“Some people I spoke to didn’t believe the couple had been kidnapped. I began to track down those who could confirm it. I found the first FBI person who was called about the couple.”

London-based film producer Paul Fischer heard a vague story about North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il (now deceased)kidnapping a South Korean film director and his ex-wife during the 1970s. Fischer wanted to find out more about this strange tale, travelling to South Korea and visiting other countries where the director, Shin Sang-Ok, had been. He interviewed dozens of people — including actress Choi Eun-Hee, Shin’s ex-wife — and cobbled together a remarkable explanation of the workings of North and South Korea and the lives of the abducted couple in his first book, A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Other books have been written about the abduction of Korean film director Shin and his famous actress wife. Why did you feel another was necessary?

Ultimately, no one had really told the story about the abduction of Shin and his wife, Choi. Their shared memoir reads like something that has been ghostwritten and heavily vetted to say certain things. Remember South Korea was a very politicized country during that time, nervous about North Korea, and it had martial law during the regime of Park Chung-Hee (who was assassinated in 1979).

Some people I spoke to didn’t believe the couple had been kidnapped. I began to track down those who could confirm it. I found the first FBI person who was called about the couple. I found people in Vienna who knew about it. I wanted to tell the story in the fullest and most factual way.

The abduction of Shin and Choi in 1978 was very elaborate, almost unbelievable. Why did the North Koreans go to so much trouble?

It was something Kim Jong-Il liked, the idea of James Bond, covert operations. Kim had people infiltrate the Hong Kong arm of Shin’s film distribution company and had those people set up a fake business meeting for Choi. They lured her to an isolated villa just outside Hong Kong and then they bundled her up and put her on a boat and sailed to North Korea.

Shin panicked when he discovered Choi, even though they were divorced, was missing. He was in Seoul when he talked to his Chinese representative in Hong Kong and was told to come right away. He reported his ex-wife’s disappearance to the police and the South Korean embassy and then flew to Los Angeles to look for work. But he kept worrying about Choi and left L.A. to go to Hong Kong. There he, too, was kidnapped by the North Koreans. Kim Jong-Il thought they would help him build the North Korean film industry.

The couple, who fell in love again and remarried in North Korea, planned to escape but were constantly watched by their minders during their captivity from 1978 to 1986. How did they finally get out?

If you were taken away from your kids and your life, you’d be thinking every day of ways to get back to that. For the first five years of their imprisonment they were kept apart. Shin tried to escape a couple of times and he was caught and sent to prison camp. Choi tried to get into Kim’s good graces and convince him to let her go. That didn’t work either.

When they were actually reunited and given the tools to make films, Kim told them they could start taking trips abroad. They were closely watched by the bodyguards who travelled with them. But one of the reasons Kim let them go is he wanted to give the impression to the outside world that they weren’t kidnapped, that they were happy in North Korea.

It took them three years of gaining more of Kim Jong-Il’s confidence before he let them leave the country and go further west. They got to the point where they could almost boss their own guards around. Choi just wanted them to make a run for it. Shin wanted to make a game plan. When Kim sent them to Vienna he thought they were brainwashed enough and trustworthy enough to be allowed to go. He was also interested in getting Western money to bring him some hard cash.

Shin had a Japanese friend, Akira Enoki, a journalist who lived in Vienna and thought he would help them escape. Enoki had been in tight spots before and he could think on his feet. They eventually escaped in a cab and went to the American Embassy, followed by the North Koreans in a white car.

It wasn’t a wild ride. I got a map and walked around the area in Vienna and I realized it would be a slow, bumper-to-bumper, trip.

After their escape from North Korea, Choi and Shin lived very unhappy lives.

They both had an expectation that the joy of escaping would continue into their lives. People would be happy to see them and believe them and they would be able to resume their previous lives. But few believed they were actually kidnapped. Also, to be gone for decade and then get right back into your life is impossible. The second after Shin escaped he believed he had to work and be a successful filmmaker. When they got to California (after the Americans took them in as political refugees), Shin co-directed a Disney film called The Three Ninjas. He made several other films for Disney after that. The films were mediocre. They disappointed him.

If he had just been satisfied with his life and counted his blessings, maybe he could have been less sad in the end. They were living in Beverly Hills, but Choi didn’t have any friends, she didn’t speak much English, and their kids had grown and had their own lives.

If she could have chosen to stay in Virginia (where they were first taken to in the United States) or go back to Seoul and have tea with friends instead of getting a big house in Beverly Hills, maybe she would have been happy. They eventually did go back to South Korea and Shin made a couple more films that weren’t well received, and then he died of cancer.

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Shin’s career ended badly but today his work been redeemed.

The films he made in the late 1950s and mid- to late 1970s, some of them were great. He was an important director in the South Korean film industry; he also created South Korean soap operas which made him world famous. His films, like many other directors of his era, are being rediscovered.

During the time he was working he wasn’t considered an artist. He made blockbuster films; he was a commercial filmmaker and maybe that’s why he was forgotten for such a long time. South Koreans have an unspoken collective sense that they should forget the years of dictatorship that their country went through. It is an inward-looking country.

jhunter@thestar.ca

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