There are some differences. Squid Game: The Challenge introduces psychological “tests” in which players can eliminate each other (I suppose the night-time murder sprees featured in the drama are hard to replicate) and there are a few new games, including a novel take on Battleship. Hwang says he wrote this scene after watching a TV reality show in which contestants are stranded on a desert island. “It was about people’s psychology in extreme situations. They are sexually attracted to people they believe are stronger and the best at hunting, when they wouldn’t have been before.” Aren’t you depicting women as sexualised commodities? For once, Hwang’s smile fades: “Why are you asking about excessive sexual representation of women?” He says his only purpose was “to show that, regardless of gender, women and men tend to perform desperate actions in extreme situations”. My dream was to create something that would resonate globally. We are living in a Squid Game world now

In the first game in the show, all 456 contestants can only move when the face of a sinister mechanised doll is turned away from them. Those caught out are mown down with machine-gun fire. Why did Hwang create a horrifyingly brutal contest that holds human life so cheap? “Because the show is motivated by a simple idea,” he says. “We are fighting for our lives in very unequal circumstances.” I wouldn’t change my ending’ … Hwang on the set of series one. Photograph: Noh Juhan | Netflix/Netflix But isn’t there a contradiction in that, without money from an international corporation, ie Netflix, your critique of global capitalism would never have been seen? Hwang laughs at me again and says: “Oh, the Guardian, asking profound questions! Well, Netflix is a global corporation but I don’t think it is aggravating inequalities. I don’t think there is a contradiction. When I was working on the project, the goal was to rank No 1 on the Netflix US chart for at least a day. But it ended up being much more successful, the most watched show on Netflix ever. It’s very surprising. It shows that the global audience is resonating with the message I wanted to reflect.” Perhaps that’s why the sex scenes in Squid Game are so grim. I’m thinking of the one in episode four when two players, one a macho gangster, have sex in a bathroom. There is no love in Squid Game, is there? “Yes there is!” Hwang insists. “It’s a different kind of love in a bizarre, strange, desperate situation. The woman relies on the strongest man in the group. She has to find something to rely on. She believes it’s love – otherwise it’s too sad, you know, to sell sex to the guy just to survive. So she believes her emotion is love, but not romantic love like in Bridgerton.” But Squid Game is hardly just a snapshot of his home country. “I wanted to create something that would resonate not just for Korean people but globally. This was my dream.” In this life and death struggle, social norms are torn away and the contestants are trapped in a war of all against all, in which human life is nasty, brutish and short. “We are living in a Squid Game world,” says Hwang, but he says not everybody in his drama is selfishly looking after number one, climbing over losers’ faces to win the money.

Hwang Dong-hyuk: ‘I tried to watch Bridgerton but gave up in the middle of episode one.’ Photograph: Ji Sang Chung/Netflix He drew on a version of tag he played as a boy called squid game, named after the various squid-bodypart shapes that were drawn on to whatever field it was played on. “I used to be good at fighting my way to the squid’s head,” Hwang says. “You had to fight to win.” Hwang sought relief in Seoul’s comic book cafes. “I read Battle Royal and Liar Game and other survival game comics. I related to the people in them, who were desperate for money and success. That was a low point in my life. If there was a survival game like these in reality, I wondered, would I join it to make money for my family? I realised that, since I was a film-maker, I could put my own touch to these kinds of stories so I started on the script.” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{