A24 has officially debuted the dual-language Minari Screenplay Book, available in both English and Korean translations.
The hardbound 320-page book features director Lee Isaac Chung’s original script with the alternate ending — published for the very first time — along with his annotated photographs from his childhood family album, ranging from his parents’ marriage in Korea to his upbringing in a rural Arkansas farm. Steven Yeun, who took on the film’s lead role of Jacob, penned the foreword in which he wrote, “A few nights before we started the first day of photography on Minari, I was in a rough place. […] This particular role scared me deeply. The role of Jacob, a man from my father’s generation, seemed difficult to capture,” adding that Chung’s script gave him the motivation to pull through, “Isaac is a beautiful writer. When I first read his script, I remember feeling so moved. His words were pure and true, his rendering of this family existed in a place beyond our memory, far past our gaze.”
In addition, Claude Wilkinson, Chung’s friend whose poetry influenced the film, contributed a poem while MacArthur Grant recipient Ocean Vuong delivered an original essay. “What becomes clear, watching Minari, is that American history is the history of land, which, as it goes, is the history of race and labor,” Vuong, who was inspired by a Minari postcard A24 sent him prior to the film’s releases, wrote. “I felt right away that this snapshot captured the precise and indelible spirit of making that so many of us, and those before us, have faced in this country. How many times have I stood over my pages scattered across the studio floor, hands on my hips, cigarette flopping from my mouth, and looked down at my work with the same perplexed stare as Jacob, asking: What am I going to do with all this?”
A24’s Minari Screenplay Book is available now on the A24 webstore for $60 USD.
Elsewhere in entertainment, Sony Pictures is developing a new Karate Kid film.
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