In Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has only ever known the paper industry and takes drastic measures to protect his family’s livelihood when he’s laid off and realizes that there is fierce competition for few positions
Awards Buzz spoke with editors Kim Sang-Beom and Kim Ho-Bin about the experience of working with this famed director. For Ho-Bin, he was relatively new to this phenomenon:
“I actually worked with director Park on his movie, Decision to Leave. At that time, I wasn’t an editor, I was an assistant editor. When I worked with him, I discovered that he is a very insistent and specific director. He has very specific needs and desires when it comes to the editing process, always asking questions as well. And it was the same for this film. He doesn’t like to take simple shortcuts. He’s always asking questions throughout the editing process, and it was a very great learning experience for me as well.”
Sang-Beom, on the other hand, has collaborated with the filmmaker many times before:
“I’ve worked with director Park for all of his films and his entire discography. What I’ve really enjoyed as an editor is that he never had a clear definition when it came to his editing style. He always had a different approach for all of his films. So as an editor myself, I was never relaxed when it came to collaborating with director Park. We always had to find new ways to approach the creative process. So the same goes for this film as well. When we first started talking about it ten years ago, we were discussing heavily into the different approaches, creative approaches we could take for the editing process. Now, ten years later that we actually worked on this film, we got to talk about what he really wanted to emphasize in this process. And that was the story that talks about the different social issues that impact modern day society, employment, family, all of those themes, we wanted to reflect it in a comedic way. And so how can we utilize different editing skills and tactics to do that? We were really looking into different ways to do it, and it required a lot of research in that process. So it was new in that sense.”
Watch the video above to hear more about constructing this story and balancing action and suspense with comedy.
No Other Choice is now playing in select theaters.
