Jung Jae-il

Selected Major Works

• 2025 Original Soundtracks for Warner Bros Film <Mickey 17>(directed by Bong Joon-Ho)
• 2024-2025 Original Soundtracks for Netflix Series <Squid Game 2,3>(directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk)
• 2022 Original Soundtracks for Film [Broker] (directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, the Palme d’ Or of the 70th Festival de Cannes)
• 2020 Original Soundtracks for Netflix Series <Squid Game>(directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk)
• 2020 TXT Animation composer with BigHit Entertainment
• 2019 Original Soundtracks for [Parasite] (directed by Bong Joon-Ho, The Palme d’ Or of the 72nd Festival de Cannes & 4 awards at the 92nd Academy Awards with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original screenplay and Best International Feature film 
• 2018 Music director of [Spring Together] for the Inter-Korean Summit Farewell Ceremony Performed at DMZ
• 2017 Original Soundtracks for Netflix Original Film  [Okja] (directed by Bong Joon-Ho)
• 2016 Music director & composer for Korean traditional opera [Trojan Women] premiered in Korea(2016) and Singapore International Festival of Arts (2017)

Awards

• 2022 74th Emmy Awards Nominee
• 2022 Chanel Next prize Winner
• 2021 Hollywood Music in Media Awards TV Original Score winner
• 2020 ASCAP SCREEN MUSIC AWARDS

JUNG JAEIL BIOG (2024)

The first non-English language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and the first South Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The most watched show on Netflix, the top-viewed programme in 94 countries (beat that, Bridgerton). A pioneering 2017 environmental fable-come-road movie, named by the New York Times as one of the 10 most influential movies of the decade.

What do Parasite, Squid Game and Okja have in common? Composer and multi-instrumentalist Jung Jaeil created the music for all three, a remarkable hat-trick of soundtracks to match the mastery of big- and small-screen by those critically acclaimed, blockbuster South Korean screen properties. If his compatriots BTS are the biggest pop band in the world, Jung – not yet out of his thirties – is the biggest contemporary screen composer of his generation.

His music for film has earned such accolades as Best Score at the 2020 Daejong Awards (for Parasite), Music for Television at the 2022 BaekSang Arts Awards (for Squid Game) and Best Original Score for a TV Show or Limited Series at the 2021 Hollywood Music in Media Awards (for Squid Game), also 2021 Chanel Next Prize

Not that this self-effacing musician, whose prodigious non-film work is influenced by everything from British thrash metal band Carcass to The Bible, would thank you for shouting about his achievements. Ask him about working on Squid Game, about crafting an audio world to match the groundbreaking narrative and eye-popping visuals, and he’s modesty incarnate.

“In 2019 I met the director Hwang Dong-hyuk,” he begins matter-of-factly. “And he just gave me the script. It was really interesting story. But at the same time, I was so afraid of making the score for a nine-hour film! I had no experience of that, so I had to prepare for that. And when the shooting was finished, I just got given nine hours of film. And that was when I started the scoring.”

But he acknowledges the importance of the show’s dynamic – dark, violent and dystopian, but also hopeful and defiant – as important sonic cues. “I have to keep one texture throughout the whole episode, but at the same time I needed to use various genres to make it not boring.”

Refreshingly ego-free, he hired a composer with the stage name 23 to help him change up the colours. “I concentrated on emotional themes, and he concentrated on themes like the significant Pink Soldiers, all the David Lynch-style, very bizarre dark things.”

As for his opinion on what made the dystopian thriller such a massive hit around the world – a second season, part of a mooted “Squid Game Universe” is already in the works – and he expresses blissful confusion.

“I call it a phenomenon I don't understand,” he smiles. “But I guess it has drama. It's very cruel, and it's a very bizarre story. But it has humanity.”

Despite being a child prodigy and playing in nationally popular funk and traditional Korean folk bands in his teens – not to mention releasing a solo album aged 20 – Jung has always preferred, as he puts it, to stay “backstage”. Working in the world of movies, where he scored his first film aged only 15, was much more his comfort zone.

“I thought I was a good singer, but definitely not!” remembers Jung of that 2003 solo album, tear flower. Although if you’ve seen on YouTube his deft cover of Daughter by John Mayer, one of his favourite American lyricists and guitar players, you might beg to differ.

“And at the time, I was really into Björk's music," he continues, "a mixture of classical and electronic music. I thought I could be someone else but apparently not. So, I decided to take advantage of everybody's friend: instrumental music. Film needs music, pop needs music, musicals need music, dance needs music. So, I decided to explore that.”

Born in Seoul in 1982, Jung began playing piano at three and guitar at nine. By the age of 13 he was into Eighties/Nineties Liverpudlian metal combo Carcass.

"Oh, I love them so much!" he beams, explaining that thrash was a big deal in South Korea in the Nineties. “For example, Colin Richardson, Carcass's producer, produced many Korean bands. And I still love thrash. Carcass moved me on to Korn, and then to many nu metal bands.”

Still, as a teenage prodigy, Jung was under no illusions that thrash metal might not provide him with a viable musical career. Plus, his genre-hopping horizons were wider than that. So, he enrolled at the Seoul Jazz Academy.

