Han Jun-hee at Busan 2026: Genre, Risk and Backing New Directors

On Oct. 10, 2026, Variety’s interview report covered a masterclass given by Han Jun-hee, the filmmaker behind Coin Locker Girl and the military drama D.P. He used the occasion to argue that creative caution is less safe than it looks. The talk was part of Netflix’s Creative Asia program at the Busan International Film Festival, known as BIFF, and Kim Kijae, an executive with many years in creative roles at Netflix Korea, led the conversation. This account sticks to what Han said there about risk: where he takes it, how he limits it, and why he asks others to take it with him.

A gamble Korean storytellers call “go or stop”

Han told the audience that a story needs bold choices to hold anyone’s interest. He noted that Korean has a name for such gambles, “go or stop,” and drew the conclusion that a run of extremely safe decisions can turn into the larger risk. Variety tied the idea to his own start as a viewer: after binge-watching House of Cards, he came away with a single ambition, to tell a story nobody had told before that many people would still want to watch.

Niche subjects, wrapped in genre

That ambition shows in his choice of material. Variety observed that he keeps picking subjects at risk of staying too narrow, among them Korean military service in D.P. and high school violence in Weak Hero Class 1. His method, as he described it, is to give each subject a familiar form: a buddy-movie frame for D.P. and an action wrapper for Weak Hero.

He did not present the method as free of cost. Han said that dressing material in a genre raises its own question, whether the genre ends up neutralizing what makes the story unusual and leaves it too ordinary. He called the clash between the two the defining moment of the work, and he said he believes no story is beyond being turned into a film or a series.

Casting as a calculated bet

The same reasoning applied to casting. When some people feared that Weak Hero would attract only male viewers because of its violence, Han held that anyone could relate to it. His strategy rested on three young leads, Hong Kyung, Choi Hyun-wook and Park Ji-hoon. He reasoned that one of the three would be, in his words, “a crush for someone” in the audience, and that this would widen the series beyond the public its violence suggested.

Creator and producer, backing newcomers

Some of Han’s bets, Variety wrote, were placed away from the director’s chair. He frequently serves as creator and producer of shows that other people direct, and Weak Hero is one of them. He did not consider himself the best choice to direct it, so he helped Yoo Soo-min, a director who was still emerging at the time, begin a career on the series. Han said debuts have become harder to land in Korea, and argued that backing newcomers matters to the long-term health of Korea’s creative sector.

Dead-End Job, a mystery-horror series for Netflix, follows the same pattern. Han created it and guided the creative side of the project, and Kim Da-min directed. Variety described Kim Da-min as a screenwriter whose credits include A Killer Paradox. According to the report, the story follows a young man weighed down by debt who accepts a part-time post at a staffing agency, paid at 50 times the minimum wage, though any shift might end his life. Variety said the series blends mystery, action, disaster, black comedy and horror. Han described it as a tale about how hard it is to make a living, delivered through a fantasy wrapper, and said the team wanted a director with plenty of energy for what he called a “reckless” challenge.

The Blue Road: actors before spectacle

In Variety’s account, The Blue Road brings Han back to directing, yet he rejected the word comeback, because he had never stopped working off camera. The series is a joint production based on the manga Blue Road, a Korean and Japanese work credited to writer Edogawa Keishi and artist Kwon Ka-ya, dated 2002. Nagayama Eita and Son Suk-ku head the cast, and the project was shown in the On Screen section of BIFF. Han said he preferred to build the series around the performances of its actors rather than around large-scale visual effects.

On set, he worked with Korean and Japanese crews whose habits differed. In his description, Korean crews are flexible, adaptable and fast, while Japanese crews prepare everything meticulously and execute with great precision. He said the two styles had to be meshed. Early frictions turned into compromise, and by his account each side picked up habits from the other. The ending went through many rewrites, and Han likened the series to “a living creature.”

Luck, criticism and the work of preparing

Han ranked luck among the most important ingredients of a career in the business. He ended the session with advice for aspiring filmmakers: wanting a masterpiece from the very start is natural, but they should not fear criticism and should keep writing, which he named as the preparation. If a piece does not work, he said, they should try again, because artistic work is still work, and anyone who has prepared as well as possible will be ready to seize luck when it arrives.

Where risk shows up in his account

• In the story: bold choices over safe ones, with genre as a wrapper that must not flatten the subject.
• In casting: three young leads chosen so that at least one would win over a given viewer.
• In hiring: newcomers such as Yoo Soo-min given a first directing job, and an energetic director sought for Dead-End Job.
• In production: two national crews with different methods, and an ending rewritten many times.

All of this rests on Variety’s account of a single session. It says nothing about how the projects performed with audiences, so the views above remain Han’s own, as relayed on Oct. 10, 2026.

Photo: Derks24 / Pixabay