At the beginning, Squid Game, it is in 2009 a film scenario by a young graduate of a film school in Korea, refused by all the studios. Its author Hwang Dong-hyuk was inspired by his own life to write this story of a deadly contest in which thousands of over-indebted Koreans enlist, only one of whom will come out alive with a big prize pool. Thirteen years later, Netflix accepts the director’s project. But instead of making a film, it’s about making a series. Problem, Hwang Dong-hyuk does not like series.
“I’m more of a movie fan. So I must have watched a lot of good American TV shows before I started writing my own.”
Hwang Dong-hyukon franceinfo
“I had to learn how they end each episode. They call it a cliffhanger, right?” The author gets down to the work of adaptation: “It took me six months to turn the script for the film into a series of eight episodes. It was longer than I thought, because I often reached dead ends. Four or five times, I said to myself that I ‘was going to give up’, declared Hwang Dong-hyuk.
First difference between film and series, the director has more time to install his characters. “In a movie, you only have a few scenes to introduce a character, because you don’t have a lot of time. To introduce Gi-Hun, there were only three scenes in the film. And for the other characters, there was no intro scene at all. We discovered them in the first game.” Hwang Dong-hyuk said.
In the movie version of Squid Game, each game lasted only 15 minutes. They followed each other quickly. By transforming the film into a series, the author will take his time but also adapt to the way in which the public consumes the series. “I first thought of doing one episode per game, plus one episode before to start and another to finish. So eight episodes. But I changed during the writing because I wanted to show the game as soon as possible If there is no game in the first episode, viewers might lose interest. But if the audience finds the first episode boring, they stop watching. So I slipped the first game in the middle of the first episode. Then it was in the second episode that I decided to show the participants who leave the game and why they come back. It allowed to show the story of each character in real life”, concludes Hwang Dong–hyuk.