For nearly 20 years, director Park Chan-wook has tried to get an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax off the ground, convinced that it would be his definitive masterpiece – a strong take, considering a filmography including Oldboy and The Handmaiden.
His take on the satirical crime novel - about a laid-off paper company employee who goes on a killing spree to make sure he’s the only available candidate for a new role – was going to be set in the USA, because he didn’t think it would translate to his home country. Then the American money fell through, and he moved on to other projects.
“Then, about five or six years ago, one of my French producers proposed the idea of revisiting the movie and setting it in Korea”, director Park told Zavvi. “And at the time, I didn’t want to, because I saw this movie as a commentary on capitalism, so even though it technically wasn’t impossible to set it in Korea, I still couldn’t see it being set anywhere else.
“Around the time I finished my HBO series The Sympathizer, I suddenly felt a strong to desire to revisit and finish this movie. Seoul and Korea might not be the heart of capitalism like America is, but there is a lot of fierce competition amongst people in our society, so you could almost argue it’s at the forefront of capitalism.
“It was only that belated realisation that led me to see this movie could be set in Korea.”
No Other Choice stars Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun as Yoo Man-su, a laid-off paper company veteran who desperately wants to reclaim the comfortable upper middle-class lifestyle taken from him. After a job interview that goes embarrassingly wrong, he starts fantasising about killing the manager who turned him down, before devising a better plan; seeking out the best qualified candidates to replace him, and then killing all of them, ensuring he gets the role.
Best known to international audiences for playing The Front Man in Squid Game, Lee had his first big break in Park’s 2000 film Joint Security Area, a thriller which became the then highest grossing movie of all time in the country. Since then, the pair had only collaborated in a short segment for the compilation movie Three Extremes, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
“Every time I made a Korean movie, he was one of the first names I thought of for roles, but because of scheduling conflicts, we were never able to work together. He's also someone that I’ve stayed very close with on personal terms ever since we first met.
“As for why he was right for this role, of course there are other great actors in Korea, but he's a particularly convincing actor. He has a sense of familiarity that regardless of what he does, the audience wants to follow him – and when you think about this story in simpler terms, it's a story about someone who loses their job and becomes a serial killer, that’s hard for people to grasp!
“My goal wasn’t for the audience to forget about that darker perspective, but to waver between two very different states. The first is that distance where they can see what he’s doing is unacceptable, and they can’t quite believe it, but I want people to also be able to empathise with him at times, while never forgetting what he’s up to.
“If it wasn’t for Lee Byung-hun, the audience would have leaned more to one side than the other.”
One of the main reasons the source material stood out to Park initially was the streak of black comedy running through it – and in this adaptation, he pushes that to delightfully absurd extremes. However, it’s been nearly 20 years since he last made a pure comedy (with 2006’s largely underseen I’m A Cyborg, But That’s Ok), and he remains best known for his twisty, ultraviolent thrillers over anything conventionally crowd pleasing, so did he feel like he was stepping out of his (dis)comfort zone a little here?
“Regardless of what you might think, I regard most of my movies as comedies!”, Park laughed. “But it is true this movie is more of an overt comedy, and I began by approaching it as a fable about an individual that used to enjoy the benefits of capitalism and was suddenly abandoned by the system.
“I mean, he doesn't know what to do, or how to enact positive change in his life and he's struggling. So rather than taking a realist approach, I wanted to emphasize that struggle that he's going through, and I think during that part of the writing process, that's when the comedy became more emphasized.”
The movie maintains the paper industry background of the source material, published back in 1997, but does make one crucial update to the narrative: the threat of AI when it comes to making everybody’s jobs redundant. As someone in the creative industries, he’s naturally both sceptical and anxious of the technology, but doesn’t want you to read the movie as being a direct statement about it.
“I had no other choice but to incorporate AI as a threat in the film, because if I didn't introduce AI in a 2025 film that deals with job security, it means I'm not dealing with the issue in enough depth. But as for how I portrayed it, I could have taken an approach where I actively researched how AI technology was used in paper factories, but I decided very early on that I wanted it to feel like a sci-fi movie.
“Even if I did do the research on how AI was actually used in the industry, that portrayal would have become quickly outdated because the development of the technology is so quick. So, I leaned more into futuristic ideas instead, that would be a bit different from reality; I want you to see the machines running that factory and feel like something apocalyptic is happening, like in The Terminator!”
