Kill Boksoon is a Korean movie about a seasoned assassin with a 100% success rate. She’s also a mother to her teenage daughter, Jae-young. Gil Boksoon may be one of the most renowned assassins in the industry, but when it comes to parenting, she finds it difficult to connect with her daughter.
Written and directed by Byun Sung-hyun (Kingmaker), this film has it all – action, comedy, drama, and a little romance. It not only gives the audience a glance at the inner workings of a network of assassin agencies but how one balances being a professional hitwoman and a mother.
‘Kill Boksoon’s official synopsis is:
Hired by the killing agency MK Ent., Gil Boksoon is both a killer with a 100% success rate and a mother of her teenage daughter, Jae-young. While Boksoon might be a seasoned assassin, she struggles with parenting. When it is about time to renew her contract with her agency, she makes up her mind to retire to repair the relationship with her daughter. While on her final assignment, before notifying the company of her decision regarding the contract, Boksoon discovers a secret about the mission and breaks the rule that killers must try to execute all assignments regardless of the circumstances. Now she becomes the target of her agency and the entire hitman industry.
The film has plenty of intricate and intense fight sequences, with impressive camera work. The emotional pressure on Boksoon increases as she struggles to balance her work and home life. The Movie Couple participated in a roundtable interview with director Byun Sung-hyun and lead actress Jeon Do-yeon (Crash Course In Romance) to talk about the upcoming Netflix title.
The World-Building of ‘Kill Boksoon’ and the Network of Assassin Agencies
While this isn’t the first film to feature a professional female assassin, Kill Boksoon did something different with how these killers-for-hires companies work. The inspiration came from Director Byun Sung-hyun wanting to draw parallels between the assassins industry and the Korean entertainment and film industry. The assassins-to-be undergo rigorous training and will “debut” after passing tests and evaluations. Each job the company takes is well rehearsed as if they’re on set or on stage.
Anyone who’s been following the Korean entertainment industry or the k-pop industry will spot the similarities right away – from the trainees to calling each job a “show”, down to the name of the company “MK Entertainment”. The film explores the conflicts between the multiple companies as well, as there are many rules within the assassins industry.
Finding The Leading Lady
Jeon Do-yeon has long been on director Byun’s radar. She is an accomplished actress with an impressive list of movie and television credits and was the first Korean actress to win Best Actress at the 60th Canne Film Festival. He crafted the script around Jeon Do-yeon, mirroring her real life as an actress and as a mother. Jeon mentions that it was really fun to see herself in a different character and under a different light, “sometimes it’s really hard to look at yourself subjectively, so it really helped me to understand myself and understand the conditions that I’m in while Gil Boksoon isn’t perfectly myself.”
When reading the script for the first time, Jeon said to director Byun “This character is so weird. She’s so not consistent” and Byun replied, “Oh, it’s you.”
This is Jeon Do-yeon’s first action film but you’d never know as the seasoned actress performed each action sequence effortlessly. “I thought, you know, practice makes perfect. I have to practice over and over again.” She trained for 4 months, learning long fight choreography utilizing different weapons such as an axe, a katana, firearms, and hand-to-hand combat.
The biggest challenge physically for Jeon was the pub fight scene with multiple assassins. The scene was a long take and required filming in three different spots simultaneously as the camera continuously move in a circle around the entire sequence, “it was a new challenge for me and the choreography was really important. And it was also important that we kept ourselves safe. So I think that was the most difficult action scene.”
Filming The Action Sequences
You can always count on intriguing and explosive action sequences in an assassin or spy film. To stand out, Director Byun found a way to film the fight scenes – particularly the Russian bar scene – in a very interesting way by utilizing the robot arm, “I wanted to make sure in the action scenes, the emotions of Min-Kyu (played by Sol Kyung-Gu) were very well capture.” The director also wanted to avoid being compared to John Wick, which is known for its stylized fight scenes, “I believe that in ‘John Wick’, a lot of the fight scenes are static so we tried to go the other way to make it a little more fancier, so to speak.”
The film also had a unique way of emphasizing the expert assassins on how the characters would think through their actions and calculate the possible outcome. “About the use of those different possibilities, that was something I knew I wanted to do ever since I had set on the subject material of the script”, says Byun. The director was inspired by the sequence in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock, “Because it had been used in ‘Sherlock’ before, I wanted to make sure that technologically it showed a lot of advancement since then.” This was an effective way to show how skillful and calculating as a professional killer, but unsuccessful when it came to conversations with her daughter. The director took care to make sure the effect was not overused, as he had plans to use it in the third act to highlight the final action scene.
Writing Boksoon And Her Daughter Jae-young
Boksoon may be the top assassin at MK Ent., but when it comes to talking to her 15-year-old daughter, she sometimes misses the mark. To write the conversation between Boksoon and Jae-young (Kim Si-A), director Byun went straight to the source. “ I literally took my laptop to Do-yeon’s home to observe her interactions with her daughter.” recounts Byun. “I have never written a kid character in my work before. I’m not married, and I don’t have kids so I literally don’t know how you talk to a kid.”, he admits. “It’s easy for me to write the lines for the killers. The difficult part was writing the conversations with the kid and the mother. So I would go to her home, we play board games together with her daughter. I observed a lot of the interactions and was inspired mostly by that.”
Kill Boksoon is more than an action film with trained assassins. It also explores the duality of a hitwoman and a mother, her struggle with parenting, and the complexity of the secret world of professional killers. Kill Boksoon is now streaming on Netflix.
