Na Hong Jin is back at the Cannes Film Festival for the first time in a decade — and already shutting down rumors surrounding his new film Hope.
After previously bringing The Chaser, The Yellow Sea and The Wailing to Cannes, Na Hong Jin returned this year with Hope, which landed in the festival’s Competition section.
“I’m truly honored and happy just to be here,” the director said during an interview in Cannes on May 18th local time.
The thriller stars Hwang Jung Min as a police outpost chief in a village near the DMZ who becomes entangled in a mysterious case after reports of a tiger sighting.
Hope officially premiered the day before, though Na Hong Jin admitted he’s still obsessing over the film. “You always see flaws in your own work,” he said. “Even after the screening, we stayed up all night discussing what still needed work. Post-production is actually still continuing in Seoul.”
The movie has drawn extra attention as Na’s first feature in 10 years since The Wailing. He said the long delay was largely due to the pandemic and the sheer scale of the project. “I never stopped working,” he said. “There was just too much to do. I honestly wondered if a movie this demanding could even exist.”
Na also pushed back on rumors that Hope carried a 70 billion won production budget ($46.6 million) and would need 20 million moviegoers to break even. “That’s absolutely not true,” he said. “Those numbers aren’t even close.”
He also denied speculation that the film was secretly planned as a trilogy. “People think it’s Part 1 and Part 2 because the storyboard books were split into two volumes since they were so thick,” he explained. “Of course there are stories that could continue afterward, but I believed this film needed to stand on its own.”
Despite its dark premise, Na Hong Jin surprisingly described Hope as a “kind movie.”
“There’s really no true antagonist in the story,” he said. “Everyone has their own reasons.”
Still, he admitted the demanding production eventually became its own kind of enemy. “At some point, I actually started missing having an antagonist,” he joked. “This movie became the antagonist of my life.”
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