Violence and Park Chan Wook seemed to go hand-in-hand. Until now, that is.

With his new film I'm a Cyborg but It's Okay, which opens in Singapore on Thursday, the Oldboy director has made a clean break from the kind of stylised violence that rocketed him to international prominence.

Not only that, but he cast his lead actor Rain based on the fact that the actor-singer was hugely popular with women — not exactly the kind of thing that one would expect of a director whose previous films featured character actors rather than pop idols.

"In Korea, there are many award presentations and I was attending one of these when I saw Rain," Park said in an email interview. "I saw the effect he had on the women, many of whom are famous Korean actresses. I thought that he was a charismatic youth. So I made up my mind to cast him if I needed a young guy in my next movie."

Set in a mental hospital, Cyborg has Rain as a mentally unbalanced young man who believes he can steal other people's souls. He falls in love with a fellow patient, played by Im Su-jung, who believes she is a cyborg.

Upending expectations was all part of the plan for Park, whose 2003 cult film Oldboy was part of an ultra-violent trilogy that also included 2002's Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and 2005's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.

"I hope that no one who watches my films would recognise that they were shot by the same person," he said.

"I wanted to do something different after the revenge films and digress from reality by doing something mythical or fairy tale-like."

By the looks of things, Park will be sticking with such themes for a while. He revealed that his next film, Evil Live, would also have strong fantasy elements, not surprising considering it's about vampires.

"I was always frustrated by the notion of realism, which was everywhere," he said. "Somehow, I wasn't completely free from its influence."

While the South Korean audience was less than receptive to Cyborg — the film performed poorly at the box office — it won the Alfred Bauer Award at this year's Berlin Film Festival.

"Europeans think of Asian films as grotesque, violent or both. They don't pay attention to other types of Asian films and I hope that in the future, other films can arouse the curiosity of Europeans as well."


- TODAY/so