Directed by Park Chan-wook
Year : 2003
Director: Park Chan-wook
Country: South Korea
Director of Photography: Chung Chung-hoon
Fight choreographer: Kil-Yong Yang
Music: Cho Young-wuk
Shot duration: ~3 minutes
Number of doses: 17 in 3 days
Socket used: the 17th
The only CGI element: the knife stuck in Oh Dae-su's back
Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) steps out of an elevator. Before him, a narrow corridor with sickly green wallpaper. At the end, dozens of men armed with bats, planks, and iron bars. He has a hammer. He has no technique. He has no plan. He has fifteen years of rage locked inside a body that hasn't moved in over a decade. The camera is positioned to the side, at a right angle, as if you were watching a 2D video game screen. And for three minutes, it doesn't move, it follows the fight laterally, without cuts, close-ups, or editing. Oh Dae-su strikes, stumbles, gets up, takes blows, falls, gets up again. His hammer slams into a wall. A man he had knocked unconscious gets up in the background. Someone stabs him in the back. He keeps going.
Why this scene is iconic
In 2003, action cinema was dominated by shaky cam and frenetic Bourne-style editing. Park Chan-wook does the exact opposite. Fixed camera, wide shot, zero cuts. You see everything: every missed blow, every moment of exhaustion, every guy who gets back up when you thought he was down. The geography of the fight is crystal clear: the corridor, the opponents, Oh Dae-su in the middle. And it's precisely this clarity that makes the scene unbearable. There's no editing to embellish the blows, no adrenaline-fueled music to carry you along. Oh Dae-su isn't an action hero; he's a desperate man, in a rumpled suit, fighting like a wounded animal. The continuous shot refuses to turn this into a spectacle. It forces you to watch suffering in its actual duration, without cuts, without respite.
How they filmed it
The continuous shot of the corridor wasn't planned. Park Chan-wook had initially conceived elaborate action sequences, "spectacular enough to resemble a manga," in his words. The crew began filming according to this plan, using different angles, close-ups, and classic editing. But the rehearsals and takes piled up, and Choi Min-sik became increasingly exhausted.
That's when Park had his epiphany. Seeing Choi Min-sik lying on the ground, drained by the hours of filming, he realized that this genuine exhaustion told the story better than polished choreography. The sequence wasn't meant to showcase the splendor of the action; it was meant to show Oh Dae-su's despair, loneliness, and utter depletion. The decision to switch to a single continuous shot was made on set, during filming.
In a conversation with Nicolas Winding Refn for the 20th-anniversary re-release, Park was even more direct: he admitted to choosing the continuous shot "out of laziness," no longer wanting to film all the extra coverage (angles, close-ups, inserts) necessary to edit the scene in a traditional way. Choi Min-sik, seeing all his rehearsal work rendered obsolete, readily accepted Park's artistic explanation.
The result: 17 takes over 3 days. The camera is positioned laterally, in a fixed wide shot, and tracks laterally along the corridor—no Steadicam, no crane, just a classic tracking shot on rails. The only CGI element in the entire scene is the knife plunged into Oh Dae-su's back. Everything else is real: the blows, the falls, the guys getting back up.
During filming, Park watched his increasingly exhausted actor and extras and wondered, "How many more takes can I make them do?" Choi Min-sik replied, "I'd have to boil some ginseng." At the end of the last take, he blurted out, "I'm going to die." Song Kang-ho, who was visiting the set, watched the rushes and joked with Choi Min-sik, "Why don't you swing the hammer a little harder and we'll do one more take?"
Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, who would become Park's regular collaborator on Stoker, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave, illuminates the corridor with sickly green tones, cold neon lights, and a flat, shadowless light. There is no glamour in the image. The corridor resembles a cheap prison corridor, which is precisely the point.
What to observe when reviewing it
The guys getting up in the background. The wide shot lets you see the opponents Oh Dae-su knocked out getting back to their feet behind him. It's a detail that traditional editing would have obscured. Here, you see it in real time, and it makes the scene even more heartbreaking.
The hammer stuck in the wall (~1:30) Oh Dae-su strikes and his hammer gets stuck. He has to pull it out. It's not choreographed to be spectacular; it's the chaos of a real fight filmed without a safety net.
The end of the fight (~2:45) Oh Dae-su staggers, falls, barely gets up. Look at Choi Min-sik's body at that moment: the fatigue isn't acting. After 17 takes over three days, the exhaustion is real. Park used this reality as narrative material.
Did you know that?
At the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where the film won the Grand Prix (with Quentin Tarantino as jury president), Korean director Im Kwon-taek, a member of the jury, directly asked Park how the knife-in-the-back scene had been created. When Park replied "CGI," Im Kwon-taek exclaimed, "I've figured out the secret to that scene!" and ran off. Tarantino had the exact same reaction.
The scene spawned a direct lineage: the corridor fight in Daredevil (Netflix, 2015) is an acknowledged homage, filmed under the same conditions—a continuous lateral shot, a narrow corridor, an exhausted hero. John Wick, Atomic Blonde , and Extraction all adopted Old Boy's founding principle: the clarity of the long take versus the chaos of rapid editing. Twenty years later, the corridor fight remains the moment when action cinema understood that it could achieve more by showing less.
Sources
Park Chan-wook, Vanity Fair video breakdown (analysis of the corridor scene)
Park Chan-wook, Inverse interview (20th anniversary, August 2023)
Conversation between Park Chan-wook and Nicolas Winding Refn (20th anniversary re-release in theaters)
NamuWiki - Oldboy (2003) / famous scene (set details, anecdotes)
Wikipedia - Oldboy (2003 film)
Screen Rant - "Deeper Meaning of Oldboy's Hallway Fight Revealed by Director" (2023)
ComicBook.com - "The Hallway Fight in Oldboy Changed Action Movies" (2025)
The 811 / The Infinite Eleven - "Oldboy Rerelease: The Corridor Scene" (2023)
Medium / FilmSoc - "A Corridor of Blood: How Oldboy's Fight Scene Packs a Punch"
Q read also
Hard Boiled (1992) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/a-toute-preuve - The "big bang" of the genre according to Park Chan-wook himself, previous entry in the collection
The Honor of the Dragon (2005) https://www.plan-sequences.com/categories-de-plans-sequences/lhonneur-du-dragon - Two years after Old Boy, Tony Jaa takes the corridor fight to a vertical level, without any cheating
