Well, as you know, I got the basic idea from Umberto Eco’s essay. It’s called KO Club, and basically, it’s about killing old people. It’s a story about the conflict between generations, set in the near future, not too far from our contemporary times. I feel that these tensions between generations are being felt everywhere — and maybe especially in East Asia. People are living longer everywhere, and the younger generation is smaller, but facing a huge tax burden to support older people by paying for their pensions. Meanwhile, the older generations are hanging onto society’s wealth and political power. One example could be Brexit, where older folks voted for Brexit much more than young people, so now the youth are like, “You guys have, what, 10 or 20 years left, and now you’ve decided our future? That’s not fair, and it doesn’t make any sense.” So the film touches on all kinds of things like this.
How far along are you in the development process, and when will you start shooting?
I’m working on the script now, and I should be done in a couple of months. I’ve already started casting. We’ll start preproduction in the fall and probably start shooting next spring.
You’ve talked a lot about how grueling the creation of Squid Game was for you — writing, directing and showrunning every single episode yourself. You famously lost several teeth while making the first season because of stress. I imagine it’s gotta be refreshing to return to the more self-contained form of feature filmmaking?
Oh my god, yes, of course. Over the past six years, I did three seasons and 22 episodes of Squid Game. I mean, that was six years of my life! It was a lot. Now I’m working on a two-hour feature film script, and it feels so short. It feels like nothing. So now I’m really cautious about not writing too fast. When I was writing the second and third seasons of Squid Game, I really had to work fast. It was a lot of hours of storytelling and I had relatively little time to write, because I also had to develop and direct every other aspect of the whole thing. I feel like I’ve now got the tendency to write really fast, which means I can easily make mistakes. So now I’m trying to slow down and think more deeply, and really enjoy the process of writing this film.
You famously developed the idea for Squid Game at a time when you were down and out in the industry, broke and struggling to pay off debt, and no studio wanted to finance the project for over 10 years until Netflix came along. I imagine you have a lot more options for KO Club. Where are you setting up the project? Has that been decided yet?
It’s still up in the air. It’s really tough to decide. It’s a whole new environment now, you know? Cinemas in Korea are really struggling — attendance has gone down really rapidly. I really want this film to be seen in a theater, but it’s kind of scary, you know? Netflix is obviously the safer choice. But I want this film seen on the big screen, not a smartphone! If a big studio — maybe one from the U.S. — is willing to finance the film for a global release, then I would go for that. But if they’re a bit reluctant, maybe I’ll go with Netflix again.
Early in your career, you achieved something pretty remarkable with Silenced, a film that tackled a horrible real-life crime and the structural problems in society that allowed the case to be buried — and the public reaction to the film resulted in arrests, legal changes and justice for the victims. With Squid Game, the target of your critique is broader and bigger — the inequality and brutality that seem to be a natural consequence of unfettered capitalism. As a filmmaker who has consistently engaged with real-life social issues in your work, I’m curious how you think about art and entertainment’s ability to instigate real-world change for the better.
Well, you know, they’re different cases. Silenced was based on a true story that had happened not that long ago, just a few years before I made the film. So there was something very tangible that we could actually change. You could go after those bastards and bring them to justice, you know what I’m saying? There was something we could really do about that. But inequality, capitalism and social justice in general? There’s nothing so simple or straightforward. We need to totally reorder the way we live and the way the world works. But still, you can tackle those issues — and filmmakers should — and then maybe over time, as we keep hammering on it, the need for change will gradually get through to people. It’s not a one-step thing. We just have to keep at it, and keep at it, and not give up — and know that life can be better and kinder.
It’s striking to me how the most acclaimed and successful Korean films and series of recent years share a preoccupation with this issue. Parasite, Squid Game and Park Chan-wook’s most recent film No Other Choice are actually very similar in their thematic preoccupation, as different as they might be in story and style. You each attack it from a different angle, but you seem to share a consensus about this fundamental problem of our times.
Well, Director Park is a bit older than us, but Bong and I are basically the same age. He’s just two years older than me. So we’ve been through the same era, and shared a lot of the same generational experience. When we were in college, we were all part of the same anti-government, leftie activist movement happening in Korea then. We were influenced by the same political and economic currents. So I think it’s natural that some of those experiences were embedded in us and shaped how we would see things when we grew up. Like you said, we each express ourselves very differently, but it’s understandable that we share some of the same concerns.
A final question for your fans, or movie lovers in general: Can you tell us about three Korean films that shaped you as a director, or simply moved you deeply as a filmgoer?
The first thing that comes to mind is a title you may not know — Christmas in August, a love-story melodrama from 1998 directed by Hur Jin-ho in his directorial debut. It’s a classic. Nothing much happens in the story, and the two lead characters never say “I love you” throughout the whole film, but we still feel the love so poetically. It has a strange magic. And the lead actress, Shim Eun-ha, was my favorite. I was a young man at the time (laughs), and I thought she was so natural and so beautiful.
The next one I have to pick is Lee Chang-dong’s directorial debut, Green Fish. You must see it if you haven’t. I mean, I was already a huge fan of him as a novelist. His writing deeply influenced me — and then all of a sudden one of my favorite writers became a filmmaker! Around that time, I was just starting to think about pursuing a life in film myself. I idolized him, and his career pivot kind of gave me courage to go for it. And then when I actually watched the film, it was stunning. Like every film he has done since, it was so beautifully done. He’s such a master storyteller, and the way he uses his own visual language to tell a story with a novelist’s depth — it’s just so great. I’m really awaiting his new one, [Possible Love], which happens to be for Netflix. I went to his set when he was in production on the new film last year. We had a good talk on set, and later went to dinner together. It was a memorable day.
The last one, which I must say, is Oldboy. I was a student at USC when it came out, and it was the very first Korean film to become well known and widely talked about in the Western world. I didn’t even know that it had come out, but my friends from class — American guys — came up to me like, “Hwang, have you seen this movie called Oldboy? Wow, that is a crazy, amazing movie!” That film made me kind of proud in a new way. When I finally got a chance to see it — on video, sadly — it was just so great, as everyone had been saying. Every aspect — the originality of the story, the direction, the acting, the music — it was just so obviously a strange masterpiece. It gave me a new kind of courage — that maybe I, as a Korean filmmaker, could make something that would be regarded as great everywhere in the world.
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