Guests Archive / SONG KANG-HO

SONG KANG-HO

Name in korean:

송강호

Profession:

Actor

Date of Birth:

17 Gennaio 1967

Gender:

Man

Biography

Song Kang-ho was born in Jinhae, South Korea, on January 17, 1967. His acting career began in the theater: after his first semi-professional experiences in his university years, Song became a member of one of the most important Korean theater companies, the one directed by Kee Kuk-seo. Under Kee's direction, Song acquires the main foundations of an acting style that, while focusing on emphatic gestures, also leaves a lot of room for instinct and improvisation. During the years in which Song increasingly established himself as a theater actor, there was no shortage of offers from the cinema, all of which were rejected until 1996, when Hong Sang-so offered him the opportunity to star in the film The Day a Pig Fell into the Well. After this first and positive experience, Song began his film career: after playing the part of a homeless man in the documentary Bad Movie (1997) by Jang Sun-woo, Song played his first important role (that of the gangster struggling with a group of young recruits) in No. 3 (1997), the cult film by Song Neung-han, which also earned him his first important awards. In his later films (Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie and The Quiet Family, both 1998) Song played mostly supporting roles, until he landed his first starring role, that of a secret agent in a highly successful thriller such as Shiri (1999) Kang Je-kyu, followed by Kim Jee-woon's The Foul King (2000). in which he demonstrates extraordinary physical ability.
However, it was the meeting and the beginning of the partnership with Park Chan-wook that launched Song as one of the emerging stars of the new Korean cinema: first with JSA – Join Security Area (2000), in which he plays the role of a North Korean sergeant, and later with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), in the role of a lonely father whose daughter is kidnapped. After participating in a film set at the beginning of the twentieth century, YMCA-Baseball Team (2002), which reconstructs the history of Korea's first baseball team, Song began another important partnership, the one with Bong Joon-ho, who wanted him as the protagonist in one of his most important films, Memories of Murder (2003).
In 2004, the actor was directed by another young director, Im Chan-sang, in The President's Barber, which tells the fictional story of South Korean President Park Chung-hee's personal barber. In 2005 Song reunited with Park Chan-wook for the third time in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and participated in Yim Phil-sung's Antarctic Journal, a real flop at the box office. The actor, however, made up for it the following year, when Bong Joon-ho called him to play the protagonist of The Host (2006), one of the greatest commercial successes in the history of Korean cinema; the film allowed Song to establish himself abroad, winning important awards such as Best Actor at the Asian Film Awards held in Hong Kong in March 2007.
Having become an actor whose talent is now recognized all over the world, Song participates in other important films: again in the role of a gangster in The Show Must Go On (2006) by Han Jae-rim; in Secret Sunshine (2007) he was directed by a great master of contemporary Korean cinema, Lee Chang-dong, in a tough and poetic film; he ventured into a hyper-citationist western such as Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), before making his fourth film with Park Chan-wook, Thirst (2009), in which he played the part of a Catholic priest who turns into a vampire. After The Secret Reunion (2010), he again took on the role of the gangster in the romantic thriller Hindsight (2011) by Lee Hyeon-seung. Howling (2011). He is currently working on Bong Joon-ho's new film, Snowpiercer.

