[How About This Book] Bong Joon-ho Also Missed His Mark on the First Slate

Ju Seongcheol, Lee Hwajeong, and Six Others Present "My First Action" Volumes 1 & 2
31 Directors Reflect on the Times When They Were "Nobodies"
What Did They Hold On to When No One Promised Them Success?

Bong Joon-ho was not good at using a slate. More precisely, while attempting to clap his first slate, he managed to pinch his little finger. He had practiced quite a bit, but the feedback was cold: "How can you even mess up clapping a slate?" These days, his name is preceded by numerous accolades, from the Palme d'Or at Cannes to the Academy Award for Best Picture. This makes such a scene hard to imagine. It's as if a person's resume looks oddly flawless once they find success—the early outtakes are edited away, leaving only seamless takes pieced together. "My First Action" is a book that collects those cut-out frames left on the editing floor.

Director Bong Joonho, who won the Best Director award at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020 for the film Parasite, is holding the Oscar trophy. Parasite won four awards at the time, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. Photo by Yonhap News Agency

The original 2014 edition, "The Moment of Debut," featured 17 directors. Twelve years later, the revised and expanded edition has grown to two volumes, 31 directors, and 576 pages. From Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Hur Jin-ho, and Lee Joon-ik to Yoon Ga-eun, Yoon Dan-bi, Jeong Ju-ri, Im Seon-ae, Kim Cho-hee, and Han Jun-hee—in that time, the face of Korean film has changed, and so too has the path to becoming a director. Even the change in title is thought-provoking. The word "debut" suggests a starting line, perhaps somewhere on a red carpet, but after an "action," there is always a "cut," and sometimes an "NG" (outtake). The experiences of these 31 directors prove that becoming a director is not an event completed in a single moment.

The oldest rookie was Kang Yoon-sung. While his friends at companies climbed the ranks to section chief or department head, he opened and closed the doors of his wife's store. He’d write screenplays at a nearby café, running back to clean or watch the shop whenever his wife called. He became known as the "Shuterman." What he wrote during that time became "The Outlaws." For someone who debuted as a commercial film director well past forty, the phrase "youthful challenge" feels a bit awkward.

Park Chan-wook's perseverance was hardly exemplary either. During the back-to-back box office failures of "Moon is... the Sun's Dream" and "Trio," he comforted himself by criticizing successful films and filmmakers. He confesses to thinking, "I could do it better," as he disparaged movies made with tens of billions of won. While such a mindset isn't advised for moral cultivation, it apparently proved effective as a survival tactic for aspiring directors. Later, "Joint Security Area (JSA)" would emerge from this period.

Director Yoon-sung Kang. After helping with his wife's store work and holding onto his screenplay, he debuted in feature commercial films with "The Outlaws" well past his forties. His "first action" came later than others, but that was why it was a longer journey to start.

This is where a little skepticism about the book makes it even more interesting. "The Outlaws" eventually came for Kang Yoon-sung, and "JSA" came for Park Chan-wook, so their preceding years can now be reframed as "time they didn't give up." But what if those breakthroughs had never arrived? The same decade could just as easily have been nothing more than a period of unemployment and failure.

Of course, all 31 names in this book are those who became directors. Success in the present edits the past into foreshadowing, acting as a supremely skilled editor. For this reason, reading this book as a "Chungmuro self-improvement guide proving that anyone can achieve their dreams if they just persist" severely undercuts its appeal. In the film industry, there were far more who disappeared than those who persevered, and alongside talent, luck, money, people, and timing were all critical. The book's fascination is not in revealing the secret to success but rather in showing what these individuals fixated on, to a strangely obsessive degree, back when no one could know the outcome.

Approached this way, one can see faint traces of each director’s later filmography in their first films—not the presence of a fully formed artistic vision, but the beginnings of a lifelong, unshakable question.

Director Yoon Ga-eun. Having delicately explored the world of children in House of Hummingbird and Gloria, she once again delved into the boundaries of relationships and understanding in 2025 with Owners of the World.

Yoon Ga-eun once showed a screenplay to Lee Chang-dong, only to be asked, "But do you believe this story?" She says her mind went blank. Before this, after watching Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Nobody Knows," she finally realized what kind of film she wanted to make. Even after "The World of Us," "The House of Us," and up to "The Owner of the World" in 2025, she continues to question our conviction that we truly know someone. Now, looking back in 2026 after winning Best Director at the Baeksang Arts Awards, it feels ironic—what stayed with her was not Lee Chang-dong’s answer, but his question.