“I had no intention of jazz music,” he acknowledges. “But I really wanted to learn how to compose. When I was in bands, it was all about covering bands like Carcass or Sepultura. But I needed to make my own music. So that's why I went to the Jazz Academy. But I had no idea of jazz before that.”

Meanwhile, he’d already composed the music for his first film, 1997 docudrama Bad Movie. He was, say it again, only 15. How did an adolescent schoolboy get that gig?

“Because I joined a band, and the bassist was the son of a director. So, I got a chance to be part of it.”

That band was gigs, a funk outfit influenced by Chic/Nile Rogers and Parliament/Funkadelic. He was on bass – “I was very concentrated on slapping! There's a singer called Lee Juck. He was very famous in Korea, and he wanted to become a member of the band. So gigs were very huge because of him. We released two albums and toured all over the country.”

What did Jung’s parents think of their mid-teenage son going off around Korea, touring?

“To be honest, my mum really didn't like it. She wanted me to be a teacher or a doctor, professor or something. But I used to make money, and she was satisfied by that.”

Over the next seven years, Jung alternated studying with performing in bands – Puri were another, who played traditional Korean percussive music. Jung played piano alongside a pansori singer, “traditional Korean singing, very powerful, like flamenco. We toured Japan and Korea, sometimes Europe.”

In the same time, besides working as a session musician on over 200 K-pop albums he has collaborated with some of the biggest names in K-pop, writing songs for artists such as Hyo Shin Park (with ‘Wild Flower’ reaching No. 1 in the Korean charts) and IU.

And he kept up his soundtrack work, scoring seven more movies before meeting Bong Joon-ho, co-writer and co-producer of 2014 drama Sea Fog. When, a couple of years later, Bong was putting together Okja, he contacted Jung.

The director's notes for his film, Netflix’s globe-trotting eco-fable about a GM super-pig that starred Tilda Swinton and Paul Dano, were, to the say the least, minimal: “He just he said to me: give me some music!”

But given the road movie energy of the film, Jung knew he needed “various chapters of music. It started from a rural area of Korea, and goes to Seoul, and New York City, and then the slaughterhouse. So, I needed all different type of chapters. For example: the chasing scene in Seoul – we decided to have Balkan brass music. So, we collaborated with the Dzambo Agushevi Orchestra from Macedonia.”

Two years later, he and Bong renewed their partnership on Parasite.

“In Okja, he didn't mention genre or style at all. But in Parasite, he emphasised baroque music. While he was writing the scripts, he listened to baroque composers like Handel and Vivaldi. On one scene, he put the note 'Vivaldi Four Seasons winter' – that was the reference. So baroque was the key for that film.”

Parasite went on to dominate the 2020 Oscars, taking home four big awards. But Jung (“just a guy who's working backstage”) was already busy elsewhere. His choral-electronic album psalms, which commemorates the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Democratic Uprising of Gwangju – a key moment in South Korea’s transition to democracy – was released in his homeland last year.

Even as a huge figure in Korean culture who’d performed at the historic April 2018 Inter-Korean Summit between Moon Jae-in, President of South Korea, and Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, this wasn’t a project he undertook lightly.

“To be honest, I initially refused to do this work, because it's a huge wound that is not healed yet. But as time went by, I was thinking about what could be my attitude to that big tragedy as a very small citizen. Not as an artist, not as a musician, but as a citizen.

“And I thought, we should not forget that tragedy. Just remembering is very important for us next generations. And in 2014 there was a huge ferry tragedy in South Korea, many children passed away. At the same time, I thought about how Germans remember Auschwitz.

"So the most important thing was just remembering. So I found the word memorare from The Bible and that's where I began. Remember. Don't forget.”

And now? After exploring his jazz roots in The Methodologies, his 2020 album with former punk drummer Check Kim (“we enjoyed alcohol! So we improvised many days, without bass, just piano and drums”), and scoring another prestige film – Broker, directed by Palme d'Or-winning Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, to be released later this year – Jung Jaeil is, once again, considering a solo album “with talented singers”.

Ask him who’s on his wishlist and he mentions Saul Williams and Damien Rice. As for the concept: “It will be various genres that I feel pretty comfortable with it. But I would like to start from Macbeth. I'm always thinking about the passage: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage..." It's very related to our lives, to repeat foolishness every day. I'd like to start from that phrase.”

There is, too, a score for a “confidential” Hollywood movie, and dreams for more work influenced by his other passion: dance.

Also in 2020, Jung released the album, Seasons of Change, a beautiful score composed for a performance by eminent dancer Kim Joo-won. “She just suggested me to score her performance, and it's based on the change of seasons. And I just composed songs while I was watching her performing.”

He’s a big fan, too, of Pina Bausch. Would that be a dream collaboration?

“Oh, yes, yes!” he beams. “I found out through Pina Bausch pieces that music with movement makes a whole different atmosphere. When I listen to Tom Waits music with Pina Bausch, his music is totally different.

“Dance is the genre that I love most. I should have been a dancer or choreographer. I just chose the wrong profession.”

Luckily for us, and for the silver screen, Jung Jaeil didn’t.