Ha Jung-woo lines up Andre Kim biopic and military thriller next

by girlfriday

Chungmuro mainstay Ha Jung-woo (Agassi, Assassination) never has any shortage of projects, but the coming year looks to be a particularly busy one for him. He’s currently giving interviews at Cannes while promoting Agassi, the Park Chan-wook film that just premiered at the festival, and he discussed the next three movies he’s got lined up, beginning with fantasy saga With the Gods, followed by an Andre Kim biopic, and then a military action thriller. All three movies are reunions with directors he’s worked with before on successful projects.

There’s already a lot of anticipation for the upcoming fantasy film series With the Gods (directed by Kim Yong-hwa of Take Off), where Ha Jung-woo will play a reaper who escorts souls to the afterlife. Cha Tae-hyun co-stars as an everyman who goes through trials to determine his ultimate fate, and Lee Jung-jae plays the king of hell who rules over all the other gods. The two-part epic will be filmed all at once beginning in late May, and Ha Jung-woo said, “The 8-month-long saga will begin soon.” Yikes, that’s a long shoot.

After that project, he’ll be moving on to Andre Kim, a biopic about the famous eccentric Korean fashion designer Andre Kim who passed away in 2010. The film has been in development for over two years already, with director Sohn Young-sung of legal thriller The Client at the helm. Ha Jung-woo is set to play Andre Kim in the film, set in the design world of 1960s Korea.

He said about the project, “We’re finally going to shoot it. There were an enormous number of versions of the script. We finally have one that’s satisfying. The director’s face began to shine.” Truth be told, I’ve never understood Andre Kim’s aesthetic, but I am interested to see the transformation Ha Jung-woo will undergo to play him. Hey, he shaved his head for Kundo, so I figure there’s not much he won’t do for a character.

Then after that movie, Ha’s third director reunion will be with Kim Byung-woo of the super tense thriller The Terror Live. They’re teaming up for a new film called PMC (or Private Military Company), about the members of a private mercenary company and an incident in an underground bunker.

That’s pretty vague, but The Terror Live is a great example of how you can put a guy in a room and turn it into an intense thriller — Ha Jung-woo played a news anchor who takes a call from a terrorist on live radio as the attacks are taking place in real time. I have no doubt that this director could lock a bunch of guys in a basement and turn it into a full-scale disaster. Script work is still being done on PMC, but it’ll probably be a while before Ha Jung-woo is done with the other two films anyway. Busy, busy.

In the meantime, Agassi will be released in Korea on June 1, and With the Gods plans to hit theaters next summer.

Via TV Report

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