Ryoo Seung-wan

Ryoo Seung-wan (born December 15, 1973) is a South Korean film director.

Ryoo Seung-wan was born in 1973 in Onyang, a small town in South Chungcheong Province.

With the choice of domestic films mostly limited to Propaganda and hostess films due to extreme government censorship, young Ryoo often opted for the more kinetic and free-spirited action films from the Shaw Brothers canon.

Watching Jackie Chan's Drunken Master turned him into a lifelong fan, and Ryoo spent his youth building his knowledge of and love for Hong Kong-style action films.

Dreaming of becoming a film director someday, he took taekwondo lessons and saved lunch money for three years during middle school to buy an 8mm camera, with which he shot short films.

Ryoo became his family's sole breadwinner after he lost his parents while in middle school.

He later dropped out of high school in 1992 and worked for six months to raise enough money to cover a year's worth of basic living expenses for his family.

After that he joined a private film workshop, and paid his tuition through several part-time jobs: as a construction worker, hotel janitor, vegetable cart driver, and even an instructor at an illegal driving school.

Ryoo, a fan of a young unknown director named Park Chan-wook's 1992 debut The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream and his work as a critic, went to meet Park and the two quickly became friends.

He made his debut in 1996 with the short film 'Dangerous Head', then worked as a director under director Park Chan-wook, took film lessons, and made his feature film debut in 2000 with Die Bad.

Those formative years also saw Ryoo's debut as a 'real' director, with the 1996 short Transmutated Head.

The 19-minute short's DP was Jang Joon-hwan (then a young film academy student), and it featured many familiar faces in the Korean indie scene, including character actor Heo Jong-soo and Lee Mu-young (future director of The Humanist).

From 1996 to 1999, Ryoo shot four low-budget short films starring himself, his younger brother Seung-bum, and several friends.

With a few years of experience as assistant director on Whispering Corridors and Park's 1997 film Trio, Ryoo was ready to jumpstart his own career.

Ryoo's debut was initially planned as a full-fledged feature film, but various issues forced him to instead shoot separate short films sharing common characters and themes.

In 1998 his short film Rumble won him the Best Film at the 1998 Busan Short Film Festival, and a year later he signed a contract to develop a feature film out of Rumble and three following sequels, one of which was his short Modern Man, which was not only the audience's favorite, but also won Best Film at a Short Film Festival in 1999.

In 2000, he received the Blue Dragon Film Awards for Best New Director, drawing attention from the film industry.

Ryoo Seung-wan is called Korea's 'action kid' for his unique action and rough life style, and he directed films such as Crying Fist and The Battleship Island.

In strikingly diverse styles but with a common narrative, these shorts were re-edited, combined and released in 2000 as Ryoo Seung-wan's feature directorial debut Die Bad.

The four shorts, shot on an ultra-low budget of around, became Ryoo's first feature film: Die Bad.

In an era when blockbusters like Shiri and Joint Security Area were the rage in Korean cinema, the action dramedy became an instant sensation.

Starring in the film himself along with some industry friends and even his little brother Ryoo Seung-bum, Ryoo became an instant cult hit, praised left and right for his masterful debut.

Critically acclaimed as powerfully visceral, gut-wrenching, and searingly angry, the film became an instant cult hit, earning attention for the Ryoo brothers.

One review described Ryoo Seung-bum's acting debut as "a startling, naturalistic turn," and he won Best New Actor at the Grand Bell Awards.

With his directorial debut, Ryoo became known as the "Action Kid."

With the country experiencing tremendous growth in high-speed Internet penetration, a few companies tried to bank on this momentum by producing online short films.

In 2000 the now defunct Cine4M website released a short film by Ryoo alongside Jang Jin's A Terrible Day and Kim Jee-woon's Coming Out.

Ryoo Seung-wan's follow-up Dachimawa Lee, titled after industry slang ("tachimawari" is a part of Kabuki theater plays that involve spectacular action scenes), the short Dachimawa Lee was a wild and hilarious a 35-minute short film parodying films he grew up with: Korean action films of the 60s and 70s, Bruce Lee and Shaw Brothers flicks, the machismo kitsch Korean melodramas, and of course Jackie Chan.

Coupling over-the-top voice dubbing with deliberately mistimed action, Dachimawa Lee was an enormous success online, making lead actor Im Won-hee a minor star and the Ryoo Brothers even bigger names.

Director Ryoo younger brother Seung-bum played Washington, a Young Thug with a heart of gold and a huge afro.

The short, streamed on the now-defunct Cine4M website, was enormously popular online.

Big expectations often lead to equally big disappointments, which is what industry insiders and critics felt about Ryoo's first real feature film, the gritty action noir No Blood No Tears.

The film mixed big stars like Jeon Do-yeon with talented actors from the theater world like Jung Jae-young.

Joining Director Ryoo once again was his younger brother Seung-bum, who was starting to make a name for himself in the industry independent of his brother.

Misunderstood as a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino clone, Ryoo's film was an exhilarating mix of all the elements that made Die Bad one of the best debuts films in Chungmuro's recent history, but it also added a nasty streak of ultra-realism.

The latter was contributed by Jung Doo-hong, occasionally an actor, but better known as the best action choreographer in the country, whose extreme realism balanced Ryoo's more fantasy-oriented cinematic sensibilities.

With No Blood No Tears a flop at the box office, it was a difficult period for Ryoo, who clearly felt betrayed by the same people who had put impossible expectations on his shoulders.

After that disappointment, Ryoo collaborated again with Jung Doo-hong and brother Seung-bum, along with newcomer Yoon So-yi.

The four embarked on Arahan, part modern-day wuxia and part local comedy.

Despite its commercial success, critics still weren't pleased, continuing to lament the loss of Chungmuro's enfant prodige.