The Birth of Korean Cool (20 page)

His comparison of his revenge films to a romance film is a bit of a revelation. Just as one anxiously hopes, in
An Affair to Remember
, that Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant stop missing each
other by seconds, so does one hope in
Oldboy
that Oh and his avenger will get to be in the same room.

Park has been making a foray into Hollywood. In 2013, Spike Lee released the American remake of
Oldboy
, and Park himself directed his first English-language film, the noir thriller
Stoker
, starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, and Matthew Goode.

The chief difference Park noted about Hollywood filmmaking was “how strongly a studio would voice their thoughts to the filmmaker. They have a lot of questions and opinions directed at the
filmmaker.” In Korea, by contrast, the studio system is much smaller and everyone has pretty much worked with everyone at some point, so Korean directors have more autonomy. Still, Park was
so impressed by the American dialectical method that he said he preferred the final studio cut to the director’s cut: “In truth, if you compare the movie made with my own ideas compared
to the discussions and debates resulting in what you see now, the latter is actually the better version of the film.”

Korean films, by contrast, are much smaller projects with fewer staff. Korean directors are also playing with much lower budgets than are their Hollywood counterparts, so the studios are less
risk-averse and more likely to give a respected director free reign. When a Korean director makes a movie, it tends to be a reunion of people he has worked with before. The familiarity between
director and actor in a Korean film is evident and the synergy is tight—more like a stage play than a film.

Oddly enough, I didn’t really discover Korean films until I lived in France—a country that loves cinema, and where Korean films are highly popular. In fact, despite
Oldboy
’s recognition at Cannes and other Europe an film festivals, it did not get a single Oscar nomination, not even for Best Foreign Film. Park believes his appeal in Europe is
greater than in the United States because of the finicky nature of the American filmgoer. “In America, only a certain number of people go to a movie with subtitles and appreciate it. Whereas
in France, people are more accustomed to seeing movies with subtitles.”

Many feel that the subtitle issue will prevent the film aspect of Hallyu from being strongly felt in the United States. On the other hand, some experts believe that movies are Korea’s next
big export. In the past, Korean producers didn’t have enough financing to make a major export push.

Getting U.S. audiences to pay attention to the booming state of K-cinema is a challenge. Culture critic Lee Moon-won said, “Americans think that Korean films are for Koreans. U.S.
producers would never think a white audience would watch a Korean film.” That said, however, demographic trends suggest that this bias might not be as big an issue in the future.
“American distributors think about population ratios,” said Lee. “So if the Latino population is increasing, they’ll think, ‘We should make more movies for
Latinos.’ Similarly, U.S. distributors are already anticipating that the Asian population will become big enough to require more films catering to that demographic.” He added,
“Minorities in the U.S. are increasing, so race and language are less significant barriers. The audience for Korean films is obviously going to increase.”

The godfather of Korean film, to whom Park and every contemporary Korean filmmaker owes a debt, is not a producer, or a director, or an actor. In fact, when I asked him
whether he was a lifelong film fan, he said, “Not exactly.”

Rather, the man who pretty much single-handedly created the Korean movie industry from the ground up is a former career government official, Kim Dong-ho, who served as the Korean minister of
culture from 1961 to 1988. Now a professor of film at Seoul’s Dankook University, and one of Korea’s most respected intellectuals, he unknowingly set one of the earliest examples of how
the Korean government could create a cultural industry out of whole cloth.

It’s not considered politically correct to talk about pedigree in modern-day Korea, but it’s significant that Kim comes from an esteemed and genteel background with the highest
academic accolades. He graduated from the vaunted Seoul National University, which Koreans annoyingly refer to as the Harvard of Korea. All of which means, to paraphrase a line from
All About
Eve
, that nothing from Kim’s background or breeding should have brought him any closer to the cinema screen than row E, center.

