Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook (Korean: 박찬욱; pronounced [pak̚tɕʰanuk̚]; born 23 August 1963) is a South Korean filmmaker and former film critic. Widely regarded as a leading figure in South Korean and 21st-century world cinema, he is known for films that blend crime, mystery, and thriller elements with other genres. His films are noted for their cinematography, framing, black humour, and often brutal subject matter. After two unsuccessful films in the 1990s, which he has since largely disowned, Park came to prominence with his acclaimed third directorial effort, Joint Security Area (2000), which became the highest-grossing film in South Korean history at the time and which Park himself prefers to be regarded as his directorial debut. Using his newfound creative freedom, he would go on to direct the films forming his unofficial The Vengeance Trilogy: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), a financial failure that polarised critics, followed by Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005), both of which received critical acclaim and were financially successful. Oldboy in particular is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and helped establish Park as a well-known director outside his native country. Most of Park's work following The Vengeance Trilogy was also commercially and critically successful both in South Korea and internationally, such as Thirst (2009), The Handmaiden (2016), which earned Park the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and Decision to Leave (2022), which won the Best Director award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. He directed the English-language miniseries The Little Drummer Girl (2018) and The Sympathizer (2024). His 2025 film No Other Choice was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Description above from the Wikipedia article Park Chan-wook, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
| Known for | Directing |
|---|---|
| Born | 23 Aug 1963 |
| Place of birth | Seoul, South Korea |
Favorite films
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When I was watching it, I decided to become a filmmaker… that film provided [me with] one of the decisive reasons for me to become a filmmaker in the first place.
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[The director is] able to find and portray beauty in destruction, humor in violence and terror… I’m still making films that are too modest compared to his.
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Nosferatu is my favourite vampire film out of all the classic films and even the modern ones too.
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The best for me is Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, especially for the sequence where there is a fragmented sex scene between a man and his wife, interweaved with an intricate series of flash-forwards.
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Known for
Crew: Comic Book, Director, Production Assistant, Screenplay
