When Han Jun-hee binge-watched “House of Cards,” the series struck him as a game changer. It left him with one ambition: to make a story no one had told before, but that many people would watch. Delivering a masterclass at Netflix’s Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), the director of “Coin Locker Girl” and military drama “D.P.” spoke in conversation with Kim Kijae, a longtime creative executive at Netflix Korea.
The session came ahead of the Nov. 20 Netflix release of his Korea-Japan thriller “The Blue Road.” “I think you need to make bold choices so that the story is interesting,” Han told the audience. That collision is ultimately the defining moment of the work. I believe there is no story that cannot be made into a film or series.” Some of his bets have been made from outside the director’s chair.
In recent years, he has often worked as a creator and producer on series that others direct. Some worried the hit series would only appeal to male viewers because of its violence, but Han believed anyone could relate to it. There were three young actors.
I thought among the three, at least one would be a crush for someone,” he said, referring to leads Park Ji-hoon, Choi Hyun-wook and Hong Kyung. Han also thought he wasn’t the best person to direct it, and helped launch the career of Yoo Soo-min, then an emerging director. With debuts getting harder to land in Korea, he said, backing new talent matters for the future of the country’s creative industry.
More recently, he created “Dead-End Job,” a Netflix mystery-horror series that premieres Oct. 30, and oversaw its creative development while Kim Da-min, who wrote the Netflix series “A Killer Paradox,” directed. In the series, a young man buried in debt takes a part-time job paying 50 times the minimum wage, at a staffing agency where every shift could kill him. The project packs in horror, black comedy, disaster, action and mystery.
Adapted from “Blue Road,” a Korean-Japanese manga written by Edogawa Keishi and drawn by Kwon Ka-ya in 2002, the co-produced series stars Son Suk-ku and Nagayama Eita, and is screening in BIFF’s On Screen section. On set, Han worked with both Korean and Japanese crews. In Japan they prepare everything very meticulously and are very precise in their execution.
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