Die Bad Q&A Session

Originally scheduled for Monday, December 18, the Q&A session for Die Bad was rescheduled for the Tuesday screening after director Ryoo Seung-wan became stuck in traffic and was unable to get to the theater on time. Ryoo, who got his start as an actor, both directs and acts in the film, and from appearance own looks more than capable of carrying off both roles. "I was crazy about Hong Kong action movies when I was a teenager, and I'm still very influenced by action movies, for example those by Quentin Tarantino, Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike," says the director, and his film, a compression of genres ranging from horror and comedy to social satire and action, more than proves it. Bombarded with enthusiastic question after enthusiastic question from the audience, the director met the audience's inquiries with soft, sometimes humorous answers like "I'm not making films in order to convey some kind of message. I wanted to tell people that life doesn't always go as you expect it will" and ""There were too many violent scenes, so we spent too much money on medicine." The most memorable exchange of the afternoon came after a comment about veteran actor Lee Chang-ho's performance. Ryoo responded, "As a young director, he is like a father to me, but now he is just like a tiger that has lost its teeth. His anger towards the Korean film industry that treats him lightly might just have come through in his acting." Incidentally Ryoo also drew laughs with his comment that "the title Die Bad was supposed to sum up the characters' "death or evil" attitude, but my English is poor, so this is how it ended up."