As stained by the blood of the Kwangju massacre—the violently suppressed 1980 street protest often referred to as Korea's Tiananmen Square and the inspiration (with a little help from The Exorcist) for prior cine-generation master Jang Sun-woo's A Petal—Save the Green Planet may be filled with excruciating moments, but it's as much concerned with the politics of pleasure as lessons learned in pain. This new generation's Jang, who was too young to have experienced what he calls Korea's "smoky, tear-gas-in-the-face history" firsthand, claims to value Hollywood movies just as much as the tougher-minded films Korea calls its own. "I remember liking Misery a lot when it came out," he recently recollected of the Stephen King adaptation that would prove an inspiration, "but it bothered me that [the Kathy Bates character] was just this crazy bitch. I knew that I wanted to make a film about kidnapping, but I also knew that I'd have to come at it from the opposite direction. I'd have to take the kidnapper's point of view. And when I came across this anti-DiCaprio website, claiming that he was an alien who was trying to seduce all the women on the planet in order to conquer earth, the two ideas seemed to fit."

A graduate of the Korean Academy of Fine Arts who first appeared on film festival radars with his 1995 short 2001 Imagine, a John Lennon-related whatsit to rival Chris Munch's The Hours and Times, Jang credits Green Planet's keenly detailed visuals (mutating cell-structure montages, speed-scribbled notebook ravings, Claymation accounts of dinosaur extinction) less to his background as a painter than his love of Japanese anime and cheap fantasy spectacles like The Seven Wonders of the World. For his next film, he's planning to revamp the superhero genre. Don't be surprised if saving the world—or wishing you could have—returns to haunt Jang's screen dreams.