BAE Se-yeong is a screenwriter who made her name in hit comedies. Her knack for creative writing revealed itself at a very young age, as in elementary school she would write in her diary dramatic made-up stories about her family inspired by soap operas just to get the attention of her class teacher. The latter, upon finding the truth, sent her to the literature club of the school since, as he put it, someone with this ability to trick people with words should be a writer. A c...
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BAE Se-yeong is a screenwriter who made her name in hit comedies. Her knack for creative writing revealed itself at a very young age, as in elementary school she would write in her diary dramatic made-up stories about her family inspired by soap operas just to get the attention of her class teacher. The latter, upon finding the truth, sent her to the literature club of the school since, as he put it, someone with this ability to trick people with words should be a writer. A creative writing graduate of Chugye University of Arts who continued with a master’s degree in Korean literature, BAE has always preferred writing entertaining stories chockfull of funny lines, but in her college days she would often hear disparaging things about her writing, many of her peers comparing her novels to TV series as they would deem them fun but ultimately empty. Back then, she didn’t have the slightest clue what a screenplay looked like or that it was even a thing. But as luck would have it, one day an acquaintance who was working in the film industry offered her the opportunity to write a scenario, and so she did, submitting after only 16 days the script that would be used for <Swindler In My Mom’S House> (2007). As a big fan of JANG Jin’s <The Happenings> (1998), a comedy she loved and watched so many times she could quote it by heart, one day she took a chance and visited JANG with her scripts. Far from rebuffing her, the director instead invited her to join his entertainment collective Film It Su Da. BAE learned a lot under JANG, who first made his name as a playwright and screenwriter. She notably turned into a screenplay the original story JANG had written for his film <The Recipe> (2009), and when the group collaborated with tvN to provide skits ideas and scripts for Saturday Night Live Korea, BAE successfully pitched The Teletubbies of Yeouido, a sketch featuring party leaders as Teletubbies. This satire of Korea’s politics quickly became one of the most popular segments of the show when it debuted in 2012 and helped BAE find her forte in comedy. A couple years later, JANG Jin used one of her stories to film <We Are Brothers> (2014). After seven year at Film It Su Da, she decided to go solo and went from success to success with her original screenplays. She engrossed more than 1.1 million spectators with the risqué comedy <What a Man Wants> (2017), an impressive score for a title rated mature, before taking the industry by surprise with the lines she wrote for <Intimate Strangers> (2018), a Korean adaptation of an Italian comedy set over the course of a dinner and therefore particularly reliant on the dialogues. The positive word-of-mouth it generated helped it fill 5.3 million seats in late 2017. This was however but a sample of things to come, as just three months later, <Extreme Job> (2018), this time an original story from the mind of BAE about detectives striking gold by accident with the fried chicken joint they use as cover, shot to the No. 2 spot at Korea’s all-time box office with total sales amounting to 16.3 million, a score long thought to be out of reach for comedies.
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