KB News Desk
Pairing of screen legend and one of country’s most-watched stars anchors homegrown take on 2015 Hollywood charmer, coming for Chuseok
What says the Chuseok holidays quite like a family with a few days to kill and nowhere they have to be, and what suits that better than a remake of a Hollywood crowd-pleaser everyone already half-remembers liking?
Nancy Meyers’ 2015 workplace comedy was warm, wholesome, escapist stuff, a feel-good ode to well-meaning people doing nice things. The major draw, of course, was the pairing of Robert De Niro, as a widowed retiree who signs on to be a senior intern at a fashion startup, and Anne Hathaway, a frazzled young CEO who comes to lean on him.
A decade on, the premise has received a Korean makeover.
“The Intern,” directed by Kim Do-young, hands the respective lead roles to Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee, an eye-catching combination that has gotten people talking. De Niro is De Niro, but if the part has to go to someone in Korea, who else but Choi, widely regarded as the finest actor of his generation? And who better than Han, one of the most bankable K-drama stars, opposite him?
“I’ve never worn a tie to work in my life, so I got to do the whole office thing for real this time,” Choi said at a press conference Monday at a multiplex in central Seoul.
Choi did not pretend the source material came easy. “The original is a wonderful film, and I even thought, what do I think I’m going to get out of this?” he said.
What sold him was the prospect of remaking it on Korean terms — a chance to rework the story’s push-and-pull between generations for local audiences. “There’s a whole different flavor in taking the generational stuff, the friction, the coming-together, and putting it in our own register.”
Han, who plays the CEO role, chalked her presence up to luck. “I’m on the receiving end of these decisions, so I’m just grateful,” she said. “The second I heard Choi Min-sik was doing this, I wanted in. When am I ever going to share a frame with him again? Once in a lifetime, if that.”
Whether the unpleasant excesses of Korea’s workplace culture make it to the screen — the rigid pecking order, the mandatory after-hours drinking — is one thing. The bigger question is whether the original’s cutesy, saccharine streak carries over and, perhaps more to the point, whether the remake does anything about the faintly icky notion at the film’s core that a hard-charging woman needs the approval of a fatherly mentor to get out of her own way.
Which is exactly why the choice of the director matters here.
Kim broke out with the 2019 adaptation of “Kim Ji-young, Born 1982.” The bestselling feminist novel had set off a national argument three years earlier, and Kim delivered a cinematic version more grounded than the source, if still prone to a bit of finger-wagging. Earlier this year she changed lanes and proved she could work a crowd with the surprise hit “Once We Were Us,” a plain-vanilla romance built on the classic what-if, too-late melodrama.
The director seemed well aware of how much had shifted over the years.
“It wasn’t easy to remake something this beloved, so we focused on playing to the actors’ strengths,” Kim said. “It’s a 10-year-old movie, and the way we look at things now is different. I tried to let those two views sit together.”
What she was going for, she said, was the story of people who felt lived-in rather than made-up. “These are more realistic people than the ones in the original, with their own anxieties, their strengths and weak spots. Not an idealized comedy so much as characters with their feet on the floor.”
As for the inevitable comparisons to the original, Choi was all for it. “Compare all you want, that’s the audience’s call,” he said. “If we come up short, go ahead and criticize. Just know we meant it.”
“The Intern” opens in Korean theaters Sept. 16.
