There was nothing to make actor Lee Jung-jae suspect the bombshell they had in hand when they recorded
The Squid Game,
the latest hit on the Netflix platform
.
"Actually, there's a lot of Korean audiovisual content similar to
The Squid Game,"
Lee said in a pre-Cannes interview with
Deadline magazine.
"So I'm sure we'll see more successes like this series."
He's got one on his hands,
Hunt,
Based on what happened from Thursday to Friday in Cannes, when the spy
thriller
that he wrote, produced, directed — makes his directorial debut — and co-starred in, drove the public crazy at its world premiere at the Lumière auditorium, with capacity for 2,300 people, who roared and applauded at its peak sequences.
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With
Hunt,
Lee Jung-jae (Seoul, 49 years old) culminates a creative process of years, since he first read the script, which was presented to him to star in it.
His was the idea, around 2016, that instead of one spy chief there would be two.
“It was hard to create the balance between both figures.
But because it's set in the '80s, so that increased costs, I knew I had to write a really good script that would attract good actors, and with them other producers,” he explains on
Screen International.
The plot pits the head of South Korea's internal secret service against his counterpart from the foreign affairs secret service, and starts with a true event: the assassination of dictator Park Chung-hee at the hands of the director of spies in 1979. Korea continued to live under a ruthless dictatorship throughout the 1980s, with its leaders terrified as much by the possibility of North Korean spies infiltrating the government and security agencies as by student and opposition revolts multiplying by the masses. streets.
Lee Jung-jae, center, along with his co-stars Jeong Man-sik (left), and Jung Woo-sung, upon arrival at the 'Hunt' gala shoot in Cannes early Thursday-Friday .LOIC VENANCE (AFP)
Lee creates the two antagonistic factions —whose leaders have scores to settle—
Heat
-style (even a shooting in Tokyo, in a delivery in Japan of a deserter from the North, recalls the robbery of the Michael Mann movie), dresses them as
Mad Men
and gives it the rhythm of Bond.
That saves him from how intricate the plot becomes at times.
“The underlying theme is very serious, so I tried to add a lot of entertainment to it as best I could.
And that has been appreciated by the selectors of the Cannes festival, ”said the filmmaker in
Deadline.
Lee had already been to Cannes, as one of the actors in Im Sang-soo's
The Maid,
in competition in 2010, and among his fifty works is another
thriller
of elegant, heartless male antagonists:
Deliver Us From Evil
(2020) .
As a young man he worked as a waiter in a cafe (to get a salary for his expenses, although he comes from a wealthy family) and there a designer discovered him and recruited him as a model.
He did not last long in that profession, because in 1993 he was already working on television.
By the end of that decade he was already a movie star and owned a chain of Italian restaurants and a production company.
An image from 'Hunt'.
That's why Hunt
came to him :
to produce it.
After meeting since 2005 with directors and screenwriters, who rejected the project due to its complexity, in 2016 he began to combine his filming with the rewriting of the script.
Lee had already saved one of the characters, and for the head of the internal secret service he called his friend Jung Woo-sung, with whom he founded a representation agency six years ago.
It was another producer, Han Jae-duk, who had been teased with the original script, who pushed Lee to direct it: no one else knew the story that well.
And from May to November 2021 they finally shot
Hunt.
Due to covid, it was filmed almost entirely in Korea (although it also takes place in Southeast Asia, Japan and Washington) and a second unit, supervised by Lee by Zoom, traveled to Thailand.
A moment from 'The Squid Game'.
Lee's future passes through Korea.
He is already working on his second feature film as a director, he has filmed more films as an actor and in 2023 the second part of
The Squid Game awaits him.
The explosion of the series caught him without a representative in the US He already has it.
"I don't speak English fluently, though I don't think that stops me from communicating the emotion of my characters," he tells
Deadline
of possible Hollywood shoots.
"My private life hasn't changed much," he confesses to
The Hollywood Reporter.
“The professional, yes, I hope that the possibility of new projects around the world opens up.
And now I'm much more cautious about the jobs I take."
In the Cannes Market, which is held at the same time as the festival and which expands through the three basements of the Palais des Festivals and through the hotels on the Croisette, there are no Russian companies, due to the veto, or Chinese, due to the covid .
His place has been eaten by the Korean audiovisual industry, reinforced by the triumph of K-pop and filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho
(Parasite),
and there is a face that is repeated from booth to booth, as a promotional hook: that of Lee Jung-jae, the filmmaker of the moment.
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