A scene from "The Assassin," a film depicting the shooting of first lady Yuk Young-soo. [Yonhap]
A scene from "The Assassin," a film depicting the shooting of first lady Yuk Young-soo. [Yonhap]

Heo Jin-ho, the director of "The Assassin," has pushed back against accusations that the film distorts history, saying he never set out to make a movie premised on the claim that Park Chung-hee ordered the assassination.

In an interview Wednesday on the YouTube channel Bong Ji-wook's Off the Record, Heo said he deliberately kept Park out of the foreground — a choice he acknowledged was a dilemma for him. "It wouldn't make sense to put in a scene where Park orders it and then gets shot himself," he said. "A director has to work with plausibility."

Heo also addressed claims that the film mimics a North Korean production and that Kim Jong-il issued an apology in connection with the incident. "Those are completely separate things," he said, adding that the apology claim in particular needed to be fact-checked before being used as the basis for criticism. "It really upsets me that people are making arguments based on that," he said.

He expressed concern that the controversy had spilled over onto the cast and crew. "Everyone — the actors and the staff — worked so hard on this film," he said. "I never imagined it would be denigrated like this. The actors are having a really difficult time right now."

"The actors knew all of this going in," he added, "and now they're having a historical distortion frame forced onto them."

[Yonhap]
[Yonhap]

The backlash has reached the cast directly. The SNS account of Lee Min-ho, who plays a society reporter in the film, has been flooded with comments criticizing his involvement, and actors who attended the VIP preview and left endorsements have faced similar criticism on their own accounts.

Ads featuring lead actor Yoo Hae-jin drew calls for contract cancellations, prompting some videos to disable their comment sections.

The production team issued a statement Monday saying the film "was not made to newly confirm a specific historical conclusion or to deny or distort established facts."

Production company Hive Media Corp denied claims that Chinese capital was involved in financing the film, calling the allegations groundless.

"The Assassin" is based on the shooting of first lady Yuk Young-soo at a Liberation Day ceremony on Aug. 15, 1974. Investigators at the time concluded that Mun Se-gwang, a Korean resident of Japan, had attempted to shoot then-President Park Chung-hee and that Yuk was struck by a stray bullet and killed. The film questions the number of bullets fired and the circumstances at the scene, tracing possibilities that diverge from the official account.


dbsdn1110@heraldcorp.com