Warner Bros., the major American film studio that released The Intern, is giving its 2015 workplace comedy a Korean remake starring Choi Min sik, the veteran South Korean actor known internationally for Oldboy, and Han So hee, a younger star familiar to Netflix viewers from My Name and Gyeongseong Creature. The two are stepping into roles associated with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, but the filmmakers say their goal is not to reproduce the Hollywood original.
The remake arrives after South Korean entertainment has moved far beyond the niche position it occupied in the U.S. when the original The Intern was released 11 years ago.
Parasite became the first non English language movie to win the Academy Award for best picture, Squid Game became a global television phenomenon, and Korean music and television have built sustained audiences far outside Asia. Netflix now describes Korean programming as its most watched non English content, while Warner Bros. Discovery itself has expanded its ties with the Korean entertainment industry through a production and distribution partnership with CJ ENM, one of South Korea’s largest media companies.
The Korean The Intern turns that cultural flow in the opposite direction. Instead of Hollywood remaking a Korean success for American audiences, an American film is being reconstructed around Korean actors, language and social tensions. The experiment matters to Hollywood because it shows another way established American stories can travel overseas. Rather than simply exporting the original movie, a studio can preserve the underlying story while allowing another entertainment industry to rebuild it around its own audience.
That approach is particularly relevant to The Intern because the original already has a substantial following in South Korea. The De Niro and Hathaway movie drew about 3.61 million moviegoers there, meaning the Korean filmmakers are working with an audience that already knows both the story and the performances they are replacing.
Director Kim Do young said at a press event in Seoul on Aug. 24 that the popularity of the original made the remake difficult, but also made imitation a poor strategy.
“The original received so much love that making a remake was not easy,” Kim said. “We focused as much as possible on bringing out the appeal of the actors.”
Kim said 11 years have also changed the workplace surrounding the story. Her version retains the central relationship between an older intern and younger employees but moves it into contemporary Korean corporate life.
Han plays Sunwoo, the founder of a fashion company that has become a rising industry challenger only 3 years after its launch. Choi plays Giho, a man with 37 years of professional experience who joins the company as an older intern, making him a veteran in life but one of the most junior people in the office.
That setup gives the Korean remake a cultural conflict that can be immediately understood at home but looks different from the one De Niro encountered in the American film.
South Korean workplaces have traditionally attached considerable importance to age, seniority and rank. Younger startups and technology companies have challenged parts of that culture with more casual dress, freer communication and less emphasis on rigid chains of command. The fictional company in The Intern belongs to that newer world.
Choi said he watched younger employees around Pangyo, a technology and startup center south of Seoul where he lives, while preparing for Giho.
He noticed workers heading to the office dressed much more casually than employees from his father’s generation. Some wore shorts during hot weather, while the visible formality and hierarchy he associated with older Korean workplaces appeared less pronounced.
The company in the movie works in much the same way. Employees operate freely and are relatively distant from the strict seniority and top down authority familiar to older generations.
Giho finds the environment strange, but he does not enter the company believing the younger workers need to be corrected. Instead, he watches them with curiosity.
“If it were really me, I probably would have been so confused that I would have resigned immediately,” Choi joked. Giho, by contrast, finds the unfamiliar culture interesting and observes it with patience.
That difference was one reason Choi believed the remake could become something other than a Korean copy of a Robert De Niro movie.
Choi acknowledged that accepting a role associated with De Niro created pressure. He said the original was so strong that he initially wondered why he should put himself in a position where comparisons were inevitable.
But he also rejected the idea that remakes are inherently inferior.
Theater and television repeatedly reinterpret existing stories, Choi said, and he believed The Intern could acquire a different character by expressing affection, cooperation and conflict between generations through Korean social relationships.
Once filming began, Choi said the director and cast agreed to stop thinking about the original as much as possible.
“The biggest difference between the original The Intern and our The Intern is that Choi Min sik, Han So hee and the other actors are in it and Kim Do young directed it,” he said. “That is the biggest distinction. It will clearly be different.”
Han faced the same problem with Hathaway’s character.
Her Sunwoo is a young chief executive who has devoted herself to a company she built in only 3 years, while struggling with the gap between what she must take responsibility for as its leader and what she still wants for herself.
Han said she drew partly from friends around her age who operate startups. Watching them helped her think about the instability that comes with being responsible for a company while remaining a relatively young person with personal ambitions of her own.
“It would be a lie to say I felt no pressure,” Han said. “I tried to forget the original as much as possible and interpret Sunwoo in my own way.”
That process eventually brought elements of Han’s own personality into the character, helping her move further from Hathaway’s version. Asked for one difference, Han joked that her Sunwoo is “a little foolish.”
Kim said Han’s enthusiasm for the project was one of the reasons she was cast. The director wanted actors who were interested in interpreting the material rather than reproducing performances audiences had already seen.
Kim also brought contemporary Korean language into the screenplay, including abbreviations commonly used by younger people. She said the goal was to create an office story that could speak to people entering their first jobs, workers already established in their careers and older employees approaching retirement.
That makes the Korean The Intern less a story about whether Choi can replace De Niro or Han can replace Hathaway than about what remains of a Hollywood movie after another culture makes it its own.
Korean entertainment spent much of the past decade demonstrating that stories created in Seoul could reach audiences in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere without first being remade by Hollywood. The Intern now presents the reverse experiment. Hollywood supplies the familiar story, while Korea decides what parts of it need to change.