Critique

Song Kang-ho is "the" face of contemporary Korean cinema. No actor in Korea is better known, sought after, praised and appreciated than him. Yet his film career is relatively short, if you consider that his debut in front of the camera took place only in 1996, in a film by Hong Sang-so (The Day a Pig Fell into the Well) in which he played a part that was certainly not prominent. He will have to wait until 2000 and meet Park Chan-wook for J.S.A. - Joint Security Area before being launched into the empyrean of the stars of his country. We are therefore talking about an actor/star who has been on the crest of the wave for just over a decade, but in this case the time factor has definitely played in his favor, given that the first decade of the new millennium was unquestionably the one that saw the birth and imposition of the Korean nouvelle vague all over the world. As has always happened in the history of world cinema, in times of great change not only new directors capable of making new films emerge, but also new actors skilled or suitable for playing new characters. Song's artistic trajectory is all contained in this quadrilateral: if there had not been a cultural and industrial rebirth of Korean cinema in the last decade, Song would probably be an unknown actor today. That is, he would not have had the opportunity to adopt that interpretative technique that allowed him to create a type and to propose it, in countless variations, in the various films in which he was the protagonist.
It has never been very easy for us Westerners to relate to the acting of actors from the Far East, for too many years considered – in our imagination always a bit self-referential – bearers of "exaggerated" gestures and mimicry, excessively charged to the limits of expressionism. However, anyone watching a Korean film today would quickly realize that this is not true, at least as far as the lead actors are concerned. An example? The use of clichés (i.e. that set of particular gestures and attitudes repeated in the exact same way in different contexts), as happens in our cinema, is the exclusive prerogative of character actors, that is, of those actors "used" to determine a precise spatio-temporal situation and to make it immediately perceptible and recognizable by the viewer. An actor like Song, who has been called upon to play leading roles for more than ten years, cannot afford to use clichés, except to a very limited extent. It must not have been easy for an interpreter like him, with a solid and proud theatrical background, to model some techniques learned in the theater in a new context, that of cinema. Yet the apprenticeship he made at one of the most important companies of contemporary Korean theater (the one directed by Kee Kuk-seo, who while focusing on emphatic acting leaves a lot of room for instinct and improvisation) allowed him to adapt to cinema rather quickly, despite his initial reluctance. If the actor's job has always consisted in giving life to a character that is true, complex and unique, Song has slowly learned how to achieve this goal: through an acting capable of amalgamating the general characteristics (immediately recognizable) with the more particular ones (to be carefully researched) of the character itself. Song has done this in his career, what all actors, good and not, do all over the world. Except that he had the luck and intelligence to know how to choose his companions, that is, the right directors, those who make the camera "act" with an original style. Yes, because in the cinema the body and face (and therefore the acting) of an actor are the object of the constant "dismemberment" into several images operated by the editing, according to a scale that goes from the whole figure to the detail.
Already from the first films in which Song plays the part of the protagonist you can find traces of his ability to mix different interpretative registers. If in Kang Je-kyu's Shiri (1999) he plays the role of a secret agent, it is especially in Kim Jae-woon's The Foul King (2000) that Song provides extraordinary proof of how much an actor can "make" a film. In the interpretation of a vaguely Stevensonian character (a sort of modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), by day a helpless bank employee subjugated by his boss, by night a violent and unfair wrestler from the suburbs, Song accentuates to the point of paroxysm the characteristics of these two different faces of the same character, creating that devastating inner conflict that gives substance to the story concept of the film. The extraordinary skill and physical agility (no stunt doubles were used in the film) with which Song increasingly "occupies" the frame - especially in the second part of the film - push the viewer to reconsider the very nature of the character known at the beginning. Comedy and tragedy, humour and desperation, clumsiness and courage: the more the registers get confused, the more the actor seems to feel at ease.
Park Chan-wook must have understood this very well when he asked Song to play the part of an obscure North Korean sergeant in JSA – Join Security Area, not surprisingly a film that, while presenting itself as "genre" (a thriller in the form of a military investigation) requires its characters to take an "extra" shot, to become unwitting protagonists of the tragedies of history (the North-South division between the two Koreas). It is thanks to Park's sensitivity that Song thus fully enters the "climate" of the new Korean cinema, in which the actor is called upon to embody a transformation that crosses the very way of thinking and making a film. This is perceived even more in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the second episode of the long and lasting collaboration between Song and Park, in which the actor is called to play the role of the rich, proud and lonely Park Dong-ji, whose only daughter is kidnapped and killed. It is perhaps the film in which the director-actor duo reaches the strongest point of balance: the mise-en-scène and the editing give substance not only to the increasingly tired and tried physicality of the actor, but above all to his feelings, a jumble of desperation and thirst for revenge that Song shapes through a very measured mimicry that literally "explodes" in several moments in a charged gesture, bordering on expressionism. The success of the film, at home and abroad, is such that from now on it will be difficult to separate Song's face from Park's cinema, in a star-studded combination that marks the entire next decade of Korean cinema.