Until the current generation, Koreans believed that show business in general was not for respectable people. And unlike in the United States, it wasn’t at all lucrative, so even the most
successful entertainers could hardly say in the face of ridicule that they had cried all the way to the bank. So it took courage for someone like Kim to try to build a Korean film industry, when he
could easily have coasted on the guaranteed lifetime security that awaited everyone who passed the difficult civil service exam. But in 1972, he started a five-year plan to promote culture and the
arts, and founded Korea’s national endowment for the arts. Part of his plan included taking 10 percent of movie box office sales and putting the money toward an art promotion fund. He also
built a film studio—Korea had none at the time—in the Korean countryside.

Given that Korea’s per capita GDP was $323 in 1972—making the nation poorer than countries like Guatemala and Zimbabwe—bringing about these changes must have been like the
Klaus Kinski film
Fitzcarraldo
, in which the title character insists on building an opera house in the Amazon jungle, literally by dragging it there on a rope.

According to Kim, 1998 was the turning point for Korean films entering the international arena. “In the fifty years up to 1997,” said Kim, “only four Korean films were screened
at the Cannes Film Festival,” and even those were screened out of competition. “But in 1998, four Korean films were invited to Cannes.”

What brought about that sudden spike? It was the Busan International Film Festival, which Kim founded in 1996. The Cannes program heads saw Korean films in Busan and invited them to Cannes.
Since 1998, some four to ten Korean films have been screened at Cannes every year.

In fact, 1998 was a banner year for the Korean film industry, not just artistically but also commercially. It was the year that Koreans started really becoming interested in their own
nation’s cinema. In 1998, according to Kim, Korean movies constituted only 24 percent of the total market share, with the remainder being almost exclusively Hollywood films. With such local
hits as the 1999 spy thriller
Shiri
(starring Kim Yunjin, who played the character Sun in ABC’s television series
Lost
) and Park Chan-wook’s aforementioned 2000 drama
Joint Security Area
, the market share for local films reached 50 percent for Korean-made films.

This film boom, as with so many of South Korea’s pop culture success stories, arose out of a paradoxical combination of constraint and freedom. Once again, the Korean government used its
power to boost native industry. Korea had always shown many foreign films, but these all had to be distributed by Korean production companies—of which there were only about twenty until the
1990s. Even then, non-Korean films couldn’t just be distributed willy-nilly. Film companies had to produce one Korean movie for every non-Korean movie they imported. It’s safe to say
that the Korean film industry benefited from this kind of protectionism. France has been doing the same for years; this has allowed its famous film industry to flourish.

Between 1984 and 1987, the motion picture laws were gradually revised and non-Korean film distributors were permitted to distribute their own films in Korea without having to go through a Korean
distributor. The timing was not coincidental; 1987 is the year South Korea became a true liberal democracy, and 1988 was the year Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics, forcing Korea’s government,
industry, and people to be more open to the international business community.

At the time, said Kim, many Korean filmmakers feared that this new openness would wipe them out, that they would be completely crushed by Hollywood blockbusters. Fortunately, this didn’t
happen, for a number of reasons.

First, the Korean film scene changed fundamentally, partly because many Korean directors and producers started studying their craft in the United States and in Europe, and partly because over
the previous two decades, the government gradually lifted its censorship laws. Instead of banning films, the government permitted them with age restrictions, similar to the American G, PG, PG-13,
and R ratings. The new freedom gave Korean filmmakers the chance to experiment and push creative boundaries.

Another crucial reason for the surge in the success of Korean films, according to Kim, was that the government gave direct financial support to filmmakers. Incidentally, this is not some
uniquely dictatorial Korean intervention; it’s a commonality—and a necessity—of virtually every country outside the United States with a successful local film industry. The Korean
government created a film council, not unlike that of the UK. Funds were distributed via a grant application system. Kim points out one unusual characteristic: the focus on low-budget and
alternative films—quite unlike the Hollywood studio system. The government also built and operated art house theaters.

A third factor in the flowering of Korean cinema is the cultural fund run by the KVIC—the Korean Venture Investment Corporation—a government-backed fund exceeding $1 billion of
government and private money, solely devoted to promoting Korean popular culture. As a result of the fund, which was launched in 2005, the film industry no longer had to rely solely on studio
financing.

