Ryoo Seung-wan

Ryoo Seung-wan (born December 15, 1973) is a South Korean film director. He made his debut in 1996 with the short film 'Dangerous Head', then worked as a director under director Park Chan-wook, took film lessons, and made his feature film debut in 2000 with Die Bad. In 2000, he received the Blue Dragon Film Awards for Best New Director, drawing attention from the film industry. Ryoo Seung-wan is called Korea's 'action kid' for his unique action and rough life style, and he directed films such as Crying Fist and The Battleship Island. Early life Ryoo Seung-wan was born in 1973 in Onyang, a small town in South Chungcheong Province. With the choice of domestic films mostly limited to propaganda and hostess films due to extreme government censorship, young Ryoo often opted for the more kinetic and free-spirited action films from the Shaw Brothers canon. Watching Jackie Chan's Drunken Master turned him into a lifelong fan, and Ryoo spent his youth building his knowledge of and love for Hong Kong-style action films. Dreaming of becoming a film director someday, he took taekwondo lessons and saved lunch money for three years during middle school to buy an 8mm camera, with which he shot short films. Career Early years Ryoo became his family's sole breadwinner after he lost his parents while in middle school. He later dropped out of high school in 1992 and worked for six months to raise enough money to cover a year's worth of basic living expenses for his family. After that he joined a private film workshop, and paid his tuition through several part-time jobs: as a construction worker, hotel janitor, vegetable cart driver, and even an instructor at an illegal driving school. Ryoo, a fan of a young unknown director named Park Chan-wook's 1992 debut The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream and his work as a critic, went to meet Park and the two quickly became friends. Those formative years also saw Ryoo's debut as a 'real' director, with the 1996 short Transmutated Head. The 19-minute short's DP was Jang Joon-hwan (then a young film academy student), and it featured many familiar faces in the Korean indie scene, including character actor Heo Jong-soo and Lee Mu-young (future director of The Humanist).