Ryoo Seung-wan

Ryoo Seung-wan (born December 15, 1973) is a South Korean film director.

Early life

Ryoo Seung-wan was born in 1973 in Onyang, a small town in South Chungcheong Province. With the choice of domestic films mostly limited to propaganda and hostess films due to extreme government censorship, young Ryoo often opted for the more kinetic and free-spirited action films from the Shaw Brothers canon. Watching Jackie Chan's Drunken Master turned him into a lifelong fan, and Ryoo spent his youth building his knowledge and love for Hong Kong action. Dreaming of becoming a film director someday, he took taekwondo lessons and saved lunch money for three years in middle school to buy an 8mm camera, with which he shot short films.

Career

Ryoo became his family's sole breadwinner after he lost his parents while in middle school. He later dropped out of high school in 1992 and worked for six months to raise enough money to cover a year's worth of basic living expenses for his family. After that he joined a private film workshop, and paid his tuition through several part-time jobs: as a construction worker, hotel janitor, vegetable cart driver, and even an instructor at an illegal driving school. Ryoo, a fan of a young unknown director named Park Chan-wook's 1992 debut The Moon Is... the Sun's Dream and his work as a critic, went to meet Park and the two quickly became friends. Those formative years also saw Ryoo's debut as a 'real' director, with the 1996 short Transmutated Head. The 19-minute short's DP was Jang Joon-hwan (then a young film academy student), and it featured many familiar faces in the Korean indie scene, including character actor Heo Jong-soo and Lee Mu-young (future director of The Humanist).

Yoo (Korean surname)

Ryu (also spelled Yoo or Yu or You or Ryoo) is the English transcription of several Korean surnames written as 유 or 류 in Hangul. Some of the family names written as Yoo are derived from the Chinese surnames Liu and Yu. As of 2000, roughly a million people are surnamed Yoo in South Korea, making up approximately 2% of the population. Of those, the most common is Ryu (Hanja:柳, Hangul:류), with more than six hundred thousand holders, whereas Yu (Hanja:兪, Hangul:유) accounts for about one hundred thousand.

The family name Yoo can be represented by any of the four Hanja: 柳(류), 劉, 兪 and 庾, each with a different meaning. In Korean, only the character 柳 specifically refers to 류 (Ryu), whereas the characters 劉(류) and 庾 refers to 유 (Yu) and is spelled as such; because of its irregular romanization, from Hanja to Hangul to English. The transliteration from Korean to English led 류 (Ryu) and 유 (Yu) to be mistakenly spelled the same.

Surname: Hanja: 劉 / 刘, Hangul:유,류 Pinyin: Liú. A very common surname, as it was used by the ruling family of the Han Dynasty - a high point in the history of China.