Profiles – Mr. Vengeance

The director of "Oldboy” and "The Handmaiden” brings his gift for spectacle to American television.

- Por Jia Tolentino. Photograph by Hyea W. Kang

Actors tend to describe working with Park Chan-wook as a pleasurable submission to the artiost's hand. Nicole Kidman, the star of "Stoker," Park's only English-language film, said that she was "one of his paint colors."

Last spring, I was in a white van rumbling down a road about fifty miles east of Bangkok, passing dusty awnings that hung over shops hawking cell phones and sneakers, when, abruptly, the vehicle stopped. The road was barricaded; the barricades were manned by soldiers in uniform. After a moment, I realized that the soldiers were actors and the barricades were props. We had reached the set of “The Sympathizer,” the director Park Chan-wook’s seven-episode HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. A producer hurried me out of the van and through a crowd of background actors playing Vietnamese villagers, wearing sun-bleached trousers and thin cotton dresses. They were sitting on suitcases that carried, in the world of the show, their most important possessions—everything that they would try to take with them out of the country. Time had rewound to April, 1975, and Saigon was about to fall. It was ninety degrees out and densely humid. A directive crackled through a walkie-talkie, and the actors rose to their feet, pastel parasols springing into the air.