WORLDS APART: An interview with Shiri director Kang Je-Gyu
By Warren Curry
2/4/02
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WORLDS APART: An interview with Shiri director Kang Je-Gyu By Warren Curry |
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Talk about a wise risk director Kang Je Gyu's sophomore directorial effort, Shiri, raised eyebrows in South Korea when it went into production sporting an enormous (by Korean standards) budget of nearly $5 million. What was perhaps even chancier than the extravagant cost of the film was the movie's topic: the idea of the re-unification of North and South Korea. Many expected Shiri to suffer box office humiliation and a critical flogging. What the film received was success beyond even the most optimistic supporter's wildest imagination.
By the end of its first year of release in South Korea, one in seven citizens of the country had seen the film. Hardly just a domestic success, Shiri, became the first Korean film to be sold to Japan, and one of the first to find a home in Hong Kong. It registered at the top of both the box office in both territories. Now, courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films and IDP, the movie has acquired distribution in the United States.
An action film in design, if not necessarily content, Shiri's political message is one of the most outstanding features of the movie and that message is not at all exclusive to Korea. A mysterious female North Korean sniper and a duo of paranoid South Korean detectives on her trail personify the two countries extreme conditions. One is the land of poverty and famine, the other a land of careless fast food culture. Kang Je-Gyu's most stunning achievement was creating a fair, somewhat sympathetic view of people long known as "the enemy" and having a mass audience respond favorably to that portrayal. Rarely, has an action film contained such a political conscious, proving that the two traits are far from mutually exclusive.
CinemaSpeak had a chance to sit down briefly with Kang Je-Gyu to discuss his latest work. Shiri hits American screens on February 8.
(Interview conducted via interpreter
Soobong Seong)
Since the film's budget was so much more expensive than the average Korean production, how did you go about getting financing for Shiri?
From the beginning, it was not easy to get all of the financing for this film. However, my first film Ginko Bed was pretty successful in Korea, so there was a trust from the investors that I could make a hit. The investors read the script and really loved it - they thought with a good script and a proven director, it could be a successful film.
Because of the film's political content did you fear any pressure from government figures? Especially given the movie's sympathetic view of the North Korean characters?
In the late 80's I was working as a screenwriter on a film and was actually requested by the government to stop the project. After the 1988 Seoul Olympics, everything changed for the better and since it has been much easier to get a film made. I never felt any pressure or criticism to not make this film.
Shiri is being billed as an action film, and American audiences have very preconceived notions of what to expect from Asian-Action movies, because of the success of directors like John Woo. Are you afraid that the film's political message will get lost because of the genre you're working in?
I don't feel that that will be the case. I think the trend of audiences worldwide is that they tend to prefer and respond to the same ideas and content. What I do fear is that audiences in the United States might have certain prejudices about Korean movies, because they have no information at all about what Korean movies are like. The main reason why Shiri has been so successful in other countries is that it contains certain elements that audiences may not have experienced before.
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