Ejercicio Grupo B - 1 · Inglés PAU Canarias Junio (Ciencias) 2022

Squid Game’s creator: “I’m not that rich. It’s not like Netflix paid me a bonus”

Hwang Dong-hyuk is laughing at me. I’ve just asked the creator of Squid Game, Netflix’s hit show, if its

astonishing success has made him rich. In the survival drama, a mysterious organisation challenges 456

players, who are all deeply in debt and desperate for money, to play a series of children’s games. Win

and they go home with $39 million. Lose and they get a bullet in the head.

5 “I’m not that rich. But I do have enough. I have enough to put food on the table. However, it’s not like

Netflix is paying me a bonus. Netflix paid me according to the original contract,” Hwang remarks.

“When I was working on the project, the goal was to rank No. 1 on the Netflix US chart for at least a

day. But it ended up being much more successful, the most watched show on Netflix ever.”

That seems unfair. After all, Squid Game has earned Netflix £650 million. Besides, creating, writing and

10 directing the nine-episode series caused the 50-year-old South Korean film-maker so much stress that he

lost six teeth in the process. “It was physically, mentally and emotionally draining. I kept having new

ideas and revising the episodes as we were filming so the amount of work multiplied.”

The idea for Squid Game came out of Hwang’s own family situation in 2009, after the global financial

crisis that hit his homeland hard. “My mother retired from the company she was working for; I couldn’t

15 work for about a year. We had to take out loans – my mother, myself and my grandmother,” he explains.

Hwang sought relief in Seoul’s comic book cafes. “I read some survival game comics. I related to the

people in them, who were desperate for money and success. If there was a survival game like these in

reality, I wondered, would I join it to make money for my family? I realised that, since I was a film-

maker, I could put my own touch to these kinds of stories so I started on the script.”

20 Are you making a profound point about capitalism? “It’s not profound! It’s very simple! I believe the

overall global economic order is unequal. We are living in a Squid Game world where we fight for our

lives in very unequal circumstances,” he remarks.

Hwang doesn’t want to become just the Squid Game guy and is now negotiating with Netflix to screen

three further movies he made in the past decade. But he certainly hasn’t discarded a sequel – if only for

25 one very materialistic reason. “It’s possible that I have to do season two to become as rich as Squid

Game’s winner,” he says with one last laugh.

Fragment adapted from The Guardian, October 2021

1. Say whether the following sentences are TRUE or FALSE according to the text. COPY the evidence from the text. No marks will be given without the evidence. [1.5 points]

a)

In Squid Game, players participate for fun and enjoyment.

TRUE

FALSE

b)

Netflix has shared the immense profits from the series with Hwang.

TRUE

FALSE

c)

All the episodes of Squid Game were written before filming started.

TRUE

FALSE