<\/p>\n
The best feedback Hwang Dong-hyuk received when he first pitched \u201cSquid Game\u201d in 2009 was someone asking him how he could possibly have come up with something so absurd. \u201cThat was the most positive response I got,\u201d he told a packed house Sunday at the Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong, where he opened the Asian Film Awards\u2019 day of masterclasses.<\/p>\n
Hwang traced the origins of the series to a period of acute personal hardship. His first feature had failed commercially, a second project had fallen apart before production, and he was selling household furniture to cover living expenses. He spent much of his time in manga cafes, reading survival game comics in which protagonists gambled their lives for large sums of money. He wondered whether he could make something similar but distinctly Korean in character. Where most survival narratives featured protagonists with superhuman abilities, he wanted to tell a story about entirely ordinary people playing the simplest games imaginable \u2013 the kind any child had grown up playing, requiring no special skills or genius, only the will to keep going.<\/p>\n
More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n After a year of fruitless meetings with investors and actors who universally dismissed the project, Hwang made the decision to bury the script in his computer and wait. He made three more feature films in the intervening decade. When he returned to the idea in 2018 and reread the script, he said, he felt an immediate conviction that the time had come. \u201cBy 2019, the world had somehow come to look more like \u2018Squid Game\u2019 than it did when I first wrote it,\u201d he said. Competition had intensified, the wealth gap had widened, and the economic pressures and social tensions he had imagined as extreme had come to feel entirely plausible. \u201cPeople\u2019s lives had become harder,\u201d he said. \u201cThe story no longer seemed so far-fetched.\u201d<\/p>\n The arrival of Netflix Korea was the final piece. Hwang had always believed the premise would resonate more easily outside Korea than within it \u2013 the survival game genre had never been commercially popular at home \u2013 and Netflix offered immediate access to a global audience. He also found the series format liberating. His original screenplay was a two-hour film in which the games crowded out nearly everything else. Expanding to eight hours allowed him to develop the backstories of characters like Sang-woo and Sae-byeok, and \u2013 crucially \u2013 to create the figure of Oh Il-nam, Player 001, the elderly man who turns out to be the architect of the games. \u201cThat character didn\u2019t exist in the film version,\u201d Hwang said. \u201cThe series gave me the space to build him, and with him the entire emotional logic of the final episode.\u201d<\/p>\n Several games were also redesigned for international audiences. Some of the original choices had rules too culturally specific to be immediately comprehensible to viewers outside Korea. The replacements \u2013 marbles, the honeycomb candy carving game, the ddakji tile-flipping game \u2013 were chosen because any viewer anywhere could understand them within seconds. The giant doll in the Red Light, Green Light sequence, which became one of the series\u2019 most iconic images, was designed with a deliberate choice. Rather than something conventionally threatening, Hwang drew on the image of a girl character named Young-hee, familiar to every Korean child from first-grade textbooks. \u201cWe wanted something cute,\u201d he said. \u201cI genuinely did not think people would find it frightening. Their reaction surprised me.\u201d<\/p>\n The production design of the series reflected a philosophical choice rooted in Oh Il-nam\u2019s psychology. Where most survival narratives set their action in dark, oppressive spaces, \u201cSquid Game\u201d used pastel colors and the aesthetic of a children\u2019s play cafe. Hwang explained that Oh Il-nam built the games to recapture childhood joy \u2013 his own and others\u2019 \u2013 and that the spaces he designed would therefore be cheerful and colorful, not menacing. The horror, Hwang said, came from what happened within those cheerful spaces, and the contrast made it more devastating.<\/p>\n On the series\u2019 central theme, Hwang said the world of \u201cSquid Game\u201d is one in which people in a hyper-competitive society are conditioned to see those beside them as rivals rather than allies \u2013 while the people who actually designed the system watch from above and profit from it. He said he wanted the series to ask whether it was possible for people to recognize that their real adversaries were not their neighbors but those further up, and whether some form of collective response might be imaginable. He stopped short of prescribing an answer but said the question felt urgent.<\/p>\n The session also ranged across Hwang\u2019s broader career. He studied journalism at university \u2013 his father, who died when Hwang was young, had been a journalist \u2013 but grew disillusioned after participating in the pro-democracy student movements of the early 1990s and finding that the Korean press was too conservative and pro-government to do the investigative work he had hoped it would. He began watching two or three films a day in a lost period after abandoning his journalism ambitions, and eventually went to study film at the University of Southern California. He recalled his first class there, in which the professor asked students successively how many expected to direct one feature film after graduating, then two, then three \u2013 and concluded that statistically, not one person in the room would likely make even one. \u201cLooking back,\u201d Hwang said, \u201cthe only person from that class who became a feature film director was me.