Like a pound of hard steel in the back of the head, Kim Jee-woon increasing in popularity.

Loosely adapted by Park and co-writers Hwang Jo-yun and Lim Jun-hyung from a manga of the same name, Oldboy has been a stalwart of many “you’ve gotta see this movie, it’s so messed up” conversations from dorm rooms to internet message boards over the past two decades. The story puts us directly into the mysterious circumstances of Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), a seemingly ordinary man who one day is abducted and imprisoned for fifteen years. With no explanation as to where he is or why he’s been held captive, Oh Dae-su is just as bizarrely released back into the world seemingly at random. His mission is three-fold: figure out who locked him up, discover why they locked him up and then get his bloody revenge.

The middle entry in what is now dubbed Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy”—alongside Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance—Oldboy is a card-carrying member of the “you’re not the same once the film has finished” club, making viewers drop their jaws at its dynamic set-pieces such as the iconic long-shot hallway fight and causing Letterboxd like Lizzy to lose their lunch: “The final twenty minutes make me want to vomit every single time.” Sophie’s nausea was specifically triggered by the film’s notorious twist, writing, “This is the first time I’ve had to pause a film because the plot twist made me feel like I was going to throw up. A great movie that I will never f—king recommend to my family.”

With Oldboy back in theaters for the first time since its initial release thanks to a new 4K restoration from NEON, I ed Park and a translator on Zoom to celebrate the film’s twentieth anniversary. It was a hot morning in Korea, as he reflected on the work that raised him to the status of one of our most celebrated auteurs—and one of the most notorious, for demolishing the psyches of audiences.

What’s a film that has had that kind of impact on you? One where you needed to take a walk after watching it.
I don’t necessarily feel shock from twists and plots per se, but whenever I see a film and there’s that single shot that’s so creatively designed that I’m absolutely shocked by it, I think that’s the kind of shock that stays with me a lot more. An example of that would be [Michelangelo] Antonioni’s Red Desert.

Another film that really shocked me is Director Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid. In the end of the film, there’s this scene where a woman is dying and she’s holding onto the man that she loves. Both of these characters have been poisoned, and the man is walking down the staircase saying he wants to die next to his wife. His lover is holding onto his legs as he goes down, so her head just keeps bumping on each step as he’s going down the staircase. Watching that scene, I was just thinking, ‘How did anyone come up with a scene like that?’

You’ve described yourself as a romantic filmmaker, and it’s true that in nearly all of your films there’s a romantic quality, though almost always tinged with tragedy. How do you approach balancing out the rush of love with the pain that it forces into these characters?
I think those two things are inherently stuck together. Love always brings pain, and pain cannot be overcome without love. I don’t necessarily think about the ratio of how much I want to put in of each, because they’re so inherently part of the same thing.

The film really is as much Lee Woo-jin’s story as it is Oh Dae-su’s, and while Lee Woo-jin’s revenge plot is successful, there’s still this emptiness in him after. What is it about the concept of vengeance that causes us as human beings to invest all of ourselves into a goal that, if we do achieve, will ultimately leave us feeling emptier?
The reason behind revenge is the loss of something. You might have lost a loved one, or you might have lost your wealth, and because you lost something you feel a sense of revenge. But the thing is, you cannot retrieve what you’ve already lost. Sure, if we’re talking about the example of wealth, you can gain wealth again, but you’ll never be able to enjoy that same wealth at that particular time when you have lost it. So because of this irredeemable loss that cannot be fulfilled by revenge, that’s why people feel emptiness even after the success of a revenge.

In the end, I really think everything is about time. Your loved one will die ultimately, and you’re no longer able to spend more time with them. That’s what fueled revenge here. The stolen time can never come back. Whoever’s executing this act of revenge knows that already, that they cannot retrieve what they’ve lost, and they know that they’re only going to be left with a sense of emptiness in the end. The only way that they can enjoy it is to find happiness through the process of this act of revenge. That’s the only time that they can enjoy.