South Korean movieAssassination will hit mainland cinemas on Sept 17. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"I heard that," director Choi Dong-hoon said, smiling, at a Beijing media event.

He gave a one-hour interview alongside the two lead actors, Lee Jung-jae and Ha Jung-woo, with Chinese newspapers on Tuesday.

"In South Korea, few movies featuring this subject (Koreans' fight against Japanese colonists) have earned commercial success before," he says.

The veteran director explains that Assassination is not a propaganda title pushing patriotism, but one in which he hopes its audiences can sense "something unusual".

"South Korea had been colonially ruled by Japan for 35 years. It was quite a long time and became a collective scathed memory for us. The characters depicted in my movie want to convey that we never stopped fighting for freedom," he says.

One scene features the lead actress Gianna Jun's role (the leader of the trio of assassins) recalling her witnessing of Japanese armies slaughtering locals.

"My mother was shot to death by Japanese," her character, a sniper, murmurs. "It was not the worst situation ... Some were boiled."