Guests Archive / CHOI MIN-SIK

CHOI MIN-SIK

Name in korean:

최민식

Name pronunciation:

cioi min-sic

Profession:

Actor

Date of Birth:

22 January 1962

Gender:

Man

Biography

Choi Min-sik was born in 1962. Before appearing in the cinema, he had already built a reputation in the theater; In the 90s, he also worked a lot for TV. In cinema, his first major role was in "Our Twisted Hero", in 1997. With "Shiri", in 1999, in the role of a North Korean spy, he grasped one of the greatest successes of Korean cinema ever. This was followed by "Failan" in 2001 and the cult movie "Oldboy" in 2003. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, Choi publicly protested against his government's decision to reduce the quota of Korean films screened at home. In protest, he left the cinema for three years, and then returned to the set with "Himalaya". It has won numerous awards at the Asia Pacific film festival, the Asian film festival in Deauville, the Blue Dragon and the Grand Bell Awards.

Critique

It's the Korean De Niro, they wrote. The name may probably still sound remote, here in Italy. But just say "the protagonist of Oldoboy", and then we get it. Choi Min-sik is one of the most important Korean actors, a fetish-face of all contemporary Korean cinema. The Korea Film Fest 2014 brings before the eyes of the Italian public a selection of the films that Choi Min-sik has starred in in recent years, to the point of becoming an essential light of that cinematography. A savage painter, an obsessive serial killer, a dull musician, a prisoner for fifteen years and then a desperate and unwitting avenger. And again, a white collar ended up in the wind and dust of the Himalayas, dragging his shoes and his suitcase. Or a failed boxer, devastated by the punches of life, forced to sell himself in the middle of the street, like a clown or a beggar. Or determined policeman, and in another film a little fool with nothing in the world to live for, except a married woman by mail order. If there is a common denominator in Choi Min-sik's characteristics, it is that of knowing how to become different beings, sometimes diametrically opposed: victims and executioners, rulers and losers, artists and murderers. But always with a trait of obstinacy, of stubborn resistance in the face of life. Choi doesn't "act" feelings, love, he doesn't have the looks and gestures of the beautiful actors of Hollywood cinema. He always seems to be watching, and living, for himself, not for the screen, not for us viewers. And this is also his art. A body – his – that obstinately ignores the presence of the camera, as if it were fleeing from our gaze as spectators, and not there to offer itself, to expose itself, as most actors do. An abandoned body, given in all respects to the films he plays, Choi gets to do everything, without stopping, without limiting the range of his character. Would Tom Cruise or Clooney do what he does? Eating a live octopus, being seen in underwear, sloppy, having sex as fast as an animal, without any of the romance that Hollywood dresses every sex scene with. To be used as a human punching ball and to be punched by men and girls, to smoke, to cough, to walk. Choi Min-sik's cinema is a cinema of the body, even more than of words. And he is an actor who is not afraid to tell, and show in his body, the abysses of degradation, sloppiness, depravity, touching the bottom of humanity. It takes art to do all this. And Choi Min-sik built this art in the theater, and then landed on television and cinema. He graduated at the age of twenty in theatre at the University of Dongguk, and began a dense theatrical activity. In cinema, his first roles were in the 90s: Uri Sarang Idyaero in 1992, Our Twisted Hero (Urideului ilgeuleojin yeongung) also in 1992. In the meantime, he worked a lot for television: for the KBS, MBC, SBS networks. And in the theater he was applauded in Equus in 1990, in a Korean version of Taxi Driver in 1997, in a Hamlet in 1999. But it was with Shiri, in 1999, where he played a North Korean spy, that Choi achieved immense success, in one of the most popular films ever in Korean cinema. Choi was born in 1962: he was thirty-five years old when he made his "real" entrance into cinema. He's not a kid anymore. And in the movies we see, a kid will never be. In every film, he carries the depth of a past, the maceration of pain and wounds that we don't know, but that we can always sense in his face. Many actors have gone from roles of lively teenager to young romantic, to mature lover: DiCaprio at the age of twenty flew on the bow of the Titanic, an icon of adolescence, and then thickened, film after film, and gained weight and charisma. Scamarcio lived three meters above the sky, to the delight of young girls, and then mixed charm and irony, drama and maturity in increasingly balanced doses, from film to film. He, Choi, has never been a kid in the cinema. He skipped that step. In him we always feel the depth of experience, we see the scars of time, we perceive a hard skin that comes from the years. He does not ask for our sympathy, our tenderness. The harshness of living comes to him, in every film, and through him it comes to us. As a thoroughbred actor, Choi attaches absolute importance to the director. "The most important thing for a film is the director. It's his vision that I try to bring to the screen, to communicate to the viewers." The collaboration became vital, to the point that Choi often found himself working on the screenplay of the films together with the director. And it was with a celebrated director, an icon of Korean cinema, that Choi played one of his first great roles, the one that first made him known abroad: "Drunk on Women and Painting", a biography of the Korean painter Jang Seung-eop. But above all, for him it is an opportunity to work with Im Kwon-taek, a legend of Korean