\u201d<\/p>\n His USC graduation short, \u201cMiracle Mile\u201d \u2013 about a sibling who travels to the United States to find a brother who had been adopted away, carrying a dying parent\u2019s apology \u2013 led directly to his first feature, \u201cMy Father,\u201d after a Korean producer saw the short and reached out. The story drew on a memory from his own life: a paternal aunt who had been given up for adoption to America when his family was too poor to keep her, and who returned to find her birth family when Hwang was around 19.<\/p>\n He described the production of \u201cSilenced\u201d \u2013 based on the real-life sexual and physical abuse of students at a school for deaf children in Gwangju \u2013 as one of the most grueling experiences of his career. He initially turned the project down, he said, but reconsidered after researching the case and concluding that a film might be the last chance to return it to public consciousness. He deliberately chose to make it as a work of narrative cinema \u2013 emotionally immersive rather than documentary in approach \u2013 on the conviction that audiences needed to care about the characters before they could feel the full force of the injustice. The film\u2019s release led to real-world legal changes. But the psychological cost was severe. \u201cI lost weight, I developed insomnia, I was in a bad way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cMiss Granny,\u201d the broad intergenerational comedy he made next \u2013 about a grandmother who is magically transformed into her younger self \u2013 was a direct reaction to that ordeal. It was also, Hwang said, a personal tribute to his mother and grandmother, who had raised him after his father\u2019s early death. He said he had wanted to make a film that three generations of a family could sit down and watch together, each finding something to recognize in it. The film went on to be one of the top three highest-grossing Korean films of its year and spawned remakes across Asia, including versions in China, Vietnam and India. Hwang said he had been struck, while watching the various adaptations, by how each country\u2019s version drew on its own era of popular music and its own cultural textures \u2013 the Indian remake especially, with its Bollywood-style musical sequences.<\/p>\n Closing the session, Hwang reflected on his affection for Hong Kong cinema, which he credited as a defining influence on his generation of Korean filmmakers. He watched Chow Yun-fat\u2019s \u201cA Better Tomorrow\u201d ten times, he said, and when he was seriously studying film as a craft, it was Wong Kar-wai\u2019s \u201cChungking Express\u201d and \u201cDays of Being Wild\u201d that made the deepest impression. He expressed sadness that Hong Kong cinema had largely disappeared from Korean screens, saying that \u201cInfernal Affairs\u201d was the last Hong Kong film he had seen theatrically and that he had had little opportunity to follow the industry since.<\/p>\n On the question of how Korean content had come to dominate global popular culture, Hwang offered a structural rather than a mystical answer. Korea\u2019s entire postwar economic development, he said, was built on an export mentality \u2013 the country had nothing and built everything by manufacturing and selling abroad. That orientation had transferred to the cultural industries over time, with filmmakers, musicians and drama producers gradually becoming more attuned to international audiences alongside domestic ones. He said he did not believe the phenomenon had happened quickly but was the accumulated result of a long habit of thinking outward \u2013 and that he himself had had that global audience in mind when he decided to take \u201cSquid Game\u201d to Netflix.<\/p>\n His advice to the aspiring filmmakers in the room was unsentimental. Film technique, he said, can be learned quickly \u2013 his own MFA program at USC deliberately avoided admitting film majors, preferring students from other disciplines who already had something to say. The hard part is not learning to use a camera but knowing what story you need to tell. He urged young filmmakers to read, travel, make friends and accumulate experience rather than focusing narrowly on technical skills \u2013 and to be honest with themselves about whether they were truly prepared for a path that offers no stability and demands the willingness to risk everything.<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The best feedback Hwang Dong-hyuk received when he first pitched \u201cSquid Game\u201d in 2009 was someone asking him how he could possibly have come up with something so absurd. \u201cThat was the most positive response I got,\u201d he told a packed house Sunday at the Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong, where he opened the Asian Film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2330589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[364508,310801,451610,451609,103580],"class_list":["post-2330588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-feature-films","tag-hong-kong","tag-hong-kong-film","tag-netflix-korea","tag-squid-game"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Hwang-Dong-hyuk-on-Burying-\u2018Squid-Game-for-a-Decade-Koreas.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2330588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2330590,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2330588\/revisions\/2330590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2330589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2330588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2330588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2330588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}