It is perhaps in order not to fall into the meshes of an immediate recognizability that Song, in the same year, participates in an operation that could not be further from the world of Park. We are talking about YMCA-Baseball Team (2002), which reconstructs the history of Korea's first baseball team. A film set at the beginning of the twentieth century and designed for a more commercial circuit, which Song agrees to make to strengthen his reputation as an all-round actor, open to a continuous metamorphosis. The deliberately epic tones of the film, in which there is no shortage of moments of comedy, allow the actor to recover that more self-deprecating and light dimension that is not present in Park's two films. After all, for an actor like Song, the change of register is a matter of a "stylistic" nature, that is, it belongs to his way of being an actor.
From this point of view, the meeting with the young Bong Joon-ho for Memories of Murder (2003) marks an interesting point of arrival in Song's career, since the director allows the actor to be able to demonstrate those comic/grotesque potentialities already traceable in The Foul King. Bong's film, which has the structure of a detective story, sees the classic figure of the detective split into two characters very far from each other in character and temperament, also played by two very different actors, one of whom is Song himself. It's up to him to play the role of the violent and bungling policeman, very instinctive, but very unreasonable. In the end, the mystery (inspired by some crime stories that really happened in Korea in the eighties) will not be solved, the murderer will not be brought to justice, the entire genre mechanism seems to jam in the end and the two protagonists of the film pay the price, who have nothing of the romantic aura of the archetypal character and who, On the contrary, they prove to be sadly inadequate in the face of the tragic events to which they should have given a truthful answer. To the cerebral coldness of the character played by Kim Sang-kyung, Song contrasts a charged acting, made up of sudden jerks and nervous accents, moreover resting on a certain unprecedented physical "heaviness" of the actor; Song therefore resorts to those techniques of imitation that allow an actor to effectively render another (the character) different from him, looking for a precise set of external signs. It is precisely in Memories of Murder that Song comes to elaborate a very specific type, that of the clumsy and clumsy anti-hero but with extraordinary humanity, which he will begin to develop and re-propose, always "in disguise", in most of the subsequent roles he will be called upon to play. Not so much in the oleographic The President's Barber (2004) by Im Charn-sang, or in the third film shot with Park, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), nor even less in that authentic flop that was the colossal Antarctic Journal (2005) by Yim Phil-sung, but precisely in what still represents his greatest success (especially in commercial terms), namely The Host (2006) by Bong Joon-ho.
In the second film shot with Bong, the Korean actor is called upon to play the part of the protagonist in a highly spectacular film, which brings together several genres (fantasy, horror, action, thriller, adventure), behind which, however, hides the true soul of the film, represented by the tragic story of a family marked by conflicting personal relationships. What happened in The Host is what was said at the beginning, that is, new films in which new characters are realized: the role of Park Gang-du, one of the three brothers called, together with their father, to save the life of their little sister captured by the terrible monster from the Han River, is an extraordinary opportunity that Bong offers to Song to allow the actor to re-propose, under new guises, his type. Not only because the part implies an excellent mastery of physical abilities (daring chases, daring tests of courage, etc.) and an expressive use of mimicry (situations of surprise or fear are necessary stylistic features for a film of this type), but because it elevates the figure of a mediocre to the rank of an unwitting (anti)hero. At the beginning of the film, Gang-du is presented by Bong as a grotesquely comic character, a man with the head and vices of a teenager (in this case both the make-up, the hairstyle, and the costumes – the green sweatshirt, for example – are essential elements to define his character) that no one would ever dream of being able to see in the role of a brave man capable of saving a city and an entire country from a very serious threat. Instead, the Bong-Song duo works throughout the film on this aporia, transforming Gang-du into an everyday hero, an unwitting "giant", a winner with the soul of a loser. This is why The Host is a key film in Song's career: it allows him to establish himself at home and in the rest of the world as the most important contemporary Korean actor, but it also clarifies how the formula adopted by Song (to embody a rather recognizable character-type and, through the techniques of imitation, to shape him in the most varied contexts) is a winner.
