When Hwang Dong-hyuk first pitched the “Squid Game” in 2009, the best feedback he received was from people asking him how he could come up with something so ridiculous. “That was the most positive response I got,” he told a packed crowd at Hong Kong’s Saiqu Center on Sunday, which opened the Asian Film Awards’ Master Class Day.
Hwang said he traced the origins of the series back to a time of deep personal hardship. His first feature film was a commercial failure, his second project failed before production, and he was selling home furnishings to make ends meet. He spent a lot of time at manga cafes, reading survival game manga in which the main characters gambled their lives on the line. He wondered if he could create something similar, but with distinctly Korean characteristics. While most survival stories feature protagonists with superhuman abilities, he wanted to tell stories about perfectly normal people in the simplest game imaginable, the kind that any child would have grown up playing, requiring no special skill or genius, just the will to keep going.
After a year of fruitless meetings with investors and actors who all rejected the project, Hwang decided to put the script into his computer and wait. He made three more feature films over the next decade. He said that when he revisited the idea in 2018 and reread the script, he instantly knew the time was right. “By 2019, the world has somehow become more like ‘Squid Game’ than when I first wrote it,” he says. Competition intensified, the gap between rich and poor widened, and the economic pressures and social tensions he had imagined to be extreme began to feel entirely plausible. “People’s lives have become more difficult,” he said. “The story didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.”
The arrival of Netflix Korea was the final piece. Hwang had always believed that the premise resonated more abroad than within South Korea – the survival game genre had never been commercially popular there – and Netflix offered instant access to a global audience. He also found the series format freeing. His original script was a two-hour movie that filled out almost everything else with games. Expanding it to eight hours allowed us to develop the backstories of characters like Sang-woo and Sae-byeok, and more importantly, the persona of Oh Il-nam, Player 001, the old man who turns out to be the game’s designer. “That character didn’t exist in the movie version,” Huang said. “This series gave me the space to build him, and with him I built the entire emotional logic of the final episode.”
Some games have also been redesigned for international audiences. Some of the original choices had culturally specific rules that viewers outside of Korea might not immediately understand. Instead, we chose games like marbles, honeycomb candy carving games, and Dakuji tile flipping games because they can be understood by viewers everywhere within seconds. The design of the giant puppet in the Red Light, Green Light sequence, which has become one of the series’ most iconic images, was a deliberate design choice. Rather than being traditionally threatening, Hwang created an image of a girl character named Yong-hee, which every Korean child is familiar with from their first-grade textbooks. “We wanted something cute,” he said. “I really didn’t expect people to find it scary. I was surprised by their reaction.”
The series’ production design reflects Oh Il-nam’s philosophical choices rooted in psychology. While most survival stories take place in dark, oppressive spaces, “Squid Game” used pastel colors and a children’s play cafe aesthetic. Hwang explained that Oh Il-nam created the game to bring back the joy of childhood, joy for himself and others, so the spaces he designed would be cheerful and colorful rather than intimidating. According to Hwang, the horror comes from the events that take place within that cheerful space, and the contrast makes it all the more devastating.
Regarding the central theme of the series, Hwang said the world of “Squid Game” is one in which people in a hyper-competitive society are conditioned to see those next to them as rivals rather than allies, while those who actually designed the system are watching from above and profiting from it. He said he wanted the series to ask whether people could recognize that their real enemies are not their neighbors but those above them, and whether some kind of collective response was possible. He stopped short of prescribing an answer, but said he felt the question was urgent.
The session covered Hwang’s wide-ranging career. He studied journalism in college – his father, who died when Hwang was young, was a journalist – but became involved in the pro-democracy student movement in the early 1990s and became disillusioned when he learned that South Korean news outlets were too conservative and pro-government to do the investigative work he had hoped for. After abandoning his ambitions for journalism, he began watching two or three movies a day during a period of uncertainty, eventually leading him to study film at the University of Southern California. He recalled his first class there. So the professor asked students how many of them expected to direct one, two, or three feature films after graduation, and concluded that statistically it was unlikely that anyone in the room would direct any. “Looking back, I was the only one in that class to become a feature film director,” Huang said.
His short story, “Miracle Mile,” which he produced as a graduate work at the University of Southern California, tells the story of a brother and sister who travel to the United States to find their adopted brother after their dying parent apologizes.A Korean producer saw the short story and contacted him, which directly led to his first feature, “My Father.” This story is based on Mr. Huang’s own life memories. His paternal aunt was taken to the United States because the family was too poor to support an adopted child, and Mr. Huang returned to find his biological family when he was around 19 years old.
He said that making “Silence,” which is based on the actual sexual and physical abuse of students at a school for the deaf in Gwangju, was one of the most difficult experiences of his career. He initially turned down the project, but after researching the case and concluding that the film might be his last chance to bring it back into the public consciousness, he had second thoughts. He intentionally chose to make the film an emotionally immersive piece of narrative film rather than a documentary approach, based on his belief that audiences need to care about the characters before they can feel the full power of injustice. The release of this film led to real-world law changes. However, the mental burden was severe. “I was losing weight, I had insomnia and I was in terrible health,” he said.
His next wide-ranging intergenerational comedy, “Miss Granny,” about a grandmother who magically transforms into her younger self, was a direct response to that ordeal. It was also a personal tribute to his mother and grandmother, who raised him after his father’s early death, Huang said. He said he wanted to make a movie that three generations of a family could sit down and watch together, each recognizing something in the movie. The film went on to become one of the top three box office grossing Korean films of the year, and spawned remakes across Asia, including versions in China, Vietnam, and India. As he watched the various adaptations, Huang said he was struck by how each country’s version brought out the popular music of each era and its own cultural texture. The Indian remake, in particular, featured Bollywood-style musical sequences.
At the conclusion of the session, director Hwang reflected on his love for Hong Kong cinema, saying it had a decisive influence on Korean filmmakers of his generation. He says he has seen Chow Yun-Fat’s “A Better Tomorrow” 10 times, and when he was seriously studying film, the movies that left the deepest impression on him were Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express” and “Wild Days.” He expressed sadness that Hong Kong films had all but disappeared from Korean screens, saying that Infernal Affairs was the last Hong Kong film he saw in theaters and that he had had little opportunity to follow the film industry since then.
To the question of how Korean content came to dominate global popular culture, Hwang offered a structural rather than mystical answer. He said that all of South Korea’s postwar economic development was built on an export mentality, meaning that South Korea had nothing and built everything by manufacturing and selling overseas. Over time, that orientation transferred to the cultural industry, and filmmakers, musicians, and drama producers gradually became attuned not only to domestic audiences, but also to foreign audiences. He doesn’t believe the phenomenon happened quickly, but says it’s the cumulative result of years of outward-thinking habits, and said he himself had that global audience in mind when he decided to put “The Squid Game” on Netflix.
His advice to the aspiring filmmakers in the room was unemotional. The art of film can be learned quickly, he said. In his own MFA program at USC, he intentionally avoided admitting film majors in favor of students from other fields who already had something to say. The challenge isn’t learning how to use a camera, it’s knowing what story you need to tell. He urged young filmmakers to not just focus on technical skills, but to be honest with themselves about whether they are truly ready for a path that requires reading, traveling, making friends, gaining experience, and a lack of stability and a willingness to risk everything.
