This week, T: The New York Times Style Magazine publishes “The Greats,” a package featuring masters in various artistic fields, profiled by great writers. There are seven profiles, and seven different covers to go with them.

Included is novelist Alexander Chee’s profile of Korean director Park Chan-wook, who has become the most celebrated filmmaker in Korea despite his informal training.

Park is an autodidact, a self-taught auteur. This wasn’t just by choice; the 1980s Korea in which he came of age had only a few film schools, and no serious cinematic culture for him to either engage with or ignore. He had only the American Forces Korea Network, a television channel famous for airing foreign movies, often without subtitles. (If there were subtitles, they were in English, not in Korean.) Park remembers watching these on his family’s black-and-white television. Later, he had his university’s cinema club, which showed bootleg VHS tapes of foreign films. “When you say you go to a film school in America or France, you would probably go to a lecture where they teach you about German Expressionism and show you what these German Expressionist films are,” he says. “But in Korea there was no systematic education I could be exposed to. It was sporadic, haphazard. And maybe that’s why my films have ended up in this strange form, where it feels like it’s a mishmash of everything.”

He recalls a James Bond film he saw in the theater as a boy — he doesn’t remember which one, but it excited him so much, he began imagining his own Bond films. But not just the stories: He saw them in his head, shot for shot, thinking of how lighting, angles and editing told stories, and he began formulating his own.

The six other profiles in The Greats series include: Roxane Gay on hip hop artist Nicki Minaj, Hanya Yanagihara on designer Dries Van Noten, Lin Manuel Miranda on lyricist Stephen Sondheim, Manohla Dargis on actor Amy Adams, Dave Eggers on writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Randy Kennedy on sculptor Claes Oldenburg.

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