Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee do 'The Intern' the Korean way

Nancy Meyers' 2015 "The Intern" was never a sophisticated film, and it never intended to be one. Its pleasures were of the most soothing kind, set in a Brooklyn startup where a frazzled young CEO finds the answer to her problems in the seen-it-all wisdom of a 70-year-old intern.

The Korean remake, out Sept. 16, brings that comfort to the Chuseok holiday stretch, when families flock to multiplexes wanting nothing more than a good time.

What the remake can't carry over is, of course, De Niro and Hathaway. So much of the original came down to the two megastars' chemistry, and the Korean version leans just as hard on Choi Min-sik and Han So-hee — a screen legend opposite one of K-drama's biggest draws. Choi plays Ki-ho, retired after 37 years on the job and hired as a senior intern at a fashion startup that Han's Sun-woo has turned into a booming business. The two sat for interviews a day apart at a cafe in central Seoul.

Choi went in knowing exactly what a remake is up against. "A remake gets compared to the original. That's just its fate," he said. "Then I thought, what am I scared of? Flip it around and it's simple. A Korean ajeossi and a young woman CEO butt heads and come together, and we do it our way."

Doing it their way had to start with reworking the man himself. Where De Niro's Ben was a polished gentleman with a handkerchief at the ready, Ki-ho is a more down-to-earth sort who keeps a stash of old-school snacks around for when she needs a pick-me-up. "I wanted to make him a Korean dad," Choi said. "That thing where a grown-up goes, 'I'm only saying this because you're like a daughter to me.' Westerners might find it odd."

Han had lobbied hard to get the part, showing up to meetings with the director styled like Hathaway's Jules. "When else in my life was I going to be in a movie with Choi Min-sik?" she said. By Choi's account, the 31-year-old threw herself into the part like her career depended on it, her ups and downs as an actor perfectly lining up with Sun-woo's. Han wasn't about to take the credit alone: "It wasn't just me. Everyone on that set was all in," she said.

The scene both keep returning to takes place at a bar, where Sun-woo, done dirty by a cheating husband and a backstabbing colleague, unloads on Ki-ho. Unbeknownst to Han, Choi had told the director beforehand that he would drop the honorifics when he told her to get a grip, so that her reaction on camera would be authentic. "I just kept the feeling going," Han said of the moment. "When he said, 'You're young and capable and you can do anything,' it sounded like he was saying it to me as a person." What Sun-woo does with that advice sends the ending somewhere different from the original's, which Han loved from the first read.

Both actors are playing against type on this one. Han, whose recent credits run heavy on fights, heists and gunplay — "My Name" and "Project Y" among them — found the low-key register of everyday drama difficult to pull off. "I'd always played the one who starts the fight," she said. "This time I'm the one who settles it and takes the advice." Choi, after a storied career of hard-man roles that runs from "Oldboy" to "The Admiral: Roaring Currents," also had to learn to blend in. "This time I tried to be water on set. Put it in a square bowl, it goes square. Triangle bowl, triangle," he said. "From now on I guess I should take it easy on the heavy roles."

Han said her co-star never once told her what to do; at most, he'd ask a question and let her work it out. She said she spent the shoot wishing she had someone like Ki-ho in her own life. "A good adult, to me, isn't someone who gives advice," Han said. "It's someone who lives their own life so well you look at them and think, I want to be like that." Choi, for his part, seemed to have one piece of business left to attend to: landing more roles. "Somebody say, 'Choi Min-sik's still usable,'" he said. "I'm out here drumming up business."

"The Intern" opens in Korean theaters Sept. 16.