Park Chan-wook is speaking out on the Academy’s decision to not include his 2022 noir film “Decision to Leave” on the Oscar ballot.
While fellow international filmmaker Justine Triet won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Anatomy of a Fall” and landed both Best International Feature, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Picture nominations, “Decision to Leave” was entirely iced out of the 2023 ceremony.
Now, Park is admitting that his career may have looked a little differently without that “Decision to Leave” Oscars snub. Park told The New Yorker that it would be hypocritical to deny the fact that awards are paramount to a filmmaker’s power trajectory in Hollywood.
“It would be hypocrisy to say that art is the only thing that matters,” Park said. “If you get an award, it might mean you have more power, more creative freedom, in your next project. It might mean you can have a bigger budget. Maybe you can have more freedom and a bigger budget, depending on how big the award is.”
However, even if Park was up for an Oscar, maybe he wouldn’t have attended. Park’s “The Handmaiden” co-writer Chung Seo-kyung added that Park “really doesn’t like the trouble of attending awards ceremonies” anyways.
The Korean Film Council, prior to 2022, had never submitted one of Park’s films as the country’s nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. “Decision to Leave” was the first Park feature to be in the potential running for an Oscar.
Park previously told IndieWire that “Decision to Leave” decidedly had less “graphic” elements compared to his past films in hopes for the feature to reach a wider audience.
“I have always considered that I have been making love stories,” Park said. “But I realized at one point that nobody has been saying that about my films. They even laugh when I make that kind of comment and take it as a joke. That got me into thinking about why. My assessment was that perhaps violence and nudity were really just at the forefront of everything. It was just too strong, too graphic. This time around, I really had to subdue these things to show something different.”
Park now helms the first three episodes of A24 and HBO limited series “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel. The spy series stars Academy Award winner Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles along with lead actor Hoa Xuande and Sandra Oh. Per a recent Esquire article, it was Park who proposed executive producer Downey play four characters who are all white, male, American stereotypes.
