With no prior experience or formal education in film, PARK Hoon-jung fell into the film industry by accident. Having been expelled from university, he started writing scenarios for video games as a way to make a living, before taking a stab at movies and even comics. He was quickly noticed by some of the most preeminent Korean directors and ended up writing the scripts for KIM Jee-woon’s <I Saw The Devil> (2010) and RYOO Seung-wan’s <The Unjust> (2010), the la...More

With no prior experience or formal education in film, PARK Hoon-jung fell into the film industry by accident. Having been expelled from university, he started writing scenarios for video games as a way to make a living, before taking a stab at movies and even comics. He was quickly noticed by some of the most preeminent Korean directors and ended up writing the scripts for KIM Jee-woon’s <I Saw The Devil> (2010) and RYOO Seung-wan’s <The Unjust> (2010), the latter of which won him Best Screenplay at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. He made his directorial debut with <The Showdown> (2010), a historical chamber piece set during the 17th century war between the Manchus and the Ming dynasty. While his first directing effort wasn’t met with success, PARK’s follow-up <New World> (2012), a gangster thriller intended as the first of a trilogy and starring CHOI Min-sik, LEE Jung-jae and HWANG Jung-min, was a commercial and critical hit. The film was sold to a large number of worldwide territories and travelled to many festivals, picking up along the way the Jury Prize at the Beaune International Thriller Film Festivals and Best Film of the Focus Asia section at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival. He tackled a bigger project with the Colonial Era drama <The Tiger> (2015), which featured CHOI Min-shik as a hunter tracking down the last tiger on the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese occupation. The film served as the closing film of the Udine Far East Film Festival in 2016, but failed to break even. After founding his own film production company in 2016, he teamed up with Warner Bros to produce his following film <V.I.P.> (2017), an action thriller about a North-South joint operation to stop a North Korean serial killer, as well as his latest output <The Witch : Part 1. The Subversion> (2018) which saw him tackle the fantastic genre.Less