‘Oldboy’ director Park Chan-wook on the new age of K-cinema

South Korean director Park Chan-wook, maestro of our demons and desires, talks to CNN about revenge, inspiration and his forthcoming adaptation of “The Sympathizer.”

Park Chan-wook understands revenge. The 60-year-old South Korean director, best known for his psychological thrillers, has often imagined how he’d get even, lying awake in bed thinking about those who’ve done him wrong. “Maybe I make the kind of movies that I do so I don’t execute those feelings,” Park told CNN in Hong Kong, where he recently hosted a filmmaking masterclass at the M+ museum. “I never take action, but I do think about it a lot,” he added, speaking through a translator. “I think about how I’m going to cause trouble for that person… what ways can I inflict the most pain. It’s helped me with my movies.” Park’s films deal with the darker, more taboo sides of human nature, telling tales of revenge, incest and tragedy. His 2016 feature “The Handmaiden,” a loose adaptation of Welsh author Sarah Water’s “Fingersmith” set in 1930s Korea during Japanese colonial occupation, is a love story amid a twisted world of patriarchal control and perverted eroticism. He is also known for a trio of movies dubbed “The Vengeance Trilogy” — “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance” — as well as the 2022 film noir romantic thriller “Decision to Leave.” More recently, he has turned his hand to the story of a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy told in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer.” The HBO adaptation, for which Park serves as co-showrunner and executive producer alongside Canadian actor and filmmaker Don McKellar, stars Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Oh and Hoa Xuande. It chronicles the life and dilemmas of The Captain, a North Vietnamese double agent who is forced to flee to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War, and lives in a community of South Vietnamese refugees whom he continues to spy on. (HBO is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.) “Americans may not know well, but the fact that South Korea participated in the Vietnam War is a very significant event for Koreans,” said Park, explaining what drew him to the project. “A country divided into two, suffering a severe ideological crisis… and going through war, civil war… South Korea has been through such tragedy as well, so this didn’t feel like someone else’s story to me.”