How Park Chan Wook Turned Hollywood's Rejection Into His Most Urgent Film
Park Chan wook spent over a decade trying to make an American adaptation of Donald Westlake's 1997 thriller "The Ax." He pitched it to multiple Hollywood studios, believing the story about a laid off worker murdering his competition deserved an American setting. Every studio passed. They couldn't see the commercial potential in a dark comedy about unemployment, corporate greed, and economic desperation. One after another, they turned him down. The director of "Oldboy" and "The Handmaiden" recently confessed he almost thanked those studios in the credits of "No Other Choice," the Korean adaptation he finally made after Hollywood rejected him. He reconsidered at the last minute, but the impulse reveals how dramatically the rejection improved his film. Forced to reimagine the story for South Korea, Park created what many critics are calling his most humane, mordantly funny, and devastatingly timely work. Hollywood's loss became cinema's gain.
