Years active 1998-present Name Choi Dong-hoon Hangul 최동훈 | Spouse Ahn Soo-Hyun (m. 2007) McCune–Reischauer Ch‘oe Tong-hun | |
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Awards Blue Dragon Film Award for Best New Director Nominations Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Director, Grand Bell Award for Best Director Movies Assassination, The Thieves, Tazza: The High Rollers, Jeon Woo‑chi: The Taois, The Big Swindle Similar People Lee Jung‑jae, Oh Dal‑su, Kim Yoon‑seok, Ha Jung‑woo, Duek‑mun Choi | ||
Revised Romanization Choi Dong-hun | ||
Choi Dong-hoon (Hangul: 최동훈; born 1971) is a South Korean film director. He ranks as one of the most consistently successful directors working in contemporary Korean cinema, with all five of his films becoming commercial hits -- The Big Swindle attracted 2.12 million viewers, Tazza: The High Rollers at 6.84 million, Jeon Woo-chi: The Taoist Wizard at 6.13 million, The Thieves at 12.9 million, and Assassination at 12.7 million.
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Career
After graduating from the prestigious Korean Academy of Film Arts, Choi Dong-hoon first worked as an assistant director on Im Sang-soo's Tears (he subsequently appeared in acting cameos in several of Im's films).
After working on the screenplay for two years, Choi made his feature film directorial debut in 2004 with The Big Swindle and single-handedly re-imagined the heist and crime thriller genre into something uniquely Korean. His follow-up Tazza: The High Rollers, a gambling flick adapted from Huh Young-man and Kim Se-yeong's manhwa, was the second highest grossing Korean film of 2006, and producer/Sidus FNH CEO Cha Seung-jae praised Choi as "a genius storyteller for his spectacular ability to develop elaborate stories." 2009's Jeon Woo-chi: The Taoist Wizard was lauded as the first Korean fantasy/superhero blockbuster movie, earning Choi a reputation as an artistically innovative and commercially successful writer-director.
He returned to the heist genre in 2012 with the star-studded crime caper The Thieves, which attracted almost 13 million viewers in 70 days to become the second all-time highest grossing movie in Korean film history. In 2015, Choi made his first period film with Assassination, about freedom fighters during Japan's colonial rule, and it was once again a box office hit, crossing the 10 million admissions milestone on the 70th anniversary of South Korean independence.
Tazza and Thieves leading lady Kim Hye-soo described him as "a genius who also works extremely hard. I think he knows who he is, the exact kind of films that he wants to make, and how to make them."
Filmography
Awards
