Director Kang Yoon-seong opened a new genre in the crime action genre by recording 6.88 million viewers and winning the New Director Award at the 54th Baeksang Arts Awards and the New Director Award at the 23rd Chunsa Film Festival, capturing hot action and speedy development with the movie ‘Criminal City’. For the first time, he directed and wrote the series. It’s a ‘Casino’.
Director Kang Yun-seong, who was the first series challenger, said, “It’s my first time doing a drama, so I’ve been looking at the reaction. I usually don’t look at the reaction even when I’m making a movie. I looked it up. I saw bad reviews in the beginning, but I thought it was fortunate that there were many good reviews in the second half.”
Director Kang Yoon-seong said, “I predicted the likes and dislikes in the beginning,” and said, “While writing this work from the beginning, I thought that there should not be only incidents and happenings in the casino. I thought it would only be a list of incidents and accidents in the space of a casino, so there had to be a certain portion of the character’s narrative, and there was a story that was difficult to follow if Cha Moo-sik was not understood. If you watch until season 2, why did you have to lay a lot of character narratives in season 1? You will be able to understand.
Director Kang Yoon-seong, who created a story centered on the life of a character named ‘Choi Moo-sik’, with the desires and betrayals of various characters in the space of a casino, said, “I didn’t want to express only simple gambling and human desire. I wanted to show him, and I wanted him to be seen as a person on the borderline, neither good nor evil.”
Director Kang Yoon-seong, who said he wanted to show a character whose good and evil are not revealed, said, “It’s not that I think that way about human beings themselves. That was the goal. That’s why I didn’t worry too much about who was good or bad among the people in this room, or the conflict between good and evil. Since they were characters who pursued their desires anyway, it was natural for them to become friends or enemies depending on their desires at the time.” He explained that it contained the intention of letting the public indirectly experience the unpopular space of a casino.
Maybe that’s why director Kang Yun-seong emphasized ‘reality’ for this work from the press conference. Director Kang Yun-seong said, “I wanted to make people believe that these people exist, and put a hidden camera in the casino to show them as if they were real.” He said that it was portrayed as a movie, and thanks to the actors, a lot of reality was saved.
Director Kang Yoon-seong, who said he did a lot of research for the writing, said, “I learned about how junket rooms work, about rolling, and how people who come to casinos fall in love with casinos through coverage. I wanted to portray that this happens in it.” Most of the stories are constructed through interviews, and in some important cases, actual events are brought in, but cinematic modifications are made to a level that does not interfere with the overall story of the work. It was revealed that he wrote the screenplay after editing it.
While directing a series rather than a movie, and even through an OTT channel rather than a broadcasting company, director Kang Yoon-seong said, “I was envious when ‘The Glory’, which was released at the same time, ranked first in the world, and the reason why it became a lot of issues was revealed at once. I thought about it for a while, but from then on, I only thought about wanting more people to see our work rather than competing with other works, and I hoped that there would be a good response abroad.” Talk about how you feel about the reaction.
Since Disney+ does not have a public ranking like Netflix, director Kang Yoon-seong said, “I did not receive any specific reports from Disney, but I only heard that the overseas response was good and that the number of subscribers increased significantly in Korea.” finished delivery to Disney in December of last year, so now I’m trying to get away from ‘Casino’, but it’s not easy.”
The biggest advantage of telling a story as a series on the OTT platform is that there is no time for sufficient explanation of the character and no restrictions on expression. He also said that he enjoyed this advantage to his heart’s content and said, “However, since it was my first time filming a drama, there was too much to be filmed in a day. For a movie, if you check the filming space in advance and rehearse with the actors before filming, you can go to the filming location for the first time that day. It’s also a place where I can see actors for the first time on the day of filming.”
Director Kang Yoon-seong, who usually directs with his own scripts, also wrote the script for the 16 episodes of the first series, ‘Casino’. He said, “I’ve been writing screenplays since 1998, and I blamed myself for not making my debut because I didn’t work hard. There has to be a story, and I think the time and effort devoted to the story is essential.” He added, “I’m not perfect either, but I’ve never received a perfect text while working on it. It would be nice if there were more concerns about the story, so even if I don’t write it myself and direct it with someone else’s writing, I don’t want to just direct it without revising a single piece. No. It was too difficult to write all 16 episodes this time. Now, I want to work on adapting and directing the works I wrote,” he said about the direction of his future work.
Director Kang Yoon-seong, who wants to tell a story that is not limited to genre, era, place, or country, said, “I want to challenge various genres and do things that others have not done. In terms of science fiction, when others go to space, I want to go underground. Others I haven’t done this, but I want to tell a story I can imagine.”
‘Casino’ depicts the intense story of a man who became a casino legend in the Philippines, ‘Chamoo-sik Cha’, who became a casino legend in the Philippines, gets caught up in a murder case and starts making his last bet at the edge of his life. has revealed Season 2 will release episodes 1-3 on February 15th, followed by one episode every Wednesday at 5pm. ‘Casino’ is available on Disney+.
Kyunghee Kim / Photo courtesy of Disney+