Why Park Chan-wook Identified with His ‘No Other Choice’ Protagonist: ‘I Can’t Explain My Life Without Using Movies’

Park tells IndieWire about the 15-year journey to make his Korean Oscar entry, across two pre-production teams, and with AI introduced into the source material about an unemployed paper expert who starts offing his peers to save his family from poverty.

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “No Other Choice.”]

Anyone who’s suffered unemployment or, you know, lives in the current global job market can identify with Park Chan-wook‘s “No Other Choice.” The Korean auteur’s Venice-premiered dark comedy, adapted from a novel called “The Ax” by late American potboiler writer Donald Westlake, stars a coolly transfixing Lee Byung-hun as a middle-aged paper mill expert and father of two who’s pushed out of his job — and into systematically executing all of his competitors so that he is the last living employable man in his chosen field. He’s, after all, got a lovely life with a wife, children, and two giant dogs named after them on the line.

Though Park’s premise — scripted with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye — takes economic dire straits to their extremes, it’s entirely prescient for our moment. As a filmmaker working opposite peers in his chosen field, Park confesses to identifying with Man-su (Lee), a family man who resorts to murder to protect his family against poverty. But not for the obvious reasons.

Sitting down with IndieWire in Los Angeles, Park said that he identifies with Man-su’s mindset that “paper is his life. Similarly, I can’t explain my life without using movies. I think my life would almost have nothing if I [didn’t] have movies in it. Of course, I do have family, but I spent so much of the time I should have spent on my family on movies as well. And I wouldn’t know how to do anything else in life if it’s not for filmmaking. So when Man-su lost his job, if you apply it in my terms, it would be when I can no longer find investment [in my movies], I would have nothing left.”

He continued, “After his last murder, Man-su embraces his wife, and his wife tells him, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have worked that hard.’ It was also a message that I wanted to tell myself. I don’t want to be foolish like Man-su. Recently, I’ve had the thought that I shouldn’t dedicate my everything just to film.”

“No Other Choice” is one of five Neon titles in the running for the Best International Feature Oscar, along with Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt,” Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” and Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident”

Park’s work on the film — part thriller, part workplace satire, all told in his precise-as-needlepoint widescreen style — dates back more than 15 years. He originally envisioned the adaptation as an American story told in the English language, but, unable to secure financing for the cost of his vision (ultimately more than a reported but still meager $11 million USD here for the version we see), he reverted to his Korean roots, setting his friend and early collaborator Lee (Park’s “Joint Security Area” and “Three Extremes”) in the lead.

“I wrote the first draft with Lee Jyung-yee, one of the co-writers on the film, and then we translated that Korean script into English, and in order to appropriately adapt this as an American film, that’s when Don McKellar came into the picture,” said Park, whose collaborator McKellar worked as a scriptwriter on Park’s HBO Max espionage thriller “The Sympathizer.”

Park said he was “devastated” to learn that “The Ax” had already been adapted into a 2005 French film by Costa Gavras (his family eventually helped produce “No Other Choice”). “But I was relieved after watching the film [because] it was so different from the film I had envisioned. That core difference lies in the portrayal of the family,” said Park, who puts Man-su’s nuclear family front and center of his film, which also meant expanding the role of Man-su’s (named Burke in the novel) droll but devoted dental hygienist wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin).

“Man-su, and even the character in the novel as well, the justification they use to do what they do is that they’re protecting their family, and I wanted to dig deeper into who this family consists of. I wanted to focus on the people that they want to protect, which would be his wife and children,” Park said.

Park, who is less comfortable in English and spoke with me via a translator, made another significant change for “No Other Choice”: working with cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, DP on his 2018 BBC spy series “The Little Drummer Girl,” rather than Chung-hoon Chung, which gives “No Other Choice” a more grounded feel than his grandiloquent genre pictures.

Chung previously shot the likes of “The Handmaiden,” “Stoker,” “Thirst,” “Lady Vengeance,” and “Oldboy,” though Kim retains Park’s penchant for elegant dissolves and transitions that tell two stories about the same image at once. Think Nicole Kidman brushing her hair, which becomes dry, windblown grass in “Stoker,” or in “No Other Choice,” an image of Man-su’s family layered on top of a churning paper mill that becomes a kind of vortex.

“I hired Kim Woo-hyung for the project back in 2010 or 2011 [back when ‘No Other Choice’ was an American film]. Why did I hire him? First of all, Chung-hoon Chung was very busy,” Park said. “He was working on American films in Hollywood, so I needed a new DP, and Kim was very respected in Korea as a cinematographer, and also, he was very good at English, which was why I thought he was perfect for this job. At that time, we finished storyboarding and location-scouting around the U.S. and Canada.”

“After it didn’t work out, we parted ways, and I called him back again to work on ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ together. After [‘No Other Choice’] was being developed again as a Korean film, we had to storyboard and location-scout all over again, so of course I called him again to work on that Korean version of that film,” he added. “Working with a new DP allowed it to feel fresh because it gave me a sense of tension instead of falling back on my old habits.”

The changes between the American and Korean versions, especially with respect to adapting an American novel from 1997, were more minor than you might expect, more about “the passage of time” than anything else, as Park explained. Part of Man-su’s plight is that he’s being replaced by artificial intelligence-powered machinery, as decided by imperious men in suits.

“The factory automation was also in the original novel, but in our daily lives, we witnessed more technological advances like AI, which I decided to incorporate into the film. More changes came from the 15 years that have passed since I started working on the project, rather than the change of countries,” Park said.

As far as what his film wants to say about AI’s encroachment on our culture — especially given the film’s coda I won’t spoil here — Park said, “I don’t know if the message is quite an anti-AI message because regardless of how I feel about it, its development is not going to stop any time soon. And it works similarly for capitalism as well. The film deals with capitalism. But am I necessarily having an anti-capitalist message?”

He continued, “I think that discussion on its own is meaningless because we already live in a capitalist society, and it’s not going to go away anytime soon. Instead of being anti-AI, I think I’m fearful of AI, and it’s already seeped into my field and my occupation so much. My crew might already be using it even without my knowledge, for instance, in VFX or in the art department. And it might already be stealing my colleague’s job as well. And you can’t estimate the speed of its development either, which is why I’m so fearful of it.”

“No Other Choice” opens from Neon on Christmas Day and currently represents Korea in the Best International Feature Oscar race.