Park Chan-wook’s latest film took nearly 20 years to reach the screen, since he first picked up Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax. Originally, he planned to shoot it in Canada, and then in the U.S., until his producer suggested the story would work just as well in their native South Korea.
Starring Lee Byung-hun, the film tells the story of Man-soo, a loyal company man who is laid off by the new owners of the paper mill where he has worked for 25 years. But unemployment does not sit well with Man-soo, and the competition in his specialist area is fierce, so he settles on an unusual solution.
Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International award-season event, director Park said there were “many reasons” why the book appealed to him. “One of them being that it’s a story about a man who is fired by company and who feels that, because of that, his life and his family’s life has been destroyed. But instead of taking revenge on the boss or the executives at the company or filing a lawsuit or perhaps even [joining a labor union], he chooses something more unexpected. So the somewhat brilliant method that he comes up with is very similar to what the company does: He creates a fake company, he puts out a job advert, he collects résumés and he picks out the best candidates. And the way that he kills these best candidates is very similar to how a company would fire their employees.”
He continued: “I found all of that very ironic. As a result, he doesn’t go for the enemy that has given him a hard time. In contrast, he goes after people who are in a similar situation as himself, those that he can understand best and perhaps, if they met under different conditions, would have become friends. He finds these men who are in the same pitiful situation that he’s in, and he has to eliminate them.”
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In Park’s hands, Westlake’s dark horror-thriller becomes a deliciously macabre black comedy, largely thanks to a very physical, at times almost slapstick performance by Lee, who never fails to deliver the pathos of Man-soo’s desperation.
“After reading the screenplay,” Park said, “the first question that Lee asked me was, ‘Can it be funny?’ My response was, ‘The funnier the better — you can make it as comedic as you want.’ And after that, like playing a game of ping pong, we would throw a funny idea at each other, then we would develop it further on our own, and throw it back at the other person. That constant development of humor has led to the film that you see today.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.