‘Squid Game’ characters drawn from director’s life
Published on: Friday, October 29, 2021
By: AFP
South Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk was a well-regarded filmmaker over 10 years before the huge global success of ‘Squid Game’.
SEOUL: Many characters in Netflix sensation “Squid Game” are loosely based on its South Korean director’s own life and he believes its theme of economic inequality has resonated with viewers around the world.Hwang Dong-hyuk’s television debut last month became the streaming giant’s most popular series at launch, drawing at least 111 million watchers.
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Its dystopian vision sees hundreds of marginalised individuals pitted against each other in traditional children’s games – all of which Hwang played growing up in Seoul.
The victor can earn millions, but losing players are killed.
Hwang’s works have consistently and critically responded to social ills, power and human suffering, and he based several of its highly flawed yet relatable characters on himself.
Like Sang-woo, a troubled investment banker in “Squid Game”, Hwang is a graduate of South Korea’s elite Seoul National University (SNU) but struggled financially despite his degree.
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Like Gi-hun, a laid-off worker and an obsessive gambler, Hwang was raised by a widowed mother and the poor family lived in the kind of subterranean semi-basement housing portrayed in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning satire “Parasite”.
And it was one of his first experiences abroad that inspired him to create Ali, a migrant worker from Pakistan abused and exploited by his Korean employer, he said.
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“Korea is a very competitive society. I was lucky enough to survive the competition and entered a good university,” he said.
“But when I visited the UK at age 24, a white staff member at airport immigration gave me a dismissive look and made discriminatory comments. I find it truly shocking to this day.
“I think I was someone like Ali back then.”
Hwang studied journalism at SNU, where he became a pro-democracy activist – and he named the main character in “Squid Game”, Gi-hun, after a friend and fellow campaigner.
But democracy had been achieved by the time he graduated and he “couldn’t find an answer to what I should do in the real world”.
At first, “watching films was something I did to kill time”, he said, but after he borrowed his mother’s video camera, “I discovered the joy of filming something and screening it for other people, and it changed my life.”Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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