It is probably no coincidence that the film starring the actor in the same year, The Show Must Go On by Han Jae-rim, has many points of contact with The Host. It may seem paradoxical, but it is so, precisely because the actor's work always moves between repetitiveness and originality. In this film, Song plays the part of In-gu, a gangster, a very common figure in Korean cinema today, given the high number of thrillers that are produced. Be careful, however, because the film tells us about the tragedy of a ridiculous man, who constantly experiences the aporias between the worries of everyday life and the role he is called to play in society. This clumsy and clumsy little gangster, hated by his daughter, little understood by his wife, in perpetual contrast with his boss's son, has nothing of that romantic aura to which the history of cinema (both in the West and in the Far East) has accustomed us. He is rather a mediocre figure, a victim of events that he tries in vain to control, but by which he is punctually overwhelmed, a loser, in short, and of the worst kind. It would perhaps go without saying that Song is really comfortable in the shoes of this character. The actor once again resorts to the technique of imitation: when he assumes an expression, he tends to make it clearly visible, mixing the signs of the different sensations and emotions that in the various moments make the character concrete, in a sort of "montage of expressions". An example of this is the final part of the film, in which In-gu is hunted by his boss's gang and Song has to return a series of very different emotional states (fear, anger, despondency, courage, determination, etc.) and he does so by making them immediately perceptible to the viewer. What? Expressively emphasizing both actions and gestures (and leaning once again on costumes).
Many of the subsequent characters played by the Korean actor can also be traced back to the elaboration of a type, except for the part played in Secret Sunshine (2007) by Lee Chan-dong, an intense and dramatic film in which, however, Song "cedes" the part of the protagonist to the extraordinary Jeon Do-jeon and carves out a role as a deuteragonist, while ensuring with his presence a right acting balance. Already starting from The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008) Song can return to his preferred interpretative scheme, this time helped by the structure of a film that right from the title is programmatically structured as a tribute to a certain genre cinema (the spaghetti western of the sixties). In a cast assembled to foster the impact on the general public, Song, while sharing the stage with two other stars of today's Korean cinema, Jung Woon-sung and Lee Byung-hun, is undeniably the real star of the film. The film's citationist euphoria and pastiche aesthetics are in themselves a good foundation on which to build the part, so Song can easily make the minimum effort to get the most out of it. By giving a personal touch to a character who must necessarily appear typified, the actor still manages to make the "Fool" (a bandit who loves to rob trains) a less predictable figure than the other two.
A more interesting acting experiment appears to be that of Thirst, the fourth film that Song plays for Park Chan-wook, in one of the most complex roles of his career. Certainly, the director chooses his fetish actor because the understanding between the two is well tested and after all it would have been difficult to find an actor in Korea who could effectively give credibility to Sang-hyeon, a respectable and beloved Catholic priest who turns into a vampire attracted by the pleasures of the flesh in spite of himself. In Thirst Song he is called upon to manage this gradual change of character, and even in this case he resorts to the tools of imitation, with an acting that focuses everything on this transformation. If, in fact, at the beginning of the film Song does everything he can to make the priest appear as a measured, reassuring, courageous man (through a very calibrated mimicry and a restricted series of small daily gestures), with the development of the narrative and the psycho-physical change of the character, the actor resorts to well-recognizable effects, expressively charging various emotional states, in an interpretative register that privileges above all the emphatic gesture. In this, the actor is helped by the other protagonist of the film, the young Kim Ok-bin, in the role of the girl with whom Sang-yeon falls madly in love. Compared to Secret Sunshine, in which it was Song who had to "chase" the lead actress on an interpretative level, in Park's film the opposite happens. Like all stars, Song also seems to be more comfortable in the parts of the absolute protagonist, especially when he is paired with a young actress. It's actually the same kind of type-casting found in Lee Hyeon-seung's Hindsight (2011), in which Song stars alongside a semi-newcomer like Shin Se-kyung, in a story of love and death that brings together two different genres such as thriller and melodrama. Faced with a character, that of the killer Se-bin, strongly typified (she is only a revised and updated variant of the dark-lady, a typical figure of American and Asian noir) above all thanks to her hairstyle (a long fringe often covers part of her face), the costumes (the leather garments) and the objects she uses (the motorcycle), Song re-proposes the figure of the lone criminal, Melancholic and crepuscular (he has retired from the business and hopes to open a restaurant), a contrasting character, torn between the feral and bloodthirsty instinct of the gangster and the more indolent one of the man in love. Once again, therefore, the portrait of a small man struggling with a difficult everyday life and with a reality that he cannot control and that often appears more miserable and deceptive than one might think.
While waiting to see his next films, Ha Yu's Howling (2012), but above all Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho's new film due out in 2013, one thing is certain: Song has now reached an enviable professional maturity, which allows him to choose from the many offers that are made to him – not only in Korea – from a position of strength. He has built up over the last decade thanks to his ability to develop an interpretative style that he has been able to adapt to the new context of Korean cinema at the beginning of the millennium and which, although it may seem changeable, in reality remains the same. It's the secret of every (good) actor, actually. The vertigo, in short, is only apparent.

Filmography