GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
OLD BOY, NEW TRICKS
Wherever Park Chan-wook goes, violence and poetry follow in his wake. Eddie Harrison speaks to the Korean director about Stoker, his much-anticipated new thriller and fi rst foray into the English language 14 THE LIST 24 Jan–21 Feb 2013
T he Korean director of Oldboy turned down Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and the Evil Dead remake to direct Stoker, which was written by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller. Taken from the annual Black List of the best, unproduced scripts and produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free company, the result is an intense Gothic thriller which gets its UK premiere at the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival.
‘The films I made in Korea were not very talky, and because I’m not used to the English language, I didn’t want to make something which depended on dialogue,’ says Chan-wook. ‘What I liked about Wentworth Miller’s script was that it had space for me to breathe my own life into it, to bring my own visual sense.’
Played by Mia Wasikowska, India Stoker is a teenage girl mourning the tragic death of her father (Dermot Mulroney). At his funeral, India and her mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) encounter their mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who charms his way into the household, but arouses the young girl’s suspicions. The premise recalls the melodramatic themes of Gothic literature, but also the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and specifically the character of Uncle Charlie, played by Joseph Cotton in his 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt. ‘Originally, I wanted to change both of the names, Stoker and Uncle Charlie, because I felt they might be too well recognised,’ says Chan-wook, who was inspired to become a director after viewing Hitchcock’s Vertigo. ‘And yet while I never set out to be a filmmaker like Hitchcock, I can’t help having traces of his influence in my work. So I went the other way and decided to make my film consciously Hitchcockian. Casting Matthew Goode as Uncle Charlie fitted in with that, as there’s a quality about him that reminded me of Norman Bates in Psycho, a balance between being both child-like and potentially evil.’
The palpable suspense in Stoker comes from India’s attempts to uncover Uncle Charlie’s motives, and Chan-wook was able to call on the talents of two of Hollywood’s most coveted actresses to rack up the tension. ‘For India, I wanted a girl who was timeless, who could have come from days gone by; Mia has that. If you look at the other roles she’s played, like Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland, you see that other directors recognise this classical quality too. She’s girlish, and you can see how she internalises a lot of emotion, which is very important about her character,’ says Chan-wook. ‘Nicole’s character Evie initially seems like a strong and oppressive mother, but as the journey of the film