How a man from Seoul with an office for a decade in Mumbai has been hell-bent on unclogging the writers’ block in Indian cinema
Film producer Hyunwoo Thomas Kim
Back in 2014, when South Korean-born, American-educated producer, Hyunwoo Thomas Kim (Thomas), had shifted his film firm, Kross Pictures, from LA to Seoul, he’d regularly receive emails from one “Balaji” in Mumbai.
Assuming some sorta spam still, doubting Thomas once opened the mail from this company called Balaji. It looked legit. Thomas holds global filming rights to Keigo Higashino’s Japanese bestseller, The Devotion of Suspect X (Devotion).
Korean, Japanese, Chinese film adaptations of which have all topped national box-office charts. Blokes at Balaji wished to acquire it for a Hindi remake.
The way it works for Thomas as producer, who buys rights of films/series/books/IPs, puts together projects is—foremost, he wishes to know, who’s gonna direct, before he gets onboard.
The director attached to Devotion was Sujoy Ghosh. Thomas watched Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012), was suitably impressed. Hence, he came down to Mumbai, “first time in India”, to meet with the director and execs.
What he saw, he tells me, left him amazed: “For one, everyone speaks English, which meant it’s easy to do business. Koreans, in general, don’t know anything about India. How many of them do you see walking around here (as tourists)? None.”
Stills from Jaane Jaan, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan, and Te3n, starring Amitabh Bachchan
The second thing he would’ve noticed is the sheer number of Korean films that continue to be inspired/copied into Hindi — ever since, in particular, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) as Sanjay Gupta’s Zinda (2006) — that the Seoul film industry still simply doesn’t know/care about.
Thomas set up an office in Mumbai, in 2015, based on a hypothesis, he tells me, in the conference room of his company’s SV Road, Bandra, offshoot.
“I figured, India has a huge market, great directors, actors… What it lacks are writers of the calibre in Korea. There was a gap to fill. Initially, people thought I was crazy to spend so much time/money [in Mumbai]. Or that I had a girlfriend in India.
I don’t!”
Over the past decade, Thomas has produced six feature films in India, in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu (based on Korean films/scripts, starring the likes of Sonam Kapoor, Samantha Ruth Prabhu), besides dubbing Korean Web Toons, and a slate of reality shows coming up, one of which, based on cricket!
His Bollywood films have been headlined by Amitabh Bachchan (Ribhu Dasgupta’s Te3n, based on Jeong Keun-Seob’s The Montage), and Kareena Kapoor Khan, that is Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan, Netflix India’s top
title of 2023.
It was based on Higashino’s Devotion, which is how Thomas’s India story began. The short answer to why it took him eight long years to complete that circle is: Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam (2013), already inspired
by Devotion!
Thomas considered suing Drishyam’s producers, but “[Balaji’s] Ekta Kapoor backed off.”
Thomas has since sued and won thrice, over unauthorised copies of material he owns rights to—such as Lee Hwan-kyung’s Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2013), which released as a Kannada hit, Pushpaka Vimana (2017).
Court ordered injunction against it, after theatrical run. Thomas smiles, “I realised the Indian judicial system is fair. Now, I announce, once I acquire [rights of Korean content].”
The global Korean Spring vis-à-vis films is, in fact, part of a wider Hallyu, or K-wave, that includes K-pop, K-dramas, K-beauty/fashion, K-everything!
My reading of it, based on Euny Yong’s brilliant book, The Birth of Korean Cool (2014), is it got initiated by the Korean government — directly investing in films, bands, etc, with soft-power export as instrument of state policy — after the 1997 East-Asian financial crisis.
Thomas asks me, instead, “Have you seen Korean films from before 2000? They’re terrible!”
There’s that one blockbuster, he recalls, Kang-Je-kyu’s espionage thriller, Shiri (1999), that blew open the Korean film industry: “Best minds from multiple fields felt there was money to be made from movies. As did major corporations.”
This included screenwriters, who became “respected names”. The outcome is, 80 per cent of Korean content gets consumed globally.
Thomas says, “Unlike India, where there hasn’t been a super-hit global title like Squid Games or Parasite, because the raw writing talent is not of global standards. But things are changing...”
Over the years, Thomas groans, he’s rounded up some of Indian cinema’s best writers to localise Korean scripts: “I give them Mercedes Benz. They’re used to Mahindra. No knock on Mahindra. But the calibre is different. It hasn’t been easy to execute, once they adapt.”
Can you merely throw money at that problem, and even reverse the Korea-India screen trade?
To be fair, as I’ve observed with Bollywood, it takes a second to strike off an idea — the effort is in the building of it. Also, original writing is such a laboriously personal/solitary pursuit, even meditative, that can’t be mediated by endless feedback/meetings that corporates and honchoes of all hives love, mainly to feel self-important.
Speaking of which, Thomas is obviously the oddball at movie meetings in Mumbai; the sole rep from Seoul. But he gets taken seriously: “I’ve met with everyone, including Shah Rukh Khan, who first messaged me about a script.”
Likewise, he adds, “Just yesterday, I texted Akshay Kumar, who’s in London, asking him to watch a particular film that everyone in the industry knows about. Sujoy [Ghosh] has already worked on its draft. If Akshay agrees, we have a project.”
That’d be daebak (or jackpot), as the Koreans say.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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