KIM Jee-woon, born in 1964, is one of those capable of producing the most stylish images among the Korean movie directors who are currently actively engaged in commercial filmmaking. However, he first had his eyes set on a career in theater. Although he managed to enter the prestigious Seoul National University to study this field, he quickly found himself more interested in learning on the job and eventually resolved to drop out. After writing and directing a few plays, and ...More

KIM Jee-woon, born in 1964, is one of those capable of producing the most stylish images among the Korean movie directors who are currently actively engaged in commercial filmmaking. However, he first had his eyes set on a career in theater. Although he managed to enter the prestigious Seoul National University to study this field, he quickly found himself more interested in learning on the job and eventually resolved to drop out. After writing and directing a few plays, and even starring in the musical “Guys and Dolls”, KIM challenged himself to move to films, having been nurtured on European classic movies since his childhood. He started out his film career in 1994 as an assistant director for <Young Lover>. In 1997, he won a screenwriting contest that allowed him to make his directorial debut <The Quiet Family> (1998), a black comedy about a family running a hostel on a remote mountain skirt that haplessly get involved in a series of deaths. As if experimenting with the rules of genre movies, KIM has continued making a variety of genre movies. His third movie was <A Tale Of Two Sisters> (2003), a horror film that was remade in Hollywood. <A Bittersweet Life> (2005) was a film noir and <The Good, The Bad, And The Weird> (2008) was paying homage to the Korean “western” movies shot in Manchuria between the 60s and the 70s. <I Saw The Devil> (2010) created controversy over the rating system with its portrayal of extreme gore. This long string of critically acclaimed films led him to be invited to many festivals around the world and made him a cult favorite among fans of Asian films. As a result, he had the rare privilege to make his Hollywood debut in 2013 with <The Last Stand> (2013) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. KIM returned to Korea for his next project, for which he teamed with SONG Kang-ho for the fourth time. <The Age of Shadows>, which also marks the Korean local production debut of Hollywood major Warner Bros, features GONG Yoo as the leader of an independence movement in Japan-Occupied Korea. It became the most successful film of his career to date, with 7.5 million admissions in Korea. He is currently working on a remake of Japanese animation film <Jin Roh : The Wolf Brigade>. Less