The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

Unlike his Korean peers, Bong Joon-ho avoids demented mayhem.
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Photographs from ChungeorahmFilm
With a budget of just over $10 million, the film pales
in size next to the average Hollywood blockbuster. (It’s
not even that large for a Korean movie anymore; the biggest
films push toward the $20 million mark.) But careful
planning meant Mr. Bong could afford hundreds of
effects shots that bring the monster to life.
It was his first time dealing with international effects
houses, like the Orphanage in the United States and
Weta Workshop in New Zealand, and his first experience
with American actors. (The United States military figures
heavily in the story, which can be seen in part as an allegory
for American power in the post-9/11 world.)
During an afternoon interview, Mr. Bong was dressed
in a black T-shirt that read “Mise-en-scènes: Genres film
festival,” his hair a wiry tangle of jet black. While talking,
he moved, squirmed and gesticulated continually, checking
his cellphone’s constant flow of messages. He had
been working 14 hours or more a day for months, struggling
against deadlines to finish his creature feature in
time. “The Host” will not be released until July in South
Korea, but he ramped up the pace even more to get it
done in time for Cannes.
Born in 1969 in Daegu (when he calls it “Korea’s most
conservative city,” he leaves no doubt it is not a compliment),
Mr. Bong soon moved to Seoul. He watched
movies more on television than in the theaters, often on
the United States armed forces channel AFKN. On the
small screen he liked a diverse range, from “The Bicycle
Thief” to Sam Peckinpah films.
“The Peckinpah movies had a lot of cuts,” he said. “I used
to notice the cuts and imagine what was missing.” But
even though his father was an artist and a professor of
graphic design, Mr. Bong hesitated to study film. “I was
afraid to freak out my parents. That generation did not
think movies were art.”
Instead he attended Yonsei University’s department of sociology,
which in the 1980’s was a famous hotbed for the
democracy movement. Another highly regarded and provocative
director, Im Sang-soo (“The President’s Last Bang”),
graduated from the same department at the same time, although
Mr. Bong said the two never knew each other in
those days. Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy”) attended Sogang
University, just down the street, around the same time.
While still in school Mr. Bong made a short film, then,
after gathering the courage to freak out his parents, he
spent a year in film school. Entering the movie business
in the mid-1990’s, he worked as an assistant director
on “Seven Reasons Beer Is Better Than a Girl” (which
he calls “the worst movie ever in Korea”), then a couple
more movies, before getting the chance to make his own
film, “Barking Dogs Never Bite.”
“In the mid 1990’s the Korean film industry was really
open-minded,” Mr. Bong said. “Hong Sang-soo and Kim
Ki-duk made their debut then. Kang Je-gyu was editing
his movie right next door to where I was working.”
Since then Mr. Hong and Mr. Kim have grown into arthouse
favorites abroad, but their followings at home have
all but dried up. Mr. Kang has revolutionized the film
industry in Korea with his overt commercialism, smashing
box office records twice now, but outside of Korea his
films do not travel so well. Mr. Bong, however, continues
to walk the line, balancing between the two sides without
falling into either. “The multilevel, the conscious and the
unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come
up with ideas and stories,” he explained.
This layering is also what draws some of Korea’s top actors
to Mr. Bong. “What I like about director Bong’s work is
that his films are not the kind you just watch once and
then leave behind,” said Song Gang-ho, the star of “The
Host” and “Memories of Murder.” “You find a different
attraction every time you watch them. Whenever I work
with director Bong, it’s always delightful to share his way
of looking at the world. It’s quite extraordinary.”
For Mr. Bong, the film world in South Korea has completely
changed since he started more than a decade ago.
“I think over the past five or six years I’ve felt a radical
change from foreigners about Korean films,” he said.
“In 2000, when I was promoting ‘Barking Dogs,’ all the
questions were really general. But nowadays the questions
are more individualized, personal.”
Next up, he said, will be a small film, about a “very destructive
story between a mother and a son,” followed by a return
to the special effects in a story based of a French comic book,
but probably nothing more extreme than that.
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Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.