cinema, half a century of films and countless awards won. It's 2002. The following year, he played "Oldboy." And there, in the character of a man imprisoned for fifteen years, without understanding why, he puts his own spin on it. He invents memorable scenes. "The idea of eating live octopus is mine," he confesses. And the scene is chilling: Choi takes an octopus that is moving on the plate, rips off its head with a bite, and with his bare hands puts the tentacles in his mouth, and eats them while they are moving and struggling. It's not a special effect. Who knows if Benedetta Parodi could take a cue from the scene. "The scene wasn't in the script. But after 15 years of brutalization, the character had become a primordial being, full of rage," Choi says. "I thought it was appropriate for the character to have him grab the octopus and eat it alive. I suggested it to Park Chan-wook and he agreed." For us, it's a scene of unbearable intensity. But that's not the only strong scene that Choi plays without a stunt double: in "Crying Fist," the two characters play a boxing match in the last scene. And Choi reveals: "The punches were real. They wanted to do something different from movies like 'Rocky.' It was also the last scene filmed. "We don't have to shoot anymore, and all in all we won't die. So, let's get serious while we film," I told the director and the other actor. And so it was. Courage, the truth of cinema, the madness of acting. All of this together. "Korean actors go so far as to sacrifice themselves to express something. American actors are very concerned about their personal safety. We go further, even to the point of harming ourselves. Expressing something becomes fundamental. We are ready to sacrifice everything for this," he says. In 2006 Choi was forty-four years old, at the height of his maturity as an actor. But he decides, bravely, to get out of the game, to lose the opportunities for gain, fame, success for three years. The reason? The Korean government's decision to reduce the "quota" of Korean cinema screened in theaters. For many years, the government had been protecting national cinema with a fixed number of days of theatrical programming. Under pressure from the U.S. majors, this quota had been slashed. Choi, leader of the protest of actors, directors and workers of Korean cinema, decides to abandon the cinema, after publicly expressing his opposition to the government's decisions during the Cannes Film Festival. He will only return to the set in an exceptional case, with that extreme film and perhaps not surprisingly shot outside the Korean borders that is "Himalaya". But his real big comeback is with "I Saw the Devil": a hellish film, in which Choi goes to unthinkable extremes. His protest against the reduction of the "screening quota" for Korean films is no small episode in his career. His voice is heard at the Cannes Film Festival, and his voluntary exile from the sets becomes noisy. Even after his return to cinema, there will be a lot of talk about this. The share of Korean film programming at home will remain decimated, to this day. But without his protest we would never have heard of it. And Korean cinema still remains at the top of the domestic box office. "My protest is mainly aimed at defending independent films, those that risk having less distribution," says Choi, setting himself up as a champion of the little ones, even more than of the films in which he himself participates. "The Korean film industry is already occupied by multiplexes, and there is a tendency to make only films with safe big grosses; the programming quota is used to defend films that are based on the script, films like those by Kim Ki-duk, which otherwise risk not being produced anymore," says Choi Min-sik. Nothing personal against Hollywood, he says. Hollywood, however, remains far away for him. "To act in an American film, I would have to know English well," he says. "A director doesn't need that, he can speak with the language of the camera. An actor, on the other hand, does." When he arrives for the first time in the United States, in New York, for the Asian Film Festival, he will not make agreements with producers, but he will go to Broadway, to enjoy "A Streetcar Named Desire", and if he goes to jazz clubs, to hear the blues voice of Cassandra Wilson. No Hollywood, but an international director does. And in the end, Choi will find himself contradicting his statement about the English language and actors. Fortunately. With Luc Besson, the director of "Léon", Choi finds herself shooting a great Hollywood film in English, alongside Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson, who plays a drug courier who finds himself invested with superpowers... The film will be released this season. But let's go back to that long hiatus, to that fracture in his career. At that key moment. It's 2010. After four years of exile, Choi returns to star in "I Saw the Devil." And he seems to start again where he left it all. "The life of an actor is long. During the time I wasn't acting, I had time to think, to reflect on my craft, the past and the future. It was a fertile time for my work as an actor." And the results can be seen: "I Saw the Devil" is a shocking film, marked by his presence as an actor, and by an excruciating story. He himself proposed the script to the director. "The violence, in this film, grows to the point of becoming almost comical. We laugh at the tension. But I also wanted to tell, in some way, how our society is overwhelmed by violence, and to share the feelings of terror and dismay that we all feel in today's world." And the future? "One day I'll be a director," he admits. "But that day, for now, is far away. I still have a lot to learn as an actor," he says with a smile. "And then, there are a lot of characters that I would still like to play."

Filmography