Making of ‘Decision to Leave’: How Park Chan-wook Sublimated His Explosive Style to Create a Masterful “Movie for Adults”

Park Chan-wook, the world-renowned South Korean auteur best known for the floridly violent films referred to as his “Vengeance Trilogy,” wanted to tell a gentler story. It was 2019 and Park was ruminating on ideas for what would become Decision to Leave, his 11th film and first feature in six years, following a period of television work and fine art creation. He began with two competing ideas.

“Over the years, I’ve watched lots of detective dramas and police procedurals, and I love these kinds of films,” he says. “But I’ve always thought the depiction of the protagonists is quite far from reality, because they’re either really tough and violent, or some kind of genius detective.” Examples in this genre are particularly prevalent in Korea, where the highest-grossing movie just this year is Lee Sang-yong’s The Roundup ($101 million and counting), a violent cop flick starring the hulking leading man Don Lee, who bludgeons the bad guys and saves the hostages. Park’s first inspiration revolved around the notion of a film built for a quieter, more inward and dignified detective — “just a normal guy who goes to work and does his job in an ordinary way,” he says.

The second, alternative creative spark he was pondering was a long-gestating wish to make an unabashedly romantic movie. For years, he had hoped to find an opportunity to use the classic Korean love song “The Mist,” recorded by the great folk singer Jung Hoon Hee, in one of his films. With a palpably cinematic sensibility and poignant lyrics about the haziness and ephemerality of love, the ballad was a smash hit upon its release in 1967 and a staple of Park’s youth.

The director, now 59, says the first major breakthrough for Decision to Leave came when it occurred to him that it might be possible to meld the two elements together — a dignified detective who’s pulled into a story worthy of the aching, romantic mood of “The Mist.”

“But I didn’t want it to just be a police procedural with a romantic subplot,” he explains. “I wanted these two elements to be completely combined, as if there were a chemical reaction and they had become completely amalgamated.”

An inchoate plot then took shape in the form of the film’s second lead character. What if the quiet detective’s integrity were to be tested as he finds himself falling for a suspect — perhaps a woman of moral ambiguity, who’s suspected of murdering her husband, but a husband who physically abused her? Rather than action, or the usual beats of the procedural, the film’s dramatic engine could come from a cat-and-mouse courtship, cloaked in mutual suspicion but overwhelming natural chemistry.

Park has collaborated closely with the female screenwriter Chung Seo-kyung on all his scripts since his sixth feature, Lady Vengeance, in 2005. He has credited Chung with giving his stories a more balanced perspective and expunging male biases he might otherwise not perceive.

“When I started working with director Park, I was still a new screenwriter who had not yet officially debuted,” says Chung, who is 12 years younger than Park. “Meanwhile, he was already considered a master filmmaker who had recently won the Grand Prix at Cannes [for 2003’s Oldboy]. Regardless of that difference in our status, he regarded me as an equal creative partner — and that’s how he’s always treated me ever since,” she says.

But when Park sent Jeong a sketch of his initial ideas for Decision to Leave, she wasn’t particularly impressed. “I said no, because I didn’t want to write a melodrama about an abused woman,” she remembers. “I sent back some thoughts and then we started writing back and forth about it.”

She adds, laughing: “And then I had to accept that he had sort of tricked me into already writing a synopsis.”

Eventually, Chung told Park that she would fully commit to the script under one condition: that they make the female lead Chinese, so that they could cast the great Chinese actress Tang Wei to star.

“Tang Wei didn’t simply influence or inspire the character — she was the character for us, everything about her,” Chung says, noting the almost contradictory blend of earthy frankness and inner mystery Tang brings to her best dramatic performances. “When I look at her face onscreen, I always feel like she is a shut box and you can’t guess entirely what’s inside. When she’s silent, she’s able to contain so many things within that silence.”

Park agreed instantly. “Tang Wei is a born screen star,” he says.

Almost as early in the process, Park picked the elegant and soft-spoken Korean leading man Park Hae-il as his dignified detective. The director invited both actors to meet with him before completing the second half of the script, because he anticipated that if either of them said no, he would probably abandon the project altogether.

In its finished form, Decision to Leave follows Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), a married, insomniac detective who is tasked with investigating the death of a man who has plunged from a rocky mountain peak while climbing. When he interrogates the man’s much younger Chinese wife, Seo-rae (Tang), he finds himself as attracted to her as he is suspicious of her. As he digs deeper into the investigation, Hae-joon finds himself lost in a web of deception and desire.

