'Perfect Crown' director says historical faults were failure of imagination, not intent

The coronation scene that ended the penultimate episode of MBC’s “Perfect Crown” — with Byeon Woo-seok's Grand Prince I-an wearing a nine-tasseled crown as his subjects cried " Cheonse!" rather than " Manse!" — was a failure of imagination, not of intent, the show’s director said in a tearful apology.

Park Joon-hwa, the drama's director, let his fantasy premise be calibrated entirely by the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) court, he explained during a roundtable interview on Tuesday, choking up many times while speaking. He had “failed to recognize” that the real Korea that his alternate history in the drama was branching from had also given rise to the Korean Empire.

“What our writer wanted to talk about, I think, was — if our nation’s painful past, including the [1950-53] Korean War and the period under Japan's [1910-45] colonial rule, if those hadn’t happened, couldn’t we have arrived at a happier, more beautiful picture?” Park told reporters on Tuesday. “The story started from that fantasy. So our consulting, the references we were drawing on — those were all calibrated to the Joseon royal court.”

Park had come to the roundtable without his writer, producers or any cast members. He is the only one who has given interviews after the drama concluded last Saturday.

“From the beginning to the end, I am the one who takes responsibility for what is in the drama,” he said. “The various things that came across because of my inadequacy — I felt those were things I needed to address directly, myself.”

Over the course of the hourlong interview, Park twice stopped midsentence to say his mind had gone blank, excused himself to the bathroom, and at one point cried.

The 11th episode of “Perfect Crown,” which aired last Friday, set off the controversy regarding historical distortion. As Grand Prince I-an ascended to the throne, the crown on his head bore nine front-and-back tassels rather than the twelve worn by King Gojong (1852-1919), who proclaimed the Korean Empire in 1897 and asserted Korea’s status as a sovereign state. The crown the show used, with nine tassels instead of twelve, would historically have signified a prince or a vassal lord under an emperor.

The chant of "Cheonse!" — “Long live a thousand years!” — was the form used in vassal states; "Manse!" or “Ten thousand years!” was the cry for a sovereign ruler. A tea scene from an earlier episode, in which IU's character, Seong Hee-ju, pours water into a drain tray, had already drawn criticism for echoing Chinese tea etiquette.

The details touched a nerve in Korea. The country's Goryeo (918–1392) and Joseon kingdoms maintained tributary relations with imperial Chinese dynasties; the surrender of King Injo (1595-1649) to the Qing emperor in 1636 is taught in textbooks as a national humiliation. To dress a coronation in 21st-century alternate Korea in the regalia of that tributary period read, to many viewers, as undoing the very thing King Gojong had asserted in 1897 in declaring Korea a sovereign state.

It was the fixation on a fantasy world based on a continued Joseon era, Park said, that produced the error.  

“When you ask consultants about a coronation in that era, that is the form they describe — the king wearing a nine-tasseled crown, that whole shape of the ceremony,” Park said. “I think I had a kind of fixation. When I was told this is how it was done in that period, I felt boxed in by it. But the thing is, in our actual history, there is the Korean Empire. In this fantasy drama, we had taken out the painful periods, the colonial era, but I should have been picking that up and reflecting it in how I represented things. And I didn’t, and that was my wrongdoing.”

Pressed on what was in the script and what wasn’t, Park said the "cheonse" chant had been written by rookie screenwriter Yoo Ji-won, but the nine-tasseled crown had not been explicitly described in the script.

“When you’re preparing the costumes and the art for a drama like this, you need at least about a month, and what tends to happen is, if a similar scene exists in something done before, you prepare based on that form,” Park said.

Park returned several times to the gap between intention and reception. “Perfect Crown” pulled ratings above 13 percent and became Disney+’s most-watched global Korean title within its first 28 days of release. Park recalled an Instagram clip of an elderly viewer beaming at one of the show’s proposal scenes.

“That old man’s face — I keep thinking about it,” Park said. “The feeling, the warmth, the healing, that should have stayed with him to the end, to all viewers until the very end. And instead, at the end, it came across as discomfort. That is what I can’t forgive myself for."

The production team posted a written apology on Saturday, while lead actors IU and Byeon followed on Monday. The screenwriter, Yoo, also intends to release her own statement, according to Park. The director currently has no plans for his next project.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]