Mark Protosevich, who wrote the American version of Oldboy , details what he changed, what he kept, and what he axed entirely.
Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen in Oldboy.
FilmDistrict
Reimagining a foreign film for American audiences is hard; reimagining one with a devoted following among unforgiving cineastes is even harder.
Screenwriter Mark Protosevich was given that very task five years ago by Will Smith and Steven Spielberg, the original actor and director combination attached to the American adaptation of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, which was released on Wednesday. Protosevich and Smith had worked together on I Am Legend, and one day, while working in his office in Provincetown, Mass., Protosevich got a call from Smith asking him to take on this nascent project. He crammed. "Even though I was incredibly familiar with the original film and loved the original film, I hadn't read the source material," Protosevich said. (Oldboy, which was released in 2003 and won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004, was based on a manga.)
The South Korean Oldboy has become a modern classic not only because of Park's ornate, violent visual style, but because of its insane ending. Did Spielberg, he of E.T., want to go to that crazy place?
Yes, says Protosevich. "Even in those initial meetings, Steven didn't want to compromise on the source material," he said. "The original is very provocative and unsettling, and the twist in the ending is not your normal twist. But he wanted to go for it."
If you are reading this story, you probably know that in the end, Spielberg did not have to cross that bridge: Spike Lee directed this new Oldboy, and Josh Brolin took Smith's place. A year after that initial conversation with Smith, and after completing a detailed treatment of his vision for the movie, Protosevich got another phone call: This one was from an executive at DreamWorks, Spielberg's company, telling him that the movie had fallen apart because Spielberg had pulled out of the project (and therefore, so had Smith).
"You have many soul-crushing days as a screenwriter," Protosevich said, remembering it with a grimace at BuzzFeed's office in Los Angeles. "That was a bad one. I was devastated."
But the producers — Roy Lee, Nathan Kahane, and Doug Davison — wouldn't give up on Oldboy, and eventually the movie (a more indie version of it) got a new life.
And having become so passionate about it, Protosevich was happy to report that the "initial treatment that I wrote, even when it was Will Smith and Steven Spielberg, is not that different from the final film."
People who have seen both films will notice that the adaptation has significant differences from the original. Protosevich discussed those changes and omissions in full. My explications and his answers are below — and they are all spoilers, so be warned!
Spoilers start down there!
FilmDistrict
In the original version, the lead character, Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi), discovers that his tormentor, Woo-jin (Ji-tae Yu), hates him and had kidnapped and imprisoned him because while in school, Dae-su gossiped about Woo-jin and his sister's sexual relationship (not realizing that they were brother and sister). She committed suicide out of shame. The new movie adds a layer: Joe (Brolin), a fratty bully in high school, sees a schoolmate having sex with an older man, not realizing the man is the girl's father. He tells everyone, and the girl has to leave school. Joe's tormentor, Adrian (Sharlto Copley), is her brother, and was also in an incestuous relationship with their father. The father, afraid the family's secret is about to be exposed, shoots them all and kills himself. Adrian survives, and grows up hating Joe, waiting to exact his revenge.
Protosevich: You hear often about these tragic shootings of a father or uncle or brother or stepfather coming into a house and killing their families. Killing their loved ones and then killing themselves. What drives someone to that point? What horrific circumstances push someone to make that decision? I'm intrigued by those stories. Making it such a violent destruction of his family would propel the villain even more in terms of trying to exact revenge upon the man he holds responsible for what he sees as the tragedy in his family life.
And why the incestuous father/brother/sister change?
Protosevich: I liked the idea of maintaining a parent-child relationship between the villain and Joe. I wanted that echo of a parent with their child. And unfortunately in our society, parental sexual abuse might resonate more with the audience. Those are issues that are important to me in terms of articulating and investigating them.
