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EXCLUSIVE: She has two seasons of Pachinko under her belt, a production company to run, and a movie adaptation of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night in progress. The writer-producer and debuting film director talks to Deadline.
It’s hard not to start at the end when talking to Soo Hugh as Season 2 of her drama series Pachinko draws to a close. The Apple TV+ show follows a Korean family across four generations and takes in both historical events and family drama as the resolute Sunja moves from her home country to Japan. The denouement of the latest season is both satisfying and leaves the audience wanting more. There is still, it feels, some story to be told.
Hugh and her writing team moved beyond the 500 or so pages of the eponymous Min Jin Lee bestseller upon which the series is based for parts of Season 2 — notably within the strand set in late-1980s Japan. Going deeper into the Pachinko story is already top of mind. “Apple has been really generous and supportive and they’ve encouraged us to start thinking about it,” says Hugh. “The dream is three or four seasons. If the present in the show is 1989 and we leave Sunja in the past in 1951 [at the end of Season 2], then the idea was that the past and present collide: That ’51 will become ’89. That was always the big plan for the show.”
Still, Pachinko isn’t the only thing on her mind. Hugh has an overall deal with Apple and Pachinko producer Media Res along with her own label, Moonslinger, which she runs with former Universal Content Productions executive Margo Klewans. Under that banner she is working up new projects including exec producing The White Darkness with Tom Hiddleston and is now penning on the script for a movie adaptation of Tender is the Night, which will mark her feature directorial debut.
Prior to Pachinko, Hugh was on AMC series The Terror, and she says the two are companion pieces of sorts. “The Terror is about patriarchy, brotherhood and the ways men bond and lift one another up. If it is, in some ways, a story of men and fathers and sons, Pachinko is a story of women and mothers and daughters.”
The final episode of Season 1 of Pachinko ends with footage of real-life interviews of Korean women who, like Sunja, moved to Japan generations ago. Although Pachinko is a work of fiction, Hugh and the team were advised by historians. The stories of the prejudice and hardships Koreans faced under Japanese colonial rule, and then as migrants to Japan, aren’t regularly heard in the West. In the series, they are relayed in Sunja’s life story, which is shaped by her parents, poverty, global events and a son she has with shady and sharp-suited businessman Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) out of wedlock. Her eldest son, Noa, is played by a variety of actors, as is his younger brother Mozasu.
Soji Arai stars as Mozasu in his later life, and Jin Ha is his son, Solomon, a finance whizz whose wheeling and dealing is a compelling arc. Jimmi Simpson, in a rare recurring Western role, plays Solomon’s boss, Tom Simpson, a disgraced banker put out to pasture at the Tokyo branch. The 1980s Tokyo strand also features Anna Sawai, who won the Lead Actress Emmy for her role as Toda Mariko in Shōgun. She is Naomi, a high-flying female banker in a sector dominated by men, and a character not in the book whom Hugh created for the series.
Among the many head-turning performances, it is Minha Kim as the younger Sunja, and Youn Yuh-Jung as the character in her later years, who provide the heartbeat of the series. Kim was new to acting when she landed the role, while Youn was a much-respected veteran performer, which seems fitting given their on-screen personas. The two actors only ever met during filming while making the title sequence — more on that later.
“This was Minha’s first thing,” says Hugh. “She had done a short film and web stuff before Pachinko, but really, she was a novice. Then you have YJ on the other hand, and she is one of the greatest actors living right now. You have the yin and yang, but that’s Sunja. It fits the character.”
Hugh recalls seeing Kim’s audition tape. “We’d been casting for months, and I was starting to get worried because we were struggling to find that one character,” she says. Then a tape arrived of Kim reading a scene in which Koh Hansu, father of her child and her first love, reveals he is married. “We were all mesmerized, but then the question was, ‘Can she redo it?’ She came back several times and each time it was different. At first, I was like, ‘Wait, she didn’t play it the way she did it on tape. What happened to that performance?’ And then you realize: She’s feeling it completely differently here. Minha is one of the most intuitive actors I’ve ever met. When she feels, she just feels.”
