Biography: Song Hae-sung

Song Hae-sung is a well-established South Korean film director and screenwriter born on October 11, 1964. Song made his feature film debut in 1999 with Calla, a time-traveling romance starring Song Seung-Heon and Kim Hee-sun, but it wasn’t until the success of his second picture, Failan, that he became more well-known (2001). The film, starring Choi Min-Sik and Cecilia Cheung, is about a hoodlum discovering real love and finding meaning in life. It received critical audience plaudits for its empathetic portrayal of the fragility and deep flaws beneath Korean men’s bravado. Song received two best director awards for the film, from the 2001 Blue Dragon Film Awards and the 2002 Grand Bell Awards, firmly establishing him as a significant figure in Korean cinema. Rikidozan, a biopic about Rikidozan, a legendary ethnic Korean pro-wrestler who became a national hero in Japan in the 1950s, starring Sol Kyung-gu in the titular role, was his ambitious follow-up in 2004. Despite the film’s poor box office performance, Song was awarded his second Grand Bell Award for best director in 2005. He adapted Gong Ji-bestselling young’s novel Our Happy Time into a film in 2006. Maundy Thursday, starring Lee Na-young and Kang Dong-won, tells the story of a suicidal woman and the man she visits on death row. The film, a melodrama about compassion rather than love, hit over 3 million viewers and was the sixth most popular domestic film of 2006.

When asked to film a remake of John Woo’s Hong Kong noir classic A Better Tomorrow, Song immediately rejected but subsequently chose to make a South Korean version centered on brotherhood and North Korean defectors. Song Seung-Heon, Joo Jin-mo, Kim Kang-woo, and Jo Han-sun starred in A Better Tomorrow (Invincible, 2010). Director Song described the film as “driven by the emotional contact between the characters, and the action is there to heighten and portray the dramatic tension.”

In 2013, he adapted another novel, Cheon Myung-Aging Gwen’s Family, about a grown-up trio of loser siblings who move back into their mother’s home and embark on a series of escapades. A bowl of bean paste stew decorated with five spoons, Song says, came to mind while creating the film, signifying a complex yet loving family. Song quipped that the ensemble comedy (based on Cheon Myeong-Kwan Boomerang Family) was a “low-budget family Avengers,” casting Youn Yuh-Jung, Yoon Je-moon, Park Hae-il, Gong Hyo-jin, and Jin Ji-hee.