Apparently shooting on film just isn’t good enough for some filmmakers. Park Chan-wook – renowned Korean director of such modern horror/action classics as Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Thirst has just finished shooting a his latest horror film. The 30 minute short, entittled Paranmanjang, was shot entirely on his iPhone 4! It’s nice to see modern filmmakers trying to break out of the pack and use the new media as a new means of expressing cinema. Such actions just might earn Park Chan-wook a spot amongst the illustrious pantheon of MVP’s Patron Saints of Guerrilla Filmmaking.
From the Wall Street Journal, “From hunting for a film location, shooting auditions, to doing a documentary on the filming process, everything was shot with the iPhone 4,” Park said, “We went through all the same film-making processes except that the camera was small.”
For the short, he teamed up with his younger brother Park Chan-kyong, a media artist, and KT Corp., the wireless operator that is the exclusive distributor of iPhone in South Korea. KT paid for a portion of the $130,000 in production costs.
The short is a fantastical tale that begins with a middle-aged man fishing one afternoon and then, hours later at night, catches the body of a woman. The panicked man tries to undo the intertwined fishing line, but he gets more and more entangled. He faints, then wakes up to find himself in the white clothes that the woman was wearing. The movie’s point of view then shifts to the woman and it becomes a tale of life and death from a traditional Korean point of view.
Park was not the first South Korean moviemaker to experiment this way. Last October, KT sponsored a film festival with 12 short movies also made with the iPhone 4. Mr. Park’s new work will be screened at nine cinemas nationwide later this month.”
For more information, see the original Wall Street Journal article here.
