1. Min-sik Choi Violated His Religion to Make Oldboy
Oldboy is a brilliant Korean revenge thriller about a man who is kidnapped and held prisoner for many years. When he's finally set free, he has to spend some time re-orienting himself to a world that's moved on without him while also searching for the people behind his capture. The film is in turns creepy, violent and wholly inexplicable. It was also quite challenging at times for its lead actor, Min-sik Choi. At one point in the story, the character starts keeping track of time in confinement by burning himself with heated wires. Rather than doing this through special effects, Choi opted to simply burn himself for real so the after-effects you see in the film are wholly genuine. For Choi, though, this may not have been the worst part of filming. A later seen requires him to eat several live octopi, a proposition that would be unsettling but not unthinkable to most. Choi, however, is a devout Buddhist, a religion that expressly forbids the eating of any animal killed for the purpose of the believer's consumption. In order to get through the scene, Choi had to stop between takes to pray for forgiveness about the octopi.