Since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in 2022, Park Chan-wook’s latest film Decision to Leave has seen many viewers draw comparisons with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his 1958 classic Vertigo.
Given Park has often claimed Vertigo is his favourite film of all time, those comparisons might not come as too much of a surprise, but in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com the director revealed that he only really noticed the similarities after he’d finished his film
“These two films didn’t cross my mind when I was making this film,” he said when asked about comparisons with both Vertigo and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. “But of course, now that I’m finished and after seeing it, I can see where the connection is happening – especially with Vertigo.”
Park – whose previous films include Oldboy and The Handmaiden – went on to explain that although he wasn’t consciously thinking of Hitchcock when writing the script, there were a couple of scenes where the Master of Suspense’s influence was definitely felt.
“The connection is visible in a particular scene where the detective is pursuing the suspect,” he explained. “It’s an outdoor scene during the daytime and the camera is pursuing the suspect from an aerial view.
“We follow him and it jumps from rooftop to rooftop and he reaches the edge of the rooftop and we see the camera kind of look over his shoulder and look down, and there’s an effect that elongates the distance from the top of the roof to the bottom.
“That effect is basically a reference to Vertigo, and that’s very much intended – I wanted to give a nod to Vertigo and that shot.”
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He added: “But then there’s also another scene where I realised that I was heavily influenced by external films. At the end of the film, when Seo-rae is completely submerged, there is a slight whirlpool that’s created above her.
“That was so critical to me – I tried so hard to create that whirlpool on the location practically, and then I had to add the effects to it. And I added even more sound effects to heighten that whirlpool because it was the metaphor that these two people would look quite peaceful on the outside but inside there’s huge turmoil.
“And if you look at Vertigo, this vortex pattern is quite pronounced all throughout the film. For example, the female character’s hair, how it’s tied, looks like a small vortex and that’s also seen in a portrait, the hairstyle in the portrait. That pattern of the vortex can be recognised all throughout Vertigo.
“So, in hindsight, I saw that connection to Vertigo, but I didn’t create that whirlpool consciously making the connection to Vertigo – and if I didn’t watch Vertigo or if Vertigo did not exist I think I would have made the same whirlpool for that scene.”
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Park also added one more way in which the film bears a resemblance to Vertigo – the fact that he considers his lead star Park Hae-il to be something like a South Korean version of Jimmy Stewart.
“If a foreign audience asked me what kind of person, what kind of actor Park Hae-il is, then I would summarise to say that he is equivalent to Jimmy Stewart,” he said. “He is a gentleman at heart, but then he has a quite quirky sense of humour like Jimmy Stewart!”
Rather than the work of Hitchcock – or indeed the work of any other director – Park’s starting point in terms of his inspiration for Decision to Leave was actually a piece of music.
The song Mist, performed by Jung Hoon Hee, is heard several times throughout the runtime, and according to the director it was listening to the song while working in London on a previous project that first gave him the idea of making the film.
“That song is something that I’ve always loved since I was little and it’s something all Koreans know and sing,” he said. “And of course, I kind of forgot about that song growing up.
“Then I was in London during my post-production work for Little Drummer Girl and I had been away from home for so long that I was homesick, so I looked up some Korean oldies on YouTube and I listened to the song.
“The song itself is a love song,” he added. “It’s a tragic love song. It describes someone who is leaving into the mist and looking at the silhouette of a person who left her behind. When I was little, I couldn’t really understand the lyrics fully because I didn’t understand the love between adults so I couldn’t really savour or enjoy the lyrics.
“But now that I’m all grown up and I understand this is a deeply romantic lyric, I instantly was able to imagine the mood for my next film, a romantic film.
“I had already made up my mind that now that I had made a TV series in the UK the next project would be a Korean film specifically for theatrical release, and I already had a plan to make a police procedural film inspired by the character Martin Beck in the Swedish novel series.
“And now that I had really listened to this romantic song, I had the urge to make a romantic film too – and that kind of made up my mind that ‘OK, I’m going to combine these two’. So that’s the starting point of Decision to Leave!”
Decision to Leave is released in UK cinemas nationwide on Friday 21st October 2022. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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