Park Hae-il, who has known Park Chan-wook socially for many years, says he was expecting something much more casual when he got a call from the director inviting him to lunch at a small pub in his neighborhood in the Seoul suburbs — perhaps a friendly catch-up. But as soon as they had ordered some food, the director launched into an hour-and-a-half description of his entire vision for Decision to Leave, telling him that he was the perfect actor to co-star alongside Tang Wei, who had already signed on to the film. “I remember really needing to go to the restroom in the middle of his description of the story, but we were so immersed in it, I didn’t dare interrupt him. I have adored Tang Wei ever since Lust, Caution (Ang Lee’s acclaimed 2007 erotic period thriller, which made Tang a worldwide star), and I remember being shocked and totally overcome with joy that I was being offered a chance to perform alongside her in a film by Park Chan-wook.”

Casting Tang in a Korean thriller made more practical sense than it would have for another major Chinese actress. Although she earned instant global acclaim with her breakthrough performance in Lust, Caution, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in 2007, China’s film regulators responded by giving Tang a temporary ban from acting in the country — punishment for her performance of the film’s quite graphic sex scenes (Lee and the film’s male lead, Tony Leung, meanwhile, received no official rebuke whatsoever for their involvement in creating the same sequences). During her exile from the Chinese industry, Tang starred in the Korean film Late Autumn (2010), playing a Chinese female prisoner on parole who meets a Korean man on the run. The film was a success and Tang won the best actress award at the Baeksang Awards, Korea’s version of the Oscars, becoming the first and only non-Korean actor to ever do so. In 2014, she married Late Autumn‘s director Kim Tae-yong, and the couple have kept a primary residence in Korea ever since (Tang’s career in China was eventually rehabilitated, but she never achieved the consistent A-list heights in her country’s industry that were originally envisioned for her). Throughout it all, she has remained a favorite of film buffs and directors.

Going into Decision to Leave, Tang was at ease in Korean society and could already speak a little of the language, but she was far from fluent. She did, however, have abundant experience in the daunting task of performing in a foreign language.

“Acting in another language is something that’s fascinating to me. I’m also used to it,” she says. For Lust, Caution, Tang learned and acted in the Shanghainese and Kaili dialects of Mandarin. She also occasionally has performed in Cantonese (2010’s Crossing Hennessy) and English (opposite Chris Hemsworth in Michael Mann’s 2015 thriller Blackhat), neither language native to her. “But performing in Korean was another level of language challenge for me,” she says, “since I was almost learning from scratch.”

Before production began, Tang worked with a Korean teacher, a translator and a Chinese study partner. She learned the meaning and grammar of the film’s Korean script, “line by line, and then tried to put it into the context of Korean culture and what director Park was trying to express,” she says. Next, she translated the script into Chinese and memorized all her lines, as well as those of her scene partners, in her own language, so she would have no uncertainty about the dialogue’s intent at any moment.

Adding to the role’s difficulty, Park and Chung had written Seo-rae as having a very particularized way of using spoken Korean, which added a layer of the richness to her character (one that only Korean-speaking audiences can fully perceive). Seo-rae speaks Korean in a rarified, somewhat old fashioned manner, as if she’s learned the language from studying classic books — befitting the character’s determined, naturally sophisticated demeanor. Since Decision to Leave‘s release in Korea this past June (it has earned about $15 million there and an additional $6 million in international markets), Seo-rae’s peculiar style of speech has become a viral phenomenon among young Korean women and girls, who have posted scores of videos to social media of themselves imitating Seo-rae’s attractively retro locutions.

Before production began, to help Tang master the subtle nuances of the Korean dialogue, Park Chan-wook made dozens of audio recordings of his own, performing the various characters’ lines with different takes and intonations.

“It was so amazing and impressive to see how gifted director Park is as a performer,” Tang says. “Using just his voice, he could vividly express the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman. When I was practicing the lines in Korean at the hotel by listening to his voice, it was a wonderful experience — just like enjoying a great radio play.” Tang says she found herself repeatedly asking Park if he had ever acted in his youth — and urging him to consider performing a part in one of his future movies.

For Decision to Leave‘s visual aesthetic, Park pledged to himself that he would exercise a new form of restraint — both by forgoing all graphic content and by leaning into pointedly old-fashioned methods for the film’s physical construction.

“That kind of self-imposed limitation is a great challenge for a creator, but also sort of a pleasure mixed with pain,” Park says. “Because imagine you have a workshop where you have all kinds of advanced and powerful machinery, but instead you decide to limit yourself to only using the simplest hand tools to construct your work. You give yourself only this very basic framework, and from within that, you must make this beautiful film. That is something the classic, old-time filmmakers did all the time. Going back to the old ways, in a sense — this traditional carpenter approach — was a very joyful experience for me.”

