Oldboy
Short description
Oldboy follows Oh Dae-su, an ordinary Seoul businessman and family man who is abducted one night in 1988 after being picked up drunk by police. He wakes in a windowless room that serves as a private prison, with a television his only link to the outside. From news reports he learns that his wife has been murdered and that he is the prime suspect. He spends fifteen years confined there without explanation, then is released just as abruptly. Contacted by someone who appears to know why he was held, he is challenged to uncover the identity of his captor and the reason for his imprisonment. Dae-su has one aim of his own: revenge. A young woman named Mi-do becomes his companion as he follows the trail.
The film is the third feature directed by Park Chan-wook, following Joint Security Area (2000) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), and he wrote the screenplay with Hwang Jo-yoon and Lim Joon-hyung. Choi Min-sik plays Dae-su, with Yoo Ji-tae as Lee Woo-jin, Kang Hye-jung as Mi-do, and supporting turns from Kim Byeong-ok, Ji Dae-han and Oh Dal-su. Made for about 3 million USD, it earned roughly 18 million USD worldwide.
On IMDb it holds 8.3/10 from 713,000 votes, and on TMDB 8.2/10 from 10,220 votes, placing audience responses well above the critics' rating of 7.8/10 from 160 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- For the role of Lee Woo-jin, the director wanted to find an actor who would appear as little like a villain as possible, and initially wanted to cast Han Suk-kyu, who had already played the rival of Choi Min-sik's character in the film 'Shiri'.
- In one interview, Park Chan-wook said that he deliberately made the ending of the film ambiguous, so that viewers could decide for themselves whether Oh Dae-su had managed to bury his memories or not.
- The scene of eating a live octopus was filmed in four takes.
- 300 actresses auditioned for the role of Mi-do, and in the end, Kang Hye-jung was unanimously chosen.
- The final scene in the snowy forest was filmed in New Zealand.
- The phrase “Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone,” which appears repeatedly in the film, is a quote from the poem “Solitude” by American poet Ella Wilcox.
- During the scene where Oh Dae-su dances with toy wings in the police station, actor Choi Min-sik asked the cameraman to include his feet in the shot—he wanted to imitate Michael Jackson's famous "moonwalk".
- Quentin Tarantino admitted that the film deeply touched him – he cried along with the antagonist and was surprised by his own reaction, because by that point he had already come to hate him.
- The chairman of the Cannes Film Festival jury, Quentin Tarantino, called the film an absolute masterpiece and voted for it to be awarded the Palme d'Or, but the film was one vote short of winning the prize.
- For his role in the film, Choi Min-sik rigorously trained in the gym for six weeks and lost 10 kg, after which he performed almost all of the stunts himself.
- In Korea, they do indeed eat live octopuses, but they are usually cut into pieces beforehand. Having won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the director publicly thanked the octopus alongside the actors and the film crew.
- The fight scene in the prison corridor was filmed in one take, took three days to shoot, and used very little computer graphics – only the knife sticking out of Oh Dae-su’s back was digitally added.
- Actor Choi Min-sik is a Buddhist, and before eating the live octopus, he had to pray.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