Kim’s Season 1 performance is imbued with a rawness that the team were left hoping she still had heading into the second run. “She had made a movie and another TV show in-between the seasons, so I was worried. Is she going to come back to Season 2 and lose some of that innocence?” Hugh recalls. “But she really didn’t. I hope she’s going to go on and have a long, long career, and she’s going to do so many characters and have so many other roles. I just hope at the end of it, when she looks back, that Sunja is up there for her.”
The pressure was on the whole team for the second run after the warm reception for the first outing. In less capable hands, mapping a story that becomes more involved, spans geographies and timespans, and takes in ever more characters and arcs could make for an unwieldy production, and an overwhelming experience for the viewer. Certainly, Hugh, as creator-writer-showrunner and exec producer felt the stakes being raised.
“There was an innocence when we were making Season 1, because we had no idea what the show was, it felt like we were all jumping off a cliff together. With Season 2, it felt the pressure was just there for all of us. It’s interesting to watch how different people deal with that.”
Moonslinger & ‘Tender Is The Night’ Film Adaptation
Coming off a multilayered project such as Pachinko, with its Season 2 finale dropping just before MIPCOM Cannes, Hugh could be forgiven for wanting to work on something more contained. Next up is a movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night for Searchlight, produced by her label Moonslinger, Lucky Chap and Putnam Pictures. She says: “I came from feature writing and in some ways it’s more challenging than TV, because in 120 pages, you have to pack in a universe, you have to pack in a life. In TV, I’m given 16 or 24 episodes to do that, so now with a feature, I feel like it’s about maximum impact writing.”
There will be an about-turn on the Pachinko creative approach where the writing spills over from the source material. Hugh reveals she will be paring back, not supplementing the story this time. “I’m not going to adapt the entire book,” she says. “It’s too unwieldy as a film. The book takes place over a wide expanse of time and I’m actually going to do the opposite of Pachinko and just do a sliver, a part of the book.”
The novel is set on the Côte d’Azur in the jazz era. For Hugh, its messages speak to the core of all of her work. “It’s a story about three very different people, in some ways damaged people, who all fall in love with each other,” she says. “The big theme of that book goes to the question that’s in everything I make: Is this it? If this is the one life that we have, whether or not you believe in an afterlife, while my feet are here on this terrestrial land, is my life good enough?”
Moonslinger will be one of the labels producing and Hugh advocates for writers getting involved at the business end of film and TV: “Writers make great producers because the first hump is the script,” she notes.
Accordingly, the ambition for Moonslinger is to be both writer-friendly and market-savvy. “What helps distinguish Moonslinger is we just want to be the ones who give writers the ability to make the show they want, within the marketplace that we have; to still make shows and movies that feel like classics, that aren’t a flash in the pan and are going to stand the test of time.”
Pachinko is such a project — a timeless piece of TV and something people will come to afresh for years to come. In TV commissioner parlance, it’s less of a firework of a show and more of a bonfire, with a less explosive but more enduring glow. Longevity and awareness are interesting topics to raise with Hugh. She admits to concerns that people don’t come to Pachinko, which is filmed in Korean and Japanese, as they label it “a heavy show with subtitles.” The reality, however, is Pachinko’s storylines are precision-tooled for a wide audience. “I love melodrama, and I don’t feel ashamed saying I write melodrama,” says Hugh.
Certainly, the themes in Pachinko are as enduring as they are universal. Hugh breaks it down: “At the heart, it’s a story about families searching for a home, depending on how you define ‘home’. Some people define that by what country or physical house they live in. Someone like Sunja defines home as who she’s with — family is her home. That’s always felt like the bullseye for us: ‘What is home?’”
Given the ending of Season 2, a growing legion of fans will hope it’s not home time just yet for Pachinko.