The film was shot in digital and Park liberally utilized visual effects to touch up sequences throughout the film and to achieve some of its more surrealistic transitions during the two characters’ courtship. But he and his director of photography, Kim Ji-yong, used vintage lenses and kept themselves mostly to classic, fixed-camera setups and movements, especially in the film’s first half, which more closely resembles a traditional film noir. The majority of the movie was shot with natural light, and Kim refrained from the lustrous shallow depth of field that has become so ubiquitous in high-end TV series, reserving the effect for only a few key dramatic moments, to heighten their impact.

From a storytelling standpoint, one of the biggest challenges of the project was the extent to which its deepest themes — love and loss, as almost natural phenomena — rely upon mood and chemistry to be felt and communicated. The film’s emotional valence, Park notes, is rarely expressed directly via the dialog; instead, it comes by implication and charged glances.

“That’s not to say the script doesn’t have many lines — there is a lot of dialog,” he adds. “But [the two characters] don’t really go about honestly and directly expressing themselves. It’s all about subtle eye lines and small facial expressions that carry the emotions throughout most of the film.”

To make sure he and his actors were all working in harmony to generate the necessary narrative momentum, Park discussed the intentions behind each dramatic exchange with them at great length — occasionally over food and wine at Tang Wei’s house outside of Seoul. The actress, famously, is a passionate gardener. On at least one occasion, she cooked an enormous, wholesome meal for the core creative team before a long evening of discussing Decision to Leave‘s story.

“Giving direction for what kind of gaze I want is actually impossible — how can you do that?” Park explains. “What I can do is explain what this character is going through and feeling from the perspective of a writer.”

Park’s longtime composer, Jo Yeong-wook, who has worked with him on every film since Joint Security Area (2000), says he was initially mystified by the subtly the film’s music would require.

“Indeed, this film was a peculiar one,” he says. “I just couldn’t approach it from my regular way of working. “As soon as I tried to write something a bit melancholic, with some music that overlaps with what’s happening on the screen, it all would start to feel very flat and ordinary, and all of the mystery would drain out of it.”

His solution was to try to avoid melody as much as possible, to generate a mood of insecurity and anxiety, which would serve as a backdrop, or environment, for what the two characters were going through together, rather than a comment or musical enhancement of it. Jo says secondary challenge was for the music to feel simultaneously classical and contemporary, reflecting Park’s neo-classical ambitions for the film’s overall aesthetic.

“I tried to use a lot of very special fingering or techniques for each instrument,” Jo explains. “For example, with the woodwinds, I used a lot of flutter; but with the string players, I instructed them not to use any vibrato at all. The effect was a strange sense of restrained emotion.”

The film also is peppered with striking and highly peculiar point-of-view shots. First, we see out from the dead eye of Seo-rae’s first, deceased husband. Later, we look out at the two characters from computer screens, or their cellphones, as they’re engaged in the vividly realized act of high-stakes courtship texting. Later, part of their union is espied from the dead eye of a fish in a fish market. Park’s cinematographer, Kim, says their intention with such shots was to enhance the furtive aspect of the relationship that’s building between the couple. After all, Seo-rae is a murder suspect and Hae-joon is married. “Observing them from these strange perspectives — sort of surveillance camera-like — makes it feel even more secretive,” says Kim.

Chung says it didn’t dawn on her how much Park’s style had subtly evolved until she saw the finished movie. She attributes part of the change to the simple fact that he is a filmmaker who attempts something radically new with each project (indeed, his early political thriller Joint Security Area is as far from his erotic period piece The Handmaiden as Decision to Leave is from Oldboy). But the crucial factor is the natural maturation of a late-career maestro.

“Before, we would always include scenes involving sex and violence, because that’s a method by which you can instantaneously grab the audience,” Chung explains. “So it would act as our launchpad, and from then on we could involve them deeper and deeper into the story. But for this film, he didn’t use that process. Instead, this film moves much more slowly toward its destination, taking curvy roads for a journey with layered meanings, emotions and implications.”

Adds Park: “One thing I’ve been saying is that this is a movie for adults. Ironically, it’s also one of the very rare cases where I’ve made a film that’s totally fine for teenagers to watch, because there’s no shocking violence or nudity in this film at all. So young people could watch it, but I don’t know whether it will be at all appealing or meaningful to them. It’s really about mature, human relationships. It’s for anyone who has lost somebody or had to let go of someone. It’s for those who know the experience of having a romantic relationship of great subtlety and hard-to-define feelings — and the very complex psychological changes that happen to you over the course of life.”

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.