How director Park Chan-wook turned a pulp novel into ‘No Other Choice’
In “No Other Choice,” Mansu (Lee Byung-hun) seemingly has it all: a beautiful wife, a beautiful house, kids, dogs and a position of authority at a paper company where he’s a former Pulp Man of the Year.
But after Mansu gets laid off, director Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy,” “Decision to Leave”) slowly reveals all the fault lines: Mansu’s family home, which he bought back after it had been lost, is the site of his father’s suicide after his pig farm was destroyed by disease; Mansu, sober now, was an alcoholic whose shame even drove him to beat his stepson, Si-One (Woo Seung Kim); his daughter Ri-One (So Yul Choi) is a musical savant on the autism spectrum with communication challenges. Mansu’s wife, Miri (Son Ye-Jin) is the one holding the family together, especially as their finances and mental health grow more precarious.
Chan-wook conveys plenty in small moments early on: Mansu often takes refuge in his greenhouse, where he’s shown working on a bonsai plant, trying to bend the plant to his will, a perfect metaphor, especially when the plant cracks in his hands. That sets the movie up for when Mansu finally snaps. Desperate and frustrated by his inability to land anything but a menial labor job, Mansu sets his sights on the one paper industry job that might be available to him … if he can bump off the people better suited to it than him.
Mansu’s earliest attempts as a hit man are buffoonish, and Chan-wook mixes laughs in with the deadly serious stakes. In one scene Mansu, his intended victim and that man’s wife all scramble wildly for a gun – a battle that ends in shocking fashion – before he must race off for a costume event that goes as awry as the murder attempt. But Mansu grows more ruthless and calculating, just like the bosses who have increasingly ignored the human toll taken by their quest for profits.
A layered and nuanced drama about a family whose underlying stressors are revealed by late-stage capitalism in the age of AI and automation, the film’s commentary stems in part from its American roots: Chan-wook adapted the screenplay from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel, “The Ax;” he’d struggled for years to get money to make it in English as an American film before revising the script to reimagine it Korea.
Still, in a recent video interview, Chan-wook, speaking through an interpreter, says very little changed as far as the tone and themes, even as the movie shifted halfway around the globe. The movie has earned critical acclaim, from the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival to a Golden Globe Best Picture nomination.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Beyond the critique of capitalism, automation and the rat race, is this a movie specifically about men – their inability to reflect, to adapt, to let go of their pride? And did that change because you made it in Korea instead of America?
This is something I’d written when I was planning to make it as an American film, and I portrayed it with similar intensity. But in Korean society, the traces of patriarchal order are still very strong. Mansu feels a sense of responsibility to work; as a man, he’s trapped in a box by his own prejudice of what a father and husband should be doing. So I thought Korean audiences might empathize with the character a bit more. But I’ve watched the reactions in many cities around the world, and I think this is still a universal problem in all societies.
Q. Was this something you were conscious of about yourself in your own life before you made the movie?
I don’t really reflect on my own life in the movie. But I can’t say I’m not involved at all. That’s impossible. The reason why I was drawn to the story is that people don’t think the paper industry is important, and that attitude made me sympathize with the characters immediately. There are people who think that working in the film industry is not important – that movies are just trivial, two hours of entertainment for killing time. But my whole life depends on it. This is my life itself.
Q. The first part of the movie is a layered and realistic drama about a family – there’s joy and love and pain and turmoil as Mansu’s unemployment takes its toll. Was it important to you to take your time grounding the story before he goes off to kill people?
Yes. I think that if it were a different writer, the first murder would have happened a little earlier.
The first murder begins very late. It happened a lot earlier in the novel. Compared to the novel, I wrote the wife and children’s roles to be much bigger. Mansu does all of this killing for the sake of his family – or that’s how he justifies it, saying that there’s no other choice. For that core concept or that core paradox to ring true, for the murders to matter, I really had to take time to give this detailed portrayal of this family.
Q. Do you worry that people will see Mansu as a hero, who, like an Ayn Rand character, fights for what he thinks is rightfully his, no matter the cost to others?
I think it’s up to each viewer to interpret it in their own way. I intentionally made the movie so that audiences would have their own interpretation of what the future of this family would look like. There have actually been people who criticized the film and what happens to Mansu, but my true intention is that we can imagine darker scenarios waiting for him and his family in their future. You might see apples growing on the tree he plants in his yard and believe that they look tasty and beautiful and luscious, but at the roots of this tree lies a very dark and dirty secret.