How Squid Game Turned Rage and Desperation Into a Radical Hit

They told him no one would watch. In 2009, director Hwang Dong-hyuk tried writing what would become Squid Game as a feature film. It was a time of global financial crisis. Hwang himself was in debt, as were his mother and grandmother. But for all his efforts, he couldn’t secure financing for a movie about hundreds of desperate individuals competing to the death in children’s games for a large cash prize. “People were telling me that it’s too unrealistic,” Hwang says. It was too absurd, they said—and far too violent—so he put his script away. A decade passed, during which… Read Full Article