Bong Joon-ho's ruthless, bleak new film 'Parasite' was a Cannes darling — and is the most fun you’ll have in theaters this fall. e_alexjung reports
Photo: Robert Maxwell The standoff between Bong Joon-ho and Harvey Weinstein over the U.S. cut of Snowpiercer had all the hallmarks of a scene the director might shoot himself. High drama. The Korean auteur versus the bullish American. Philosophical questions of artistic integrity in the time of mass consumption. Gallows humor.
Bong was at a loss: Cutting 25 minutes felt like taking out a major organ. Without the dialogue, the movie became incoherent; character motivation made no sense. That day, he managed to save one scene, the moment when a train guard guts a fish in front of the rebels as a show of intimidation. Bong and his cinematographer loved that shot. “Harvey hated it. Why fish? We need action!” Bong remembers.
To a viewer familiar with Bong’s work, the metatext in the conflict is unmistakable. His films often center on underdogs fighting against authoritarian forces. In his 2006 breakout movie, The Host, a bickering Korean family finds itself battling a giant river monster born of American malfeasance: A U.S. military official orders a Korean lackey to pour hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde directly down the drain , thereby creating a beast that terrorizes the city of Seoul .
Still, it’s hard not to feel that Bong could make history. In a post-Roma world, maybe Parasite doesn’t get just Best International Film but Best Picture and Best Director nominations, too. Bong has already had a brilliant year: At the Cannes Film Festival this spring, he became the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or, in a unanimous jury decision. The Korean press was rapturous upon his return. “Normally, people don’t care about film festivals.
Bong’s work reflects anxieties he feels every day — about the climate crisis, the widening income gap. “My films generally seem to have three components: fear, anxiety, and a kekeke sense of humor,” he says, using the Korean equivalent of “ha-ha.” “Humor comes from anxiety, too,” he adds. “At least when we laugh, there’s a feeling that we’re overcoming some kind of horror.” In his view, our world is already a dystopia, and all tragedy and comedy flows from this fact.
Bong was born in 1969, the youngest of four, in the southeastern city of Daegu, when South Korea was under the rule of a military dictatorship. His family’s house was near a U.S.
“We hated going to class,” he recalls. “Every day was the same: protest during the day, drink at night. Except for a few people, we didn’t have much faith in the professors at the time. So we formed study groups of our own covering politics, aesthetics, history. We’d drink until late at night, talking and debating.” He adds, “I’m not the kind of person who likes to be stuck in a group, so even while we were protesting, I would leave and go watch a movie.
We pull up to the Four Seasons, where a fleet of bellhops swarms the car to open the door for us. Just through the hotel entrance, a saleswoman is standing outside a small, glass-walled parfumerie. She hands Bong a sample of Krigler’s Sierra Vista cologne, which she describes as a “sexy scent” of cedarwood and jasmine. He takes a sniff. “It’s better than tear gas,” he says, laughing.
But not until Bong’s second feature, Memories of Murder, did his visual style begin to gel. In another life, he would have been a comic-book artist. Bong meticulously storyboards everything he shoots, and his movies look like individual frames come to life. He sketched out every scene for Parasite and Memories of Murder himself — complete with dialogue — and for films with bigger visual effects, like Okja and Snowpiercer, he worked with an artist.
Perhaps most unconventionally, he doesn’t shoot coverage — that is, multiple shots from various angles and perspectives that get edited together later. Instead, he shoots exactly what he imagines, editing on set as he goes. “That process allows him to fully control what the cut is going to be, and the result ends up being very original,” says Kevin Thompson, the production designer for Okja. “He’s not getting more than he needs.
“Wow, it feels like the extension of a wall,” Bong says, marveling at the closed door. “Suddenly, it reminds me of the dialogue of Song Kang-ho in Snowpiercer, do you remember? Song Kang-ho said everybody thinks this is a wall, but actually this is a door, and then they explode it and go out. If we erase the borderline between the door and the wall …”
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