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The writer and director of Netflix's global phenomenon (and the most watched show) reveals the origins of his dystopian satire.

The screenwriter and director Huang Donghe first proposed the idea of ​​the Netflix limited series "Squid Game" in 2008, but it will take him 10 years to realize it. Thirteen years ago, the Korean filmmaker was told that his script (which was a long story at the time) was too impractical and violent to be commercially viable.

Putting all his efforts into his script broke him, so he had to take a break and focus on other projects. But in 2018, he picked up this story for the first time in ten years and reconfigured the feature as a series after seeing the boom in Korean web comics. He brought it to Netflix, which had just started operations in the country, and company executives thought that the idea was timely enough to give it the green light.

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"The response I got 10 years later was, in fact, very realistic-someone in the world might be playing this game," Huang told The Hollywood Reporter through an interpreter. "And I think the pandemic has also accelerated the development of the situation. So this story is no longer unrealistic, no longer absurd, but something very close to reality ten years later. This makes me a little sad as a person, but it also brings As a creator, I am very happy."

The filmmaker can list the crime movie "Silence" in 2011 and "Fortress" in 2017 as one of his works. "The bigger", as time goes by, his concept becomes more realistic. He also said that climate change and the emergence of cryptocurrencies and virtual currencies have made the idea of ​​squid game more real.

"[It] is now almost like a lottery-almost like a gamble, people in reality actually doubled or really increased their wealth overnight," he explained. "And I think the world is gradually moving towards dystopia. More and more people really don’t dream of the future. This drives people to want to gamble, really gamble on everything, gamble on everything, and hope for the best. I think these changes create In an environment, the idea of ​​people betting on children’s games is no longer an absurd idea."

The show starring Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo and Jung Ho-yeon was quite violent. Participants fought for their lives through various games-the only survivor won a huge prize. But Huang never intended to show violence just to be sensational. To him, the cruelty of the show—and the use of guns—is more symbolic.

"When we describe the knockout of the game, I want to express that the knockout equals death," he said. "In Korea, we don’t use guns, so guns are actually a very unrealistic weapon in Korea. I personally think that using guns to wipe out people is actually very unrealistic to some extent, which means it doesn’t. So violent, because it is more symbolic than reality. This is a simple and symbolic expression that eliminates the equivalent of death." A sub-plot involving Squid Game guards digging organs from players who are eliminated from the challenge needs to be more grounded realism. "There is news about this happening in the real world," Huang pointed out. "I included it because it is something in our reality. I didn't deliberately show violence or blood, but I didn't deliberately try to control the level of expression for the audience or the Netflix series. I just want to show it as organically as possible. ."

In 2008, Hwang sent the script to several famous Korean actors at the time, but they all refused. This time, he specially asked Lee and Park, who played Sung Ki-hoon and Jo Sang-woo, respectively, these two childhood acquaintances, and was surprised to find that they had re-established contact in a fatal challenge-for the show. For other roles, he wants to choose relatively unknown actors, and the crew finds them through auditions.

At the same time, Zheng, who plays the North Korean defector Jiang Sebi, is one of the audition actors. Squid Game marks her acting debut: Jung is a Korean model who recently became a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton.

When viewers think of "Game of Squid", they may not only think of games and violence, but also production design. Most of the content that became the most watched Netflix series was shot in the studio with some CG added. Hwang explained that the game in the first episode of the series ("red light, green light") was shot in a large open space with a blue screen, which allowed filmmakers to change the background in post-production.

"We drew some inspiration from hotels in Las Vegas.... Do you know those hotels with fake sky painted on the ceiling? I want to create a space that makes people wonder, "Is this fake or real?" "" Huang said. "So you will see in the first game that we actually mixed the fake sky with the real sky. As for the stairs, we drew structural inspiration from works such as MC Escher's Relativity." There were six games in total. , Participants must participate in the competition, based on the games that the candidate may have played when they were young, such as red light, green light and tug-of-war. Huang said that the former is actually the most difficult to execute because of the large number of actors participating at the beginning of the competition, before the failure: 300 extras, 20 martial arts actors, and 10 actors.

"This is the first game and the first day of shooting. It must go smoothly because it will be the first impression of the audience," Huang said. “It’s very challenging physically and psychologically. It must have enough influence to make people want to watch the rest of the series. I only spent more than 10 years imagining it and then turning it into Reality... This is the most challenging scenario on many levels."

This story first appeared in the independent November issue of The Hollywood Reporter. To receive the magazine, please click here to subscribe.

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