MCN Interview: Bong Joon-Ho

An Interview with Bong Joon-Ho, Director of The Host

South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho is on a roll. His quirky first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), won the Best Editing award at the 2001 Slamdance Festival. His next feature, Memories of Murder, a kick-ass police procedural about the hunt for South Korea's first serial killer, bowed on this continent to admiring reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003, and now is fast picking up fans here on DVD. In 2006, he made a huge splash at Cannes and Toronto with his third feature, The Host, a sci-fi horror thriller about a voracious mutant amphibian that has evolved out of pollution created by the American military presence and Seoul's own go-go economy. The Host became the biggest grossing movie in the history of South Korean film, and is now poised for its U.S. release by Magnolia Pictures. On a blustery winter Chicago day I caught up with Bong, and the tray of deok (Korean pastries) that I brought as a welcoming gift for this stop on his promotional tour produced the first of many warm smiles from this affable, lively filmmaker.

ANDREA GRONVALL: I first saw The Host at Toronto, where among the young festival ticket buyers and critics I talked to, it had the most must-see buzz next to Borat.

BONG JOON-HO: Borat?

AG: Yes. And you didn't have to wear a neon green man-kini to sell your film.

BJ-H: [Laughs]

AG: Did you have a nickname on the set for your monster?

BJ-H: [Chuckling slyly] It wasn't really a nickname that the whole crew knew about. Between myself and the creature designer, we called it Steve Buscemi, based on his character in Fargo. I won't go so far as saying we based the look on him, because then I'd be really apologetic. It's more like the way he acted in Fargo: rather than being a charismatic bad guy, he makes mistakes, he's sort of moronic at times, but violent, and sometimes frustrated and a little hysterical.

AG: I really like the scene where we first see the monster. The creature is so graceful; the way it slowly unfolds is almost like a ballet movement. I've read that the creature was designed to have a five-way mouth. Did you come up with that idea, or did The Orphanage, your special effects designers in L.A.?

BJ-H: All the acrobatic movement, all the creature's movements-that's from me. It's almost as if I were directing an actor, as though I had control over the actions of an actor. But the design of the mouth, with all the multiple planes, that's entirely the idea of the creature designer, Jang Hee-chul. There are various scenes in the film where the creature swallows and then spits out people, so the design of the mouth is very important. There were like 50 different versions designed.

AG: The monster taps into our primordial fears, the way it comes up from the water like some ancient predator. It also plays on our sexual anxieties. It has a sort of phallic aspect, and that mouth! It's like a man-eating vagina!

BJ-H: We did want that mouth to be like a blooming flower; it's kind of disgusting, but beautiful at the same time. Whether they were working with miniatures, or computer graphics, or an animatronic puppet, the movements done by The Orphanage are quite complex. Their visual effects supervisor, Kevin Rafferty (Dragonheart, Shark Tale) had worked with all the dinosaurs on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He has a lot of know-how and experience, which helped me greatly. I would come up with these unique, very particular movements, and he had a great hand in keeping that real. What you see up on the screen, he let me know how to plan for that on location.

AG: Song Kang-ho, the star of your last film, Memories of Murder, is terrific here as well. Why did you decide to make his character mentally challenged?

BJ-H: I think you need to look at the family as a whole rather than just that one character. Whenever I take on a genre, there's part of me that just wants to twist it. Usually in monster films you see types, either the big action hero, or the specialist. I wanted the opposite--maybe some pathetic characters, where it makes no sense that they would go out to fight against this monster. And going with that, [Song's character] Kang-du is at the center because he has the family's most important duty, to save his daughter from the creature. That's why he's sort of even more challenged, so the audience will look at him and be so frustrated watching him.

But even such a comic character, as the story goes on, changes, and even a pathetic, stupid person faced with the extreme, changes. So, that scene where they're going into his frontal lobe-afterwards his eyes have changed, even the way he talks has changed. And in his climactic, desperate fight, you can see the changed person, there, too. In the beginning we have this image of him sleeping. By the end, it's the image of him awake. You can see this character's progression throughout the film.