A final factor was the rise of the multiplex. In 2009, the Korean media empire CJ Group launched the world’s first so-called 4-D theaters, which are like 3-D theaters with the addition of
smell and tactile sensations. For example, when the movie
Avatar
was screened at Korea’s 4-D theaters, there was light rain and mist during some of the scenes taking place on the
planet Pandora. I’m not sure how many films really need to be shown this way, but it’s a totally immersive, otherworldly experience.

Quotas still exist for Korean movies, but at a reduced level. In 1967, a law was instituted requiring all movie theaters to screen Korean films for a minimum of 146 days per year. In 2006, under
former president Roh Moo-hyun, the figure was lowered to 73 days. According to Kim, the Korean government compensated by giving the Korean film council a mammoth $400 million check, about half of
which came from government coffers and the other half via a mandatory box office contribution. This would be comparable to requiring every American movie theater owner to fund Spike Lee’s
next film.

That said, however, Kim believes the quotas are now almost a quaint anachronism: “Frankly speaking, this quota has no meaning because now the market share of Korean films has reached 50 to
60 percent. So even if they eliminated the quotas, it would not harm the Korean film industry.” Still, the quota system served an important function in creating Korean films until the
K-cinema boom of the late 1990s.

I asked Kim why Korean films were so violent. He said, “The top-grossing Korean movies are not violent.” He gave three examples:
Miracle in Cell No. 7
(2013), a bittersweet
story about a mentally ill man imprisoned on rape charges;
Masquerade
(2012), a historical dramedy starring Byung-hun Lee about a Korean king who dies, forcing his peasant body double to
rule the land for fifteen years; and
The Thieves
(2012), an
Ocean’s Eleven
–type movie about a heist gone awry.

In fact, on the list of the ten most popular Korean movies, in terms of the number of tickets sold domestically, five are Korean historical dramas or comedies (
The Face-Reader
2013;
Masquerade
, 2012;
The King and the Clown
, 2005;
Taegukgi
, 2004;
Silmido
, 2003); two are disaster pictures (
Snow Piercer
, 2013,
Tidal Wave
,
2009); one is a heist film (
The Thieves
, 2012); and one is a tearjerker (
Miracle in Cell No. 7
, 2013).
²
At the number one spot is a film
in its own genre: a creature feature with social commentary about American imperialism called
The Host
(2006), not to be confused with the American movie of the same name.

Surprisingly, none of the K-horror films or indeed any of the famous violent Korean thrillers is on the list. Yet gore is what the west expects from Korean cinema. Most of the world is used to
getting their rom-coms and police movies from Hollywood, their brooding films from Sweden, their bucolic tearjerkers from Italy, and their mad arty movies from France. Moviegoers in general have a
long history of affixing certain genres to certain countries, and for the most part Korea is stuck with the dubious distinction of the horror-and-gore genre.

Kim Dong-ho, who has served Korean cinema mostly behind the scenes in a governmental capacity, is an often unsung hero. But after director Kim Ki-duk won the 2012 Venice Film Festival’s
top Golden Lion for his mother-son drama
Pietà
, Kim said in an official thank-you speech back in his native Korea, “51 percent of this trophy should go to Kim
Dong-ho.”

HOW SERIOUSLY IS KOREA TAKING HALLYU WORLD
domination? Well, the government and its many agencies have been regularly issuing what one might call
playbooks for entering world markets.
The Art of War
, as it were, but for peddling K-culture.

One book that came into my possession,
Hallyu Forever
(available only in Korean), published by a government organization called the Korean Cultural Trade Commission, is a savvy,
well-researched guide on how to approach world markets. There’s a blurb on each region, explaining the socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors that might make it a good market for
Hallyu, and even includes suggestions on what aspects of K-culture would do well there: film, television, food, etc. For example, the chapter on the Arab world points out the importance of keeping
Muslim prayer times in mind (to avoid airing Korean TV programs during those moments), as well as detailing the strict sexual mores that would make certain Korean dramas a bad fit for the Arab
market.