The Untold Truth Of Oldboy

It's been a little under 20 years since the initial release of Park Chan-wook's controversial and critically acclaimed "Oldboy," and according to the Hollywood Reporter, those of us who weren't lucky enough to see it in theaters when it was first released back in 2003 will have the opportunity to see it on the big screen in all its gory wonder sometime in the near future.

"Oldboy" was released to great commercial and critical success, with critics like Roger Ebert describing it as "a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare." Surprisingly, according to the creators themselves, they had major doubts that they would be able to pull off such an extreme and lavish production successfully, due to many aspects of the project posing significant challenges. Thankfully, though, they were successful, and the project achieved a status none of them had foreseen. Today, "Oldboy" is considered one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the early 2000s.

Park Chan-wook has a particular love for revenge stories. In an interview with Mark Salisbury, Park even said that he doesn't understand why other directors don't. In part because of this fascination, and because he wanted to find a way to express the repressed anger of the modern era, he created "The Vengeance Trilogy," of which "Oldboy" is the second installment. The first film in the series, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," is about a factory worker who enters a life of crime in the hopes of paying for his sister's kidney transplant. The third film, "Lady Vengeance," follows a single mother on a mission of revenge against the man who framed her for the murder of a six-year-old boy.

While neither of the other two installments in the series found the success that "Oldboy" did, Park stands by them. After mentioning that the first installment, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," was said to have flopped because it was "too real for the audience," Park stated that he "wanted to make something that felt too real ... I wanted their bodies to be tired. I thought people would love that, I like that kind of experience ... I wanted a tiring film, I suppose it was a success in that sense."

Beyond the inspiration already taken from the existing manga, the production team pulled design and story concepts from several other sources. In the DVD production design documentary, costumer Jo Sang-gyeong says she referred to "American Psycho" for dressing villain Woo-jin, saying that the film was a "perfect fit" for the character's clean, severe look. Along with that, the book "The Count of Monte Cristo" and the classic story of "Oedipus" both play major roles in the story. 

The influence of "The Count of Monte Cristo" appears in the film in the IM username that Woo-jin uses to communicate with Mi-do, and even as the name of a track on the score. The central theme of long-term revenge surrounding a romantic tragedy is clearly a part of the final product. "Oedipus" shows itself both in the protagonist's phonetically inspired name and in the famous final twist of the film: The secretly incestuous nature of the relationship between Oh Dae-su and Mi-do.

According to an interview with Technical FX Director Chunk Sung-jin, he and his team approached the need for hyper-realistic effects on this project with the primary goal of supporting the film, a refreshing approach when so many other films use it as a focal point. Chunk said the crew "did our own thinking on how to help these kinds of scenes with computer graphics." Most of the visual effects were only enhanced with CGI, with the FX team assigned mostly to altering colors, removing background distractions, or smoothing lighting. That's not to say it was an easy job: A major shot showing the moment before Lee Soo-ah falls to her death took approximately a month just to remove the foam from the water in the background.

3D effects were used sparingly, primarily within the two ant scenes. The large ant that Mi-do sees in her subway vision is entirely practical, other than the hairs, which were added on as a finishing touch. In Dae-su's hallucination of ants crawling out of his skin, both his arm and the ants were created with CGI. In place of additional 3D modeling, practical effects were used to add to the exaggerated realism of the film, including the use of a wire to enable Woo-jin to successfully execute the complex Locust Pose, as seen in this featurette.

If you've seen "Oldboy" you remember the octopus scene: It's hardly subtle. Dae-su follows a trail of clues to a sushi restaurant, where he showcases his emotional instability by requesting to eat something alive. After a beat of shock from Dae-su's new friend Mi-do, he is handed a wriggling, living octopus which he proceeds to eat whole. While this might cause some shock for viewers from differing cultural backgrounds, this is an extreme example of a fairly common practice in South Korea. Yes, the octopodes in "Oldboy" were real creatures, raised to be eaten alive. In his interview with Mark Salisbury, Park said that "Korean people do eat live octopus, but not such big ones and we cut them into pieces.... it was a little bit of exaggeration in that particular scene."

Choi Min-sik was raised Buddhist, which means he would typically never consume anything living, and has discussed the process of filming this scene in multiple interviews. According to Park, Choi paused to apologize, thank, and pray over each of the octopodes after each take. Four were used in total, partially due to the fact that the first three were not active enough to be visually appealing on screen.

Though it's so iconic it seems like it must have always existed within the concept for the film, the infamous single-shot corridor scene was originally supposed to involve CGI and more than 100 cuts. In the behind-the-scenes featurette "Flashback," both Park and Choi discuss coming to an agreement that a more simplified, realistic version of the scene sounded way better. The practical effects meant that the exhaustion experienced by Oh Dae-su would have an added touch of realism because of the actor's genuine fatigue, and it also saved the filming crew hours of labor it would take to reset the camera after each new shot.

Computer graphics were used to insert a knife into the hand of one of Dae-su's attackers, but other than that and some aesthetic touch-ups, the scene was done practically. It took 17 takes over three days to get perfectly. Park says he "explained to him that we could put the shots together on the computer, but [Choi] said he was doing it," to which Choi simply adds, "I was out of my mind."

Sane or not, the choice paid off, and the corridor scene lives as one of the most masterfully shot fights in cinematic history.

For as violent a movie as "Oldboy" is, it's remarkably minimalistic when it comes to actual deaths. Its most chaotic scenes are frequently revisited later in the plot as a source of comic relief, so even the characters unlucky enough to go up against Oh Dae-su in the corridor scene make it out alive. Characters' eventual punishments are handled with extreme care to make each more horrifying than the last, so that they have a macabre irony that would make John Doe of "Se7en" envious of their design. 

Ji Dae-han is killed with a CD after helping Dae-su gather information. Park Cheol-woong, the pitiful and ultimately powerless enabler of countless crimes, is proved toothless when Dae-su forcibly removes his teeth. Mr. Han repeatedly turns a deaf ear, and his complacency in Woo-jin's crimes is cosmically punished by being stabbed in the ear. Dae-su cuts his own overactive tongue out, and Woo-jin's death is — like the rest of the plot — his own doing. In the end, the ultimate cosmic judgment is shown following Dae-su's attempt to soften his fate through escapism. Instead of expressing joy, his face morphs into the same crazed, laughing man whose painting haunted him throughout his imprisonment, letting the audience know that regardless of the outcome of his plans, he will always be trapped in that prison.