It only makes thematic sense to get a duo to tackle a television adaptation of The Sympathizer – itself half spy thriller, half migration odyssey
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 09: Don McKellar, left, and Park Chan-wook attend the Los Angeles Premiere of HBO Original Limited Series The Sympathizer at The Paramount LA on April 9 in Los Angeles.by Viet Thanh Nguyen – the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner about a Vietcong double agent acting as a mole within a South Vietnamese refugee community in Los Angeles – is certainly a contender for one of the most compelling of this century’s cloak-and-dagger literature.
But who would have guessed the right pair would be Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter Don McKellar and South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook? Talking to the showrunners, back and forth on opposite sides of the world, is not far off from the ping-pong diplomacy of howwas written at times. Chung – himself acting as a kind of double agent – translated Park’s scripts from Korean to English for McKellar, who would then do his own passes and send them back.
The story is told in the voice of the Captain as he writes and rewrites a confession in a Communist re-education camp. He constantly makes the reader cackle with his deadpan depictions of the absurd Catch-22s of war and exile and life as a minority in the United States; then, once you’ve let down your guard, he delivers emotional gut punches with his description of the plot’s sometimes gruesome human drama.
That connection relates in part to McKellar’s grandmother, who was born in China to what he calls “actual missionary stock” – and his own youth where he read Chinese communist texts in Toronto much to his parents’ dismay. But it’s also that for McKellar, as for Park, the period in which the book is set is that of his youth. “That sort of strange, broiling stew of mid-seventies culture and politics was definitely where I came into the picture,” he says.
Mckellar Park Sympathizer Captain Sense Series Game Book Bong Joon-Ho Viet Thanh Nguyen Park
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