Lee Kyung-mi had a similar experience. When making "Crush and Blush," her objective was straightforward: instead of portraying "a woman seen through a man’s gaze," she wanted to depict "a woman who could see and speak for herself." Gong Hyo-jin’s character Yang Mi-sook was neither pretty, nor sweet, nor wise. She was often jealous, awkward, and at times even appalling. These were traits barely ever allowed of heroines in Korean romantic comedies at the time.

This fascination with unconventional female characters continued through "The Truth Beneath" and even to the strange hero in the Netflix series "The School Nurse Files." A director is not someone who shows everything with their first film, but instead, someone who reveals, perhaps unknowingly, what they will revisit for the rest of their career.

Jeong Ju-ri applied to the directing departments of several films and was rejected every time. So she devised a rather bold strategy. If no one would choose her as a director, she would write a feature-length script herself and insist: "Only I can direct this." That was the only way.

With her debut feature "A Girl at My Door," she focused on a girl exposed to violence. In her second feature, "Next Sohee," her gaze shifted to the death of a call center intern. In both 2014 and 2022, each film screened during the Critics’ Week at Cannes. The topics changed, but the core question remained: Why is the world so especially harsh to certain children? When making "Next Sohee," what she asked of audiences was to notice that behind the death of one child, there was a "system" at play. What she discovered with her first feature was not her style, but her perspective.

And for a director, the second film may be even scarier than the first. Kim Sung-hoon debuted with "How the Lack of Love Affects Two Men," but the film did not become a happy memory; it took another seven years before his next work, "A Hard Day."

Director Byun Youngjoo. For him, who had already created the 'Low Voice' series, 'Secret Love', and 'The Ballet School', 'Helpless' was yet another new beginning. For a director, the 'first action' does not come only once. Seoul International Women’s Film Festival

Byun Youngjoo remembers "Helpless" as her own new beginning. Even for a director who had already made the "Low Voice" series, "Secret Love," and "Ballet Academy," there still came a moment to start over. Jang Cheol-soo’s situation was even more complicated. After making it to Cannes with "Bedevilled" and reaching mass audiences with "Secretly, Greatly," he nevertheless endured a long gap before he could release another feature.

One might think that becoming a director comes simply by making your debut, but every film keeps asking, "So what’s next?" That’s why director Woo Min-ho’s chapter is titled, "The Moment of Debut Only Happens Once" in the book.

This book also subtly shows how subjective "debut" really is. For Bong Man-dae, his theater debut was the 2003 film "Sweet Sex and Love," but he had already spent years directing erotic videos before that.

Kim Cho-hee flew to France, bought a camera and lights with money from part-time jobs, and once appeared at her first shoot wearing 10cm high heels, not understanding the on-set culture. Later, she spent many years working on film sets, yet it took even longer for her first feature, "Lucky Chan-sil," to be released. While others now call her a "rookie director," she has actually spent over a decade around the film industry. In the movie world, an entry-level worker’s age rarely matters.

This is why Bong Joon-ho's episode with the slate remains so vivid in memory. Even when he released "Mickey 17" in 2025, he said that the fear before unveiling a new film was still very real. He admitted to watching whether audience members in the back row were checking their phones in the theater.

At one time he was a nervous staffer trembling over a slate; now, he is a globally anticipated director, yet the anxiety of showing a film to an audience has hardly changed. He’s simply exchanged the slate for smartphone screens—the object of worry has gotten a bit more expensive.

Thus, the least interesting way to read "My First Action" is as an exhortation to "never give up." What the stories of these 31 directors truly show is not the victory of persistence, but the fact that no one could foresee what that time would become for each person back then.

Kang Yoon-sung opening the shop door, Park Chan-wook’s sarcasm, Bong Joon-ho’s little finger, Lee Chang-dong’s question dropped in front of Yoon Ga-eun—none of these seemed legendary at the time. They were simply moments of awkwardness, embarrassment, and anxiety in an ordinary day.

The first scene is always like that. In the moment, you never really know it is the first scene. Only once the end credits roll do people rewind the film and say, "Ah, this is where it all started."

My First Action 1 & 2 | Written by Ju Seongcheol et al. | Han Kyoreh Publishing | 296 pages & 280 pages

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.