Ok, let’s get this straight, its actually Reuters who call Park Chan-Wook’s “Thirst” film a “blood-drenched thriller,” but presumably they’ve seen the film in order to prepare for the interview and or are paraphrasing Chan-Wook.
Either way, we feel comfortable that is what’s going to be delivered at Cannes this weekend.
After his arresting revenge trilogy, (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” — which won the Grand Prix at Cannes that year– “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance”), Chan-Wook took off in an entirely different direction to make an offbeat romantic comedy called, “I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK,” that fans didn’t warm too (perhaps because it wasn’t ultra-violent).
But Chan-Wook said it was a necessary step to purge himself of the vengeance triptych. “I felt exhausted and a bit devastated after the trilogy, which is why I made a ‘cute’ film. ‘Thirst’ marks a new start for me,” he told Reuters.
But much like his previous work, the South Korean filmmaker sees the film as a challenging morality tale. “I wanted to make audiences more conscious of the moral aspects of choices, whether large or small, by presenting a once-in-a-lifetime, life-or-death decision and exaggerating it to the extremes,” he said. “Many of South Korea’s modern films do not dodge, but squarely confront, moral questions that other films in other countries tend to see as anachronistic.”
As previously mentioned, S. Korean actor and Chan-Wook mainstay Song Kang-ho stars in “Thirst” as a priest who turns into a vampire through a failed medical experiment and then falls in love with his friend’s wife.
This won’t be “Twilight,” hell, this won’t even be “Let The Right One In.” “I thought I could add some changes to this old genre by approaching the subject — vampire-ism, so to speak — without the usual mystery or romanticism but from a realistic perspective where being a vampire is sort of a disease,” he said of the film’s rawer tone.
“Thirst” is the filmmakers first film in Cannes competition since 2004’s “Oldboy” (which Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are still trying to sanitize remake for American audiences). We’re highly anticipating this one. Focus Features is putting out the film in the U.S. this summer in mid-July.