AG: A lot of horror films-certainly in the U.S., but also now coming more from other countries, as well-are like wind-up toys, or video games, where the monster, or the evil creature or force, just knocks off the characters one by one. And the audience doesn't really feel anything except fear and/or thrills. That's not the way it is in The Host, where the viewer feels genuinely sad. When some of these characters die, you feel like they die-it's not a joke.

BJ-H: They are not just victims; they're human.

AG: Right!

BJ-H: What brings that on, I think, is that the moment that I decided I would focus on the family, rather than the creature, you feel that it's not just a typical victim here. Most monster films, you spend at least an hour thinking okay, what does it look like, how is it going to kill? But here, we have the creature come out early in its full glory, and the audience [experiences it as] the family, the family whose little girl has been kidnapped. So now you're invested in this family drama, sort of like Little Miss Sunshine and Billy Elliot. Since you're invested in this family, when there's pain, it's going to hurt you deeply because it's not a game.

AG: How did you come to cast American actors Scott Wilson and Paul Lazar?

BJ-H: Scott Wilson, he's someone that I was aware of for quite a long time. I mean, he's done movies in the Sixties and Seventies, In Cold Blood, The Grissom Gang. He didn't just work only in the U.S., he worked in European films, too, and I saw him in Krzysztof Zanussi's Polish film, The Year of the Quiet Sun; he was the lead character there. But most recently I had seen him in Monster; he played a decent, low-key character. It was a short scene, but it left a deep impression. The character of the American in the opening scene of The Host orders the formaldehyde to be poured [into Seoul's Han River]. It's an evil order, but on the surface at least, he's very smooth and dignified, like a gentleman giving this terrible command. I felt like Scott Wilson could play that with dignity. And so I sent him the script and a DVD of Memories of Murder and he said okay.

Similarly with Paul Lazar. Especially when I was preparing Memories of Murder, I would repeatedly watch The Silence of the Lambs. Again, a short scene, but quite impressive, where Lazar plays that insect specialist. I was taken with that unique aura he had; the way he hits on Jodie Foster quite charmed me. While I was preparing The Host, I saw him again in Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, and realized, oh, yeah! I thought, why not? So I sent him the script and Memories of Murder, and he said yes. They were in Korea for only just a few days, but we had a great time. The fun thing was that The Host was invited to the AFI Festival in Los Angeles last year, so I got to meet up with Scott Wilson again, have dinner, watch the film together. Likewise, at the New York Film Festival, I reconnected with Paul Lazar, and we got to hang out. It was fun.

AG: Lazar has a very singular look. It's interesting that he's there near the beginning of a mutant monster movie, because in a way, you can almost imagine him as a character who is in some form of mutation himself.

BJ-H: [Laughter] "Father of the monster," he called himself: "I am the father of the monster!"

AG: Just this past year, there were three films-Babel, Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men-that were quite successful in America, and were directed by three Mexican directors who are close, and rely on each other as sounding boards. That kind of collegial relationship among filmmakers is sadly not very common in the U.S. I know you're friends with Jang Joon-hwan, director of Save the Green Planet-great, great movie.

BJ-H: Yeah, yeah!

AG: Do you have a collaborative atmosphere with filmmakers in South Korea? Do you have friends who, like you, are directors, that you bounce stuff off of while you're creating?

BJ-H: Pretty much all the directors in Korea are close to each other because the industry itself is so much smaller than here. Even the director Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach)-although our films show drastically different styles of filmmaking, yeah, we go out for a drink or two, once in a while. A group of us are kind of close, like Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Kim Ji-woon of A Tale of Two Sisters, part of a group of directors a little closer than maybe everyone else. We run into each other at the theatre, and we're like, "Aw, you know what? That's enough of the movies! Stop watching!" Or we'll borrow DVDs from each other, and not return them, so we're fighting or bickering over that. Or we'll show off, "I bought this; you don't have this, do you?"-like juveniles. But, with that aside, when we're writing our scripts, we do give feedback to each other. I will have an official working relationship with director Park Chan-wook because he will be producing my next, next film, with his production company.

AG: The next, next film--is that the film based on the French comic The Snowland Train?

BJ-H: Yes, exactly.

________________________________

The Host opens around the country on March 9.

________________________________

March 8, 2007