Hwang Dong-hyuk, director of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game, bares in recent interviews that support for the show did not come cheap and actually took more than a decade to be picked up.
According to him, he came up with the plot back in 2008 and finished the script a year later. Living with his mother and grandmother at the time, he had to halt scriptwriting at one point and was forced to sell his laptop for money.
"I came up with which games to use in the story about 10 years ago. And it was, to begin with, the red light, green light game that makes a big impact with shocking mass deaths," he told Korea Times.
With Wall Street Journal, the film director shared that local film studios found the concept “implausible” and “too grotesque” before the show was finally picked up by Netflix who found the class struggle in the show “spoke to reality”.
“The world has changed,” Hwang said. “All of these points made the story very realistic for people compared to a decade ago.”
Both interviews are currently making rounds online sparking conversations and inspiring many to not give up on their goals.
However, one writer-producer on Twitter pointed out the story’s dark side.
“The message here is not ‘never give up’, it's ‘look at how shit the industry is at bringing talent to the surface’,” wrote Ife Grillo asking people to start the conversation on how inaccessible the industry is that many talented artists struggle to rise.
“Stop romanticizing struggle,” Grillo and many others on Twitter wrote following the many news sites that reported and acclaimed Hwang’s motivation to get Squid Game out.
Furthermore, Hwang’s struggle did not end with pitching the story. He explained writing and directing the series gave him the “100 percent” level of stress.
"Each night before filming, I would always think about ways to make the scenes better and revise the scripts,” he said. "I've always considered every work as a challenge, but this piece had a much higher risk, so I put all my effort into making it a good one."
The director has also addressed questions over a second season but for now, he is concerned if he will be able to write and direct it all by himself again.
Squid Game is a survival thriller series about 456 people playing deadly children’s games to win the grand prize of 45.6 billion won.
Tags: #SquidGames, #deadlygames, #thriller, #Netflix