The violently competitive world of HR and employment is the subject matter of the South Korean filmmaker’s highly prescient latest.
Most filmmakers are lucky if they make one masterpiece in their lifetime – Park Chan-wook can’t seem to stop doing it. No Other Choice is his long-awaited adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 corporate satire-thriller ‘The Ax’, about a laid-off employee who decides to thin out the job pool. Reuniting with leading man Lee Byung-hun, director Park executes a sharp, timely and blisteringly funny tale of personal greed, while pondering the lurking evil of AI.
LWLies: You’ve spoken about your desire to adapt ‘The Ax’ into a film a few times over the years, but I wonder how your understanding or perception of that story has changed since you first read it?
Park: I don’t exactly remember, because it’s been so long since I read the novel – I think it was around 15 years ago – but a recent revelation I did have is that I felt that it was necessary to include the introduction of AI technology. I felt that was the only way to properly reflect the realities of today.
Is that something that you are personally concerned with both in the filmmaking world and in the wider world – the prevalence and speed at which AI is becoming more accepted?
Yes, I’m greatly concerned about it. Of course, it could be a technology that could become beneficial and improve our lives. Specifically in the context of filmmaking, for young filmmakers with no money and just imagination, I think it could be a helpful tool to easily and affordably realise their vision of, for instance, a future society. So there are those benefits of AI technology, but my concern is definitely greater than the benefits I see in it. Three years ago, a friend started using AI, and he no longer saw a need for his secretary, so he fired his secretary. Considering the speed of development of AI, who could tell how quickly they will develop in the next year or in the next two years, and how many people will lose their jobs because of that? I’ve also heard reports of AI in the gaming industry, where AI has refused the user’s commands. Even people around me, whenever they ask AI questions, they always receive deceitful answers, and that alone scares me greatly. Considering all of that, unlike something like the washing machine, I don’t think this is a tool that will simply make our lives more convenient.
Another element of No Other Choice I found interesting is how much the concept of well-paid employment is tied to masculinity – certainly for Yoo Man-su, but also for the other men that we meet in the film, a lot of their identity is tied to their jobs. I’m curious if this is a reflection of how you perceive modern South Korean work culture.
Certainly, I did emphasise that element more in the film than in the original novel. I do think this element works better for the audience in Korea since Korean society does have stronger traces of patriarchy. But you mustn’t forget that the issue of masculinity and such already featured in the original novel, which is an American novel. After showing this film to audiences from different countries, they were all equally nodding and laughing and sympathising with what’s happening on the screen. So I believe that it’s a relevant issue for anywhere in the world.
The film to me also seems quite concerned with how selfish capitalism forces us to become, or tries to force us to become.
Yes, the reason I immediately knew I wanted to adapt this novel into a movie, even before I closed the book, was because I greatly empathised with those elements. Man-su is not in a situation where he immediately has to go and live out on the streets and starve. He just doesn’t want to fall below the middle-class lifestyle that he’s been maintaining. When he says there’s no other choice, that’s simply his excuse. So in the scene where Man-su is telling Beom-mo that if he doesn’t have money, he can just sell his house or go and work in a supermarket, the audience becomes aware that Man-su is aware of this fact. Why doesn’t he follow his own words? His whole process of making a fake company and a job posting and collecting resumés to kill his potential competitors is a very capitalist method in nature. The companies pick superior candidates to hire at their company, and Man-su does something worse by picking out these superior candidates to kill them.
“I do want to shoot on film for my films as well, but in Korea there is no place to develop it.”
Part of the comedy and the tragedy of the film is the refrain the characters have of ‘No other choice’, which many of them say time and time again, and that we, the audience, know is not true. But there’s also an abdication of personal responsibility – capitalism wants us to believe that we have no choice but to live or act a certain way, and that our fate is an unchangeable force. I’m curious about what your perception of fate is as it relates to both this film and your other films as well, which have elements of fate woven through them.
I actually titled the film this way because I realised just how many times I subconsciously say the words, ‘I have no other choice.’ I wanted the audience to see the film and be struck with the same realisation that we certainly do have other choices and we self-justify in order to make cowardly choices. In my previous films, I featured characters who fight against their fate, regardless of how foolish or likely to fail they are. But I don’t think Man-su is that way. After he got fired, he believed he was creating his own destiny by doing what he is doing, but his method is unethical and it shatters his family as a result. Even after he kills his human competitors, he is simply faced with his AI competitor. All the work he has done is futile and we are left with an empty resolution.
In your career and your filmography, you have become well known for very memorable fight scenes, which are violent and vicious and tightly choreographed. In No Other Choice Man-su is a loser and he fights like a loser. He has a lack of killer instinct despite how many horrible things he does. How did you go about choreographing these murder scenes, because they are all so bumbling?
Despite how bumbling or pathetic he looks, I had to make the same level of detailed plans, choreography and rehearsals for the fight scenes in the movie! They were not as long as the Oldboy hallway scene per se, but I did use the same method to prepare. I storyboarded the fight scenes early on in the process, and then the stunt co-ordinators would practise with their stuntmen and record their choreography on their camcorders, just as I had storyboarded it. The actors get to see it, then we make the necessary revisions, then they practise it for a few weeks.
I can see you have a camera with you. There is a scene in the film where Beom-mo describes himself as someone who us dedicated to analogue. Does the preservation and cultivation of physical media matter to you in the same way?
I do listen to music on vinyl. I listen from other sources as well, but I most enjoy listening on vinyl. I do want to shoot on film for my films as well, but in Korea there is no place to develop it, so it is very difficult to do that. I do have to shoot digitally, but from the selection of lenses to the DI [Digital intermediate] process, I try my hardest to replicate the film look. I am also a photographer, so I have a lot of film cameras. But ever since I started using digital cameras, it is very hard to go back to film because of the convenience. But I have been trying hard to go back to my film cameras again. When I brainstorm ideas for my movies, I still like to use pen and paper to write them down.
Do you care about the type of paper as much as the characters in the film do?
[Laughs] Not to the same degree, but I do care about that.
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