One of Jo's teachers was Oh Seung-uk, screenwriter of award-winning romance Christmas in August, who taught him that "a director should trust his own abilities, but should always challenge their own works and expand their experiences.
[5] As his graduation film for KAFA, Jo made his feature debut in 2010 with End of Animal (짐승의 끝), starring Lee Min-ji and Park Hae-il.
Unlike his previous films which delved into the intricacies of the human psyche and had been called "dark, even grotesque," A Werewolf Boy (늑대소년) was a fantasy romance starring popular actors Song Joong-ki and Park Bo-young.
[8] The coming-of-age film takes place in a rural Korean town in the 1960s, where a teenage girl meets a feral boy who can neither read nor speak.
She teaches him civilized human behavior using a dog-training manual, and the two fall in love, but the mystery of his origins and the townspeople's fear threaten their idyll.