Lee Jung-jae is up there with Brad Pitt in his native Korea, but western audiences know him better as the beleaguered star of Netflix’s Squid Game. Fans of the ultra-violent show created by Hwang Dong-hyuk will be delighted to learn that Lee’s directing debut is just as hard-boiled: an ‘80s-set spy thriller film with incredible balletic action not much seen since the heyday of John Woo.
“It’s about a smoke-out operation to find a mole in the Korean CIA,” says Lee when he came to the Deadline Studio at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hunt had its world premiere in the Midnight section. “And while all the agents are trying to do that, they come across a grand plot to assassinate the South Korean president.”
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Although based loosely on real events involving the leaking of classified information to North Korea, the film is largely fictional. “The character that I play, named Park Pyong-ho, is an agent in the Korean CIA,” says Lee. “He’s been working for 13 years, so he’s a veteran agent, but he realizes that his conviction may be rooted in something that’s wrong.” The twists and turns in the film mean that no character is wholly good—and neither is anyone wholly bad. “The people who are bad or evil in this movie,” says Lee, “are actually the people who implant bad ideologies in people and brainwash them. They are the ones that are bad. [The characters in the film] are scapegoats to the people doing the brainwashing and the ideology-making.”
In the film, Lee’s character gets a hard time from his equivalent agent in Korea’s domestic security service (Jung Woo-sung’s Kim Jong-do), and while they have some pretty intense fight scenes—like a brutal smackdown on marble steps—Lee reveals that he actually reined in the violence. “In the beginning, I really wanted to put the two characters between a rock and a hard place,” he says, “so I thought maybe more violence was needed. But after second thoughts, I decided I needed to focus more on the ironic situations the two characters are in and the dilemmas that they face.”
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With a fall release looking likely, Hunt will fill some of the waiting time until Squid Game returns. “Director Hwang is currently writing Season 2,” says Lee. “I’m not sure when he will be done writing, but I think it’ll be soon. I’m looking forward to it…”
