I want to work with a wide range of genres because it gives each film a different cinematic energy.
I'm not an outgoing person. Compared to an average person, I am quite skeptical and pessimistic. This is different from being nervous.
I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell.
I'm someone who has a singular goal in making films: I want to tell a story. There are certain stories that I want to tell. Hollywood's never really been the ultimate goal for me.
My background is in acting, so I enjoy being able to show what I'm looking for. With acting, it's very immediate when you show someone what you're looking for, and the feedback is instantaneous as well.
Actors are the flowers of the film, of the set, and of the director. The term 'Flowers of the Screen' holds a deep meaning.
'The Good, the Bad, the Weird' is about individuals fulfilling their desires and just going the distance to fulfill that desire.
The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.
In Korea, the director has the final word. If the director makes a decision, that decision is final. In Hollywood, every decision needs to go through the producer, the studio, and sometimes even the main actor. There is a certain procedure that needs to be followed.
In Korea, the director is on top, and the power flows down vertically. On the set, I love to come up with ideas on the spot. But in Hollywood, if I were to come up with a certain idea on set, the idea had to be taken to all these different people who had to agree.
I work from opposites to opposites, in a way. It's finding one thing and then doing the other from film to film. So maybe after 'I Saw the Devil,' I might do something like 'I Saw the Angel' or perhaps something warm and happy.
I think my tendency when working is to try and find what's lacking in my current project and then tackle that in whatever I do next.
After my film 'The Tale of Two Sisters,' I received a lot of offers from Hollywood to direct, but because 'A Tale of Two Sisters' was a horror film, I received a lot of horror films. But I wasn't interested in working in the same genre, and the scripts I received for films in different genres were for projects that were near completion.
Obviously, I've made several films in Korea, so I'm very well accustomed and acclimated to Korean filmmaking.
Hollywood's never really been the ultimate goal for me.
Korean films have always been distributed to international audiences as arthouse films.
A lot of people are very interested that a Korean director has made a western. But when I look at the reactions of the audience, I realise the points at which people laugh are the same for a Korean audience and an international audience.
I want to do science fiction with dark stories.
Whatever it is that I thirst for in my current project tends to turn up in my following project.
I've been thinking of doing a sci-fi thriller or a sci-fi noir, if that's possible.
