Chan-Wook Park On Oldboy

We spoke to the director of the Cannes prize-winning vengeance thriller about his endorsement from Tarantino and the difficulty of persuading a Buddhist actor to eat a live octopus

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Had 2004 not been an American election year it's conceivable that 41-year-old South Korean director Chan-Wook Park might have walked off with the Cannes Film Festival's top honour, the Palme D'Or, instead of polemicist Michael Moore. After all, Park's audacious, violent and fiercely original revenge movie Oldboy had been fully embraced by festival jury head Quentin Tarantino, and it was rumoured to have lost out by a single vote, picking up the Grand Jury Prize instead.

Not that Park is complaining. "I was told by the organisers not to go home early so we suspected there would be a prize," recalls the director. "I thought it would be an acting prize so when it won the Grand Jury Prize it was a shock." And what of Tarantino's effusive enthusiasm for the film, did they become fast friends? "Not so much friends," he says with a grin, "but he did speak to me for a long time about my film at the party."

Watch Oldboy and it's not hard to see why. Based loosely on a Japanese manga, it tells the story of a businessman snatched from the street and forced to spend the next 15 years incarcerated in a private prison without explanation. From this Kafka-esque set-up, the film mutates into a deliriously twisted two-handed revenge epic that fuses beautiful visuals with some brutal violence and extreme imagery. How extreme? Try the scene in which lead actor Choi Min-Sik eats a live octopus. "That was particularly difficult for him because he is a Buddhist," reveals Park, "so before every take [the scene required four] he would pray to the octopus offering it his apology."

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