Korean Film Directors: Kim Jee-woon

KIM Jee-woon is both a talented genre filmmaker and one of the few cineastes in today's Korean film possessing both skillful storytelling abilities and an original visual style. [...] With KIM, there is a slightly uneasy coexistence of the virtues of a commercial film director and solitary auteurism; a sense of conscience that demands that he make even entertainment films melancholy; aesthetic judgment that is stinting toward genre film coupled with a director's dissatisfaction with that situation. These contradictory elements have essentially come together to drive him onto film sets. [...] His films represent a kind of theory of life presented through the conventions of genre film, and the director constantly provides a gaze of compassion toward the characters suffering within his films. -From the Preface