Director of 'The Assassin' says Park Chung-hee behind wife's killing 'wasn't even something I wanted to imagine'

Heo Jin-ho, the director of "The Assassin," a film that has drawn controversy over alleged historical distortion, said he never even considered a premise in which former President Park Chung-hee was behind the assassination of first lady Yuk Young-soo.

Heo appeared Tuesday on MBC's current affairs program "PD Notebook," saying he was in fifth grade when Yuk was killed. "Not only my parents but my sisters and I were all deeply saddened," he said. "The whole nation seemed to be in grief, and that is why I have never forgotten the incident."

Heo said he later watched documentaries on the shooting and was struck by the gap between the 1974 official investigation findings and material that emerged in 2005. "I thought this was an attractive subject I wanted to explore as a film," he said.

Heo said his decision to base the film on the shooting of Yuk stemmed from the discrepancies between the 1974 investigation announcement and investigative documentaries broadcast in 2005 by major terrestrial networks — MBC's "Now We Can Talk" and SBS's "It Wants to Know."

Heo was particularly emphatic that a scenario placing Park at the center of the plot was never part of his thinking. "The premise that President Park Chung-hee knew about the assassination of Yuk Young-soo and either turned a blind eye or planned it himself — that just didn't sit right with me," he said. "If I were the president, could I order something like that? Against my own wife? That wasn't even something I wanted to imagine. So I set that aside from the very beginning."

"There were probably people who believed the 1974 investigation findings as fact," Heo said. "But new facts also came to light in 2005. In a sense, major media outlets and historians raised questions about this. I took those questions and made a film — I dramatized the questions."

Heo said the 2005 documentaries included interviews with many people present at the time of the shooting, including security agents, a forensics chief and even the head of the security detail who allowed Moon Se-gwang to enter the venue. Heo said he built the film around the allegations raised in those documentaries.

Heo also said that more than 20,000 people attended preview screenings before the film's release, and that a separate press preview was held as well — yet at the time, no one raised the suggestion that the film implicated Park Chung-hee as the mastermind behind the attack.

"I am genuinely curious myself about how it came to this," he said.

Meanwhile, "The Assassin" held the top spot on the South Korean box office for a sixth consecutive week as of 7 a.m. Tuesday, with cumulative admissions reaching 3,382,132, according to the Korean Film Council's integrated ticketing network.