If there is anything to be learned from Hwang Dong-hyuk, it is that perseverance is worthwhile. He had the first idea for his series “Squid Game” in 2008, when Netflix was still a mailing service for DVDs and not a successful streaming platform. But now “Squid Game” is a huge, global successful production and Hwang Dong-hyuk has to explain again and again how he managed it.
“I’m not good at teamwork,” he told US entertainment magazine Variety in touching openness – but he wants to work on it. The 50-year-old not only came up with the series and, as a so-called showrunner, kept the strings in hand: he wrote the script for all nine episodes himself, staged and even produced the episodes himself. Six of his teeth fell out of stress during filming, he told the TV station CNN via video switch, sitting in his rather unadorned apartment while his main actors were preparing for a glamorous appearance on the “Jimmy Fallon Show”.
Hwang Dong-hyuk is rather shy, he was raised by his mother in financially insecure circumstances, he said in a television interview. Still, he made it to National University in Seoul, and recalls that the whole neighborhood had great expectations of him. He studied film production in California before setting out to write and direct his first short films. He is not an entertainment director, his drama “Silenced”, for example, tells the story of deaf children who are tortured and raped at their school – based on a true story. Despite its depressing subject matter, the film became a huge hit in South Korea.
This is possibly because Hwang Dong-hyuk is above all a strong writer who knows how to lead the audience exactly where they want it. The trick of “Squid Game”, to go through the exams in games that you know from childhood, has to come to mind first. “A survival game is entertainment and human drama. The games shown are extremely simple and easy to understand, which allows viewers to focus on the characters,” explains the creator.
The fact that the series became a global hit just a month after its start, although it lacks cool heroes, still amazes him, “It just feels like I’ve come up with something like Harry Potter or Star Wars.” In fact, Hwang Dong-hyuk created something that seems to be valid worldwide, the Straits Times from Singapore wrote: “The series reveals some uncomfortable truths about being human.” Life as a rat race, in which the rich become richer and the poor more and more defenseless, “I wanted to write an allegory on modern capitalism”, says Hwang Dong-hyuk, “something about the extreme competition of life.” In the 12 years that he worked on his series, above all the world has changed, this is how Hwang Dong-hyuk explains the current success.
After he has become one of the most sought-after auteur filmmakers on the planet with “Squid Game”, and everyone from the “James Bond” makers to the “Marvel” producers will knock on his door, Hwang Dong-hyuk has to think about what to do wants to start with the newly acquired possibilities. He used to drink half a bottle of soju brandy to get in the mood for writing. But if he should actually do “Squid Game 2”, this time Hwang Dong-hyuk would get himself a team, set up a “writers room”, as is usual with such productions, and hire various experienced directors, team players that he is not himself , in short: “I would definitely not do it again alone.”