‘Trustworthy actor’ Ha Jung-woo has returned as a ‘director’ with the hit film ‘Lobby’, which he not only stars in but also directs. ‘Lobby’, director Ha Jung-woo‘s third film following ‘Roller Coaster’ and ‘Heo Sam-gwan’, is a black comedy that tells the story of startup CEO Chang-wook (Ha Jung-woo) who starts his first lobby golf game in his life to win a 4 trillion won national project.

He displayed his signature ‘Ha Jung-woo-style humor’, which he had shown in ‘Roller Coaster’, which created a considerable number of fans, through 10 unique characters on a golf course where hospitality and lobbying reign supreme. He said, “Since I started playing golf in 2021, I’ve seen a truly diverse group of people on golf courses. “I thought, ‘The complete opposite of a good-natured person, a rough person who turns into a girl, isn’t that what comedy is?‘” he said with a sparkle in his eyes.

O“The reason it took me 10 years to direct a work...”

After making his directorial debut with ‘Roller Coaster’, he presented ‘Heo Sam-gwan’ only two years later, and it took him a full 10 years to present his third work, ‘Lobby’. He, who always had new works in mind for directing, opened by saying, “I waited for a work that I really wanted to do and that I could do well.”

“Actually, I was preparing a work called ‘Seoul Times’. I had written up to the third draft of the scenario, but when I read the scenario, I suddenly thought, ‘Is this a work that I can do well? Is this what I want?’. I wasn’t 100% sure about this work. I think it took me some time to make up my mind.”

He even gave up his stubbornness in order to perfect this work. Unlike his previous work where he insisted on his own tempo even for editing, he drew attention by saying, “I completely handed over the editing authority to the editing director.”

“I think tempo and timing are the most important in humor. However, with ‘Roller Coaster,’ I insisted on my own tempo, so when you look at the result, it felt like a movie that I enjoyed too much by myself. So this time, I left the tempo control to the editing director who could be more objective.”

“Chungmuro directors are my teachers.”

He also gave an explanation, not an explanation, about the acting of rookie Kang Hae-rim, who has been receiving disappointing reviews since the preview. Kang Hae-rim plays a professional golfer in a slump in the drama, and is essentially the female protagonist.

“I wanted this character to seem like a real professional golfer or an ordinary person, not an actor. That‘s why I told actress Kang Hae-rim that she could speak her lines as if she were reading a book, but she had to have a really good golf posture. It probably wouldn’t have suited this character to be fluent in words.”

Before becoming a director, he was also a ‘representative actor in Chungmuro’ and said that many of the famous directors he worked with were his ‘directing teachers’. He was confident that he was able to digest the strengths of the famous directors and portray them with ‘Ha Jung-woo‘s directing ability’.””From ‘The Unforgiven’ to ‘Suriname’, I was greatly influenced by director Yoon Jong-bin, with whom I worked on the most works. Even in his approach to scenarios and direction. “I also saw and learned on-site the strong affection that Director Choi Dong-hoon (Assassination) has for his actors, the action directing of Director Ryu Seung-wan (Berlin), and the pre-production methods of Directors Park Chan-wook (The Handmaiden) and Na Hong-jin (The Chaser).”


Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.