As Squid Game continues to be an international phenomenon (and probably not the best theme for a party, Chrissy Teigen), the Netflix series’s creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has been sharing more and more of his creative process. As he previously revealed, Squid Game has been a decade-long labor of love that only intensified as Dong-hyuk dealt with his own struggles with poverty. There was also the hurdle of entertainment execs not being able to grasp the show’s dark premise of contestants competing to the death for a life-changing amount of cash. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the election of Donald Trump made the world seem like a much darker place, and Netflix bit on the show.
In a new interview, Dong-hyuk has expanded on crafting Squid Game and revealed that things really started to come together around 2018. Adding to the mix was the continued rise of cryptocurrency, which helped the show’s premise seem even more realistic. Via The Hollywood Reporter:
“[It’s] almost like a lottery now — almost like a gamble where people in reality have actually doubled or really increased their wealth overnight,” he explains. “And I feel like the world is gradually moving toward dystopia. There are more and more people who really don’t dream about the future, and that drives people to want to gamble, to really take it all and put it all on the line and hope for the best. And I think these changes have created an environment where the idea of people putting their life on the line playing children’s games is no longer something that is too absurd.”
Dong-hyuk’s thesis is also bolstered by the fact that crypto scammers literally used Squid Game‘s success to make off with $2.1 million from unsuspecting investors who got suckered into buying SQUID coin. The coin had been flagged as a potential scam, and yet, people still bought in hoping for a chance at getting rich quick, driving Dong-hyuk’s point home.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)