Park Chan-wook
Filmmaker
Korean auteur behind Oldboy and Decision to Leave who built No Other Choice around automation destroying livelihoods — while drawing the line himself: “Instead of being anti-AI, I think I’m fearful of AI,” and his own crew may already be using it.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +2.0anti2 anti-AI statements (measured)
- ±0nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Leaning Anti-AI · 2.0/10
In his words
Instead of being anti-AI, I think I’m fearful of AI, and it’s already seeped into my field and my occupation so much… And it might already be stealing my colleague’s job as well.
Biography
Park Chan-wook (born 1963) is South Korea’s reigning auteur — director of the Vengeance Trilogy capped by Oldboy (2003, Grand Prix at Cannes), The Handmaiden (2016), and Decision to Leave (2022, Best Director at Cannes). His meticulous, formally daring style has made him one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation.
No Other Choice: automation as violence
His 2025 film No Other Choice — which opened the 30th Busan International Film Festival — adapts Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax into the story of a laid-off Korean paper-industry worker whose employer threatens to replace its workforce with AI. Park described the dying paper trade as an allegory for cinema itself: “The vanishing paper trade is not unlike what we face in cinema. Both are industries many once thought indispensable, yet both are fighting for survival.”
Machines are taking over more and more. AI is making people lose their jobs… AI is so close to us, it is happening so fast, it is impossible to predict how fast it will go.
At Busan, Park called the anxiety over AI “a fear we all share,” noting that his own crew might already be using AI tools in VFX or the art department without his knowledge, and that the technology’s pace of development makes it impossible to estimate where it will stop. Notably, he frames himself as “fearful of AI” rather than anti-AI — a distinction he drew explicitly — even as South Korea’s film industry rapidly embraces generative production tools.
Quote sources
- IndieWire, 2025(indiewire.com)
- Sweden Herald, 2025(swedenherald.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/park-chan-wook
