'The Host' - Bong Joon-Ho Q&A

Time Out catches up with the director of South Korea's most successful film of all-time.

Nov  7 2006

37-year-old writer-director Bong Joon-Ho first gained international prominence with his second feature, the police procedural 'Memories of Murder'. His follow-up, the genre-bending monster movie 'The Host', currently tops the all-time box office list in South Korea.

Is it really true that you showed your producer an image of the Loch Ness monster as a way of starting out on this film?

Yes, I did a composite of Nessie and a picture of the Han river in Seoul I'd taken myself, and said 'This is my next project!'. He was a bit taken aback, but somehow he agreed to it. That was about four years ago.

Traditionally, monster movies are often born out of particular historical anxieties - about atomic power in the '50s, for instance. Was it the same for you here?

Just as the monster movies of the '50s came out of worries about the nuclear bomb and the Soviet threat, so 'The Host' can be traced to fears about what the Americans are doing now. Having said that, it does treat the activities of the US military in quite a satirical way, perhaps not to be taken too seriously. In fact, the film's more focused on the struggle of a family faced with a situation that's totally beyond their control. These people are weak, they're under-achievers, but the system doesn't help them - it fails them.

In a way, the film takes the usual monster movie fears about powerlessness and relocates them in a social context?

The main emphasis here isn't on fighting the monster, but on the energy coming from the little girl trapped in his lair who's fighting for survival, and the family's battle to try to get to her. That makes it rather different from the usual monster movie.

And because the family's plight is actively stymied by the forces of authority, it enables you to bring elements of class tension and social comment to the story.

Right. Especially for a Korean audience, who really understand what the family's going through. I don't know how that will be perceived in the UK, but I suppose the problem of the disenfranchised underclass is pretty much a global question.

Can we extrapolate from that the inference that South Korea's still quite an authoritarian place?

Of course, we no longer have a military dictatorship, but there's still a decidedly authoritarian attitude from the government, and in people as well. I guess it's just very hard to shake it off.

That's essentially the subject of 'Memories of Murder', isn't it?

It is, though that film's a portrait of the '80s, when we had the hardest military government. In 'The Host' it's not as extreme as that, but you still get glimpses of it in individuals.

Did your producer ever encourage you to have less social drama and more monster action in the film?

Surprisingly, no. I think the success of 'Memories of Murder' bought me a little breathing space. The problems in making the film were more to do with whether we could get the effects we wanted with the budget we had available.

Audiences have seen everything, so how do you come up with a monster which still has some shock value?

We really didn't want a 'monster movie' sort of a creature, so we looked at lots of photos of real-life mutations, creatures mis-shapen after environmental catastrophes. The basic look was to take a fish with a curvature of the spine, but the rest of the design was really practical. It had to run fast on land, dangle from bridges and be very acrobatic.

Do some viewers find the blend of monster flick, family drama, black comedy and social comment a bit disorientating?

I used the same technique in 'Memories of Murder', where you had comedy layered on top of quite a dark story, but 'The Host' is even more of a mix. Human beings are so multi-faceted, I feel almost duty bound to explore lots of different emotions in each story.

Is that emotional generosity typically Korean?

You're right to say it's a reflection of Korean people, because we can be very expressive. Sometimes westerners think we're overdoing it, but that's just the way we are.

Does that blend of different elements in the material reflect your own tastes as a film-maker?

I have a real love and hate feeling towards American genre movies. I'll follow the genre conventions for a while, then I want to break out and turn them upside-down. That's where the very Korean elements come in. My generation got inspired by watching foreign movies in the mid-'80s, when Korean cinema was swamped by imports and wasn't in a very good state. It's like you want to be influenced, but you don't want to be overwhelmed.

Which foreign films made a lasting impression on you?

My personal fascination is for older Japanese directors, like Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura, but I'm also a big fan of a previous Korean director Kim Ki-Young, who's passed away now. I also love American cinema before 'Jaws' and before 'Star Wars'. John Frankenheimer, John Schlesinger, Alan J Pakula, Sidney Lumet - these people aren't regarded as major 'auteurs', but they were great professionals who were able to put their own taste, feeling and emotion into their films even though they were made within the Hollywood system.

'The Host' is released on Friday.

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