Ryu Seung-wan (born December 15, 1973) is a South Korean film director.
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Ryu Seung-wan was born in 1973 in Onyang, a small town in Chungcheong Province. With the choice of domestic films mostly limited to propaganda and hostess films due to extreme government censorship, young Ryu often opted for the more kinetic and free-spirited action films from the Shaw Brothers canon. Watching Jackie Chan's Drunken Master turned him into a lifelong fan, and Ryu spent his youth building his knowledge and love for Hong Kong action. Dreaming of becoming a film director someday, he took taekwondo lessons and saved lunch money for three years in middle school to buy an 8mm camera, with which he shot short films.[1][2]
After graduating from high school in 1992, Ryu worked for six months to raise enough money to cover a year's worth of basic living expenses for his family. After that he joined a private film workshop, and paid his tuition through several part-time jobs: as a construction worker, hotel janitor, vegetable cart driver, and even an instructor at an illegal driving school. Ryu, a fan of a young unknown director named Park Chan-wook's 1992 debut The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream and his work as a critic, went to meet Park and the two quickly became friends. Those formative years also saw Ryu's debut as a 'real' director, with the 1996 short Transmutated Head. The 19-minute short's DP was Jang Joon-hwan (then a young film academy student), and it featured many familiar faces in the Korean indie scene, including character actor Heo Jong-soo and Lee Mu-young (future director of The Humanist).[1]
With a few years of experience as assistant director on Whispering Corridors and Park's 1997 film Trio, Ryu was ready to jumpstart his own career. Ryu's debut was initially planned as a full-fledged feature film, but various issues forced him to instead shoot separate short films sharing common characters and themes. In 1998 his short film Rumble won him the Best Film at the 1998 Busan Short Film Festival, and a year later he signed a contract to develop a feature film out of Rumble and three following sequels, one of which was his short Modern Man, which was not only the audience's favorite, but also won Best Film at a Short Film Festival in 1999. The four shorts, shot on a ultra-low budget of around 65 Million won, became Ryu's first feature film: Die Bad.[1] In an era when blockbusters like Shiri and Joint Security Area were the rage in Korean cinema, the action dramedy became an instant sensation. Starring in the film himself along with some industry friends and even his little brother Ryu Seung-beom, Ryu became an instant cult hit, praised left and right for his masterful debut.[2] With his directorial debut, Ryu became known as the "Action Kid."
With the country experiencing tremendous growth in high-speed Internet penetration, a few companies tried to bank on this momentum by producing online short films. In 2000 the now defunct Cine4M website released a short film by Ryu alongside Jang Jin's A Terrible Day and Kim Ji-woon's Coming Out.[1] Titled after industry slang ("tachimawari" is a part of Kabuki theater plays that involve spectacular action scenes), the short Dachimawa Lee was a wild and hilarious parody of the films he grew up with: Korean action films of the 60s and 70s, Bruce Lee and Shaw Brothers flicks, the machismo kitsch of old Korean melodramas, and of course Jackie Chan. Coupling over-the-top voice dubbing with deliberately mistimed action, Dachimawa Lee was an enormous success online, making lead actor Im Won-hee a minor star and the Ryu Brothers even bigger names.[2]
Big expectations often lead to equally big disappointments, which is what industry insiders and critics felt about Ryu's first real feature film, the gritty action noir No Blood No Tears. The film mixed big stars like Jeon Do-yeon with talented actors from the theater world like Jung Jae-young. Joining Director Ryu once again was his younger brother Seung-beom, who was starting to make a name for himself in the industry independent of his brother. Misunderstood as a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino clone, Ryu's film was an exhilarating mix of all the elements that made Die Bad one of the best debuts films in Chungmuro's recent history, but it also added a nasty streak of ultra-realism. The latter was contributed by Jung Doo-hong, occasionally an actor, but better known as the best action choreographer in the country, whose extreme realism balanced Ryu's more fantasy-oriented cinematic sensibilities. With No Blood No Tears a flop at the box office, it was a difficult period for Ryu, who clearly felt betrayed by the same people who had put impossible expectations on his shoulders.[2]
After that disappointment, Ryu collaborated again with Jung Doo-hong and brother Seung-beom, along with newcomer Yoon So-yi. The four embarked on Arahan, part modern-day wuxia and part local comedy. Despite its commercial success, critics still weren't pleased, continuing to lament the loss of Chungmuro's enfant prodige.[2]
It took another two years for Ryu to come back, but 2005's Crying Fist was in many ways proof he had matured beyond easy labels and traditional genre boundaries. Ryu was more than just an action kid. Starring acclaimed veteran actor Choi Min-shik, the film saw the official birth of a new star, Ryu Seung-beom.[3] Steadily impressing critics and audiences since his debut in 2000, Ryu displayed amazing energy and range in the film, such that he often overshadowed his older, more prestigious colleague. But the real star of Crying Fist was none other than Ryu Seung-wan. Finally stripping himself from genre tropes, he was able to draw an incredible emotional portrayal of two people winning the most important boxing game of their life: the match against their own inner demons. More a story of survival than a simple sports drama, Crying Fist opened on April 1, 2005 against Ryu's old friend Kim Ji-woon's A Bittersweet Life, offering one of the best double-headers of 2005. The two films garnered excellent reviews, but ended up canceling each other at the box office, selling a little over a million tickets a piece.[2]
Waiting to secure funding for his first zombie film Yacha, Ryu decided to take his friend Jung Doo-hong for another challenge, making one last salute to the pure action flicks he grew up with and gave him his nickname. The two had some acting experience, Jung mostly in Ryu's films and Ryu with Die Bad, a supporting role in Lee Chang-dong's Oasis, and a couple of cameos in Park Chan-wook films. But this was another story: for the first time, Jung and Ryu would be the stars. Produced under CJ Entertainment, The City of Violence is a low-budget HD action film meant to show the potential of the new technology. As Ryu described it, The City of Violence is like a Jackie Chan-style pure action film with characters from a Chang Cheh film in a world similar to that of Roman Polanski's Chinatown. The film brings to a final duel the two conflicting philosophies of the longtime partners (the Korean title of the film, Jjakpae, means partner). Fantasy and realism, outlandish technique and brutally raw streetfight-style action, combine to form pure cinematic flow.[2]
His film The Unjust, a tale about corruption among policemen and prosecutors, received rave reviews for its seamless storytelling interspersed with action sequences, social commentary and powerhouse performances from Hwang Jung-min and brother Seung-beom.[4][5] It became the biggest hit of Ryu's career yet, its more than 2.7 million tickets sold landing it on the top ten box office list of 2010.
Ryu has started working on his next movie The Berlin File, an espionage thriller about what happens when a North Korean spy who, after infiltrating a South Korean group, is cut loose by the North. Budgeted at US$9 million, the film will be reminiscent of The Bourne Identity and will be shot 100% on location in Europe, featuring the Brandenburg Gate, and the American Embassy and Holocaust Memorial right next to it. While preparing for the film, Ryu met with several North Korean defectors and shot the documentary Spies for Korean broadcaster MBC as part of a special series that aired in 2011, intending "to make a realistic, fast-paced, Korean-style espionage action film about South Korean agents discovering North Korea's secret accounts and how political dynamics between the two Koreas get involved." On an emotional level, he says he is focusing on the solitude and sorrow of those who live as secret agents. Seasonal aspects will play an important part in the film as well. Ryu hopes to start shooting end of February or beginning of March 2012 to capture the eerie chill of Europe.[6]
Ryu is married to Kang Hye-jung, film producer and CEO of their production shingle Filmmaker R&K. They met when Kang was a crew member in his 1996 short Transmutated Head.