ANIMAL MAGIC
A GM super-pig takes the world by storm in OKJA. James Mottram meets the creators behind the year’s most meaty movie…
Joon-ho was in the street in Seoul one day, he saw an animal. He didn’t know what it was but he immediately took note. “It was huge, but it looked very shy and introverted,” he says. “It had a cute face.” In that moment, his wild fantasy-cum-satire Okja was born. The story of a young girl Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) battling an evil corporation, which has bred a genetically modified super-pig to alleviate world food shortages, it’s kind of like Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro for the meat-is-murder crowd.
“This film wasn’t made to be an activist movie or propaganda,” says Bong, sitting with his translator in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where the film has just received its world premiere. “It was made as a beauty project. It was supposed to be beautiful! I don’t think after watching this film, I want to convert everybody into veganism! Even Mija, the girl in the movie, her favourite food is chicken stew. We’re just like her. We have a lovely puppy in our house, but at lunch we eat steak. That’s very common, I think.”
In the film, Mija must head to New York to rescue Okja, the super-pig she has reared and loved, when reps from the Mirando Corporation, the agrochemical company
We have a lovely puppy in our house, but at lunch we eat steak
behind the GM-food programme, come to take this lovable porker away for a PR stunt. Joining her, with their own agenda, are radicals from the Animal Liberation Front, led by Paul Dano’s softly spoken but ruthless Jay, and including an unrecognisable Lily Collins as the red-haired, nose-ringed Red and The Walking
Dead’s Steven Yeun as K. Co-written by Bong and British journalistturned-screenwriter Jon Ronson (Frank), it makes for an interesting East-meets-West culture-clash. But despite frequent jokes in the film about things being lost in translation, that didn’t occur on set, says Yeun. “Director Bong is no slouch with English. I feel like he’s one of the few people equipped to handle a movie like this. I think it’s partly to do with how he understands both cultures but also partly to do with his unique, singular voice.”
All the cast dived head-first into what Dano calls “punishing” research. Books, YouTube clips and food industry documentary Fork Over
Knives were all devoured. “The take-away for me was how important it was to be a conscientious consumer,” says Yeun, in between mouthfuls of avocado on toast. “At least just know what you’re supporting by putting your dollar down. Can you be a little more thoughtful about the way you get your meat and vegetables? And what’s in your food in general? Suddenly you’re highly aware of the ethics of corporations.”
CHEW ON THIS
Representing the suits: Tilda Swinton (as CEO Lucy Mirando and her twin sister Nancy; “Trump and Ivanka” were inspirations, says Bong), Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Dr Johnny Wilcox, a shrill zoologist who first comes to Mija’s mountain home to take Okja back to New York. Usually a modicum of restraint, Gyllenhaal unleashes here. “There were a number of different animal show-hosts that Bong had shared with me via YouTube,” he says. “When we chose the shorts [that he wears], there was nowhere to go but over-the-top, right?”
It rather sums up Bong’s cartoon approach to a story that beautifully blends live-action with remarkable CGI. Collins, who had seen two of Bong’s earlier works, monster movie The Host and his train-set Snowpiercer, notes: “He had a comic book drawn of basically every frame of the movie. He storyboards everything. And so our characters are very grounded in reality, but were also very outlandish in a way and very comic-book-y.” It’s why character traits “that made us stand out” – like Red’s dyed hair – were pivotal.
It’s no surprise to learn Bong lays out each frame in advance, given the complex set-pieces – whether its Okja rescuing Mija in a real-life cliffhanger moment early on in the film (proving just how close their bond is) or the young girl hanging for dear life on the back of a truck during a high-speed chase. For these scenes, the production had to find a stunt double for Ahn Seo-hyun “who had a very small build but could perform big, powerful stunts,” says Bong. Eventually, a Chinese female circus performer was recruited for the task.
On set, Okja wasn’t just a tennis ball on a stick, waiting for digital rendering in postproduction. “You interacted with pieces of Okja all the time,” says Gyllenhaal. “There were pieces that were being moved and if you pushed on Okja, Okja would move back and push back on you. In that moment, there was one big large piece of fibreglass – and underneath Okja, the nipples and stuff, that was there too. You could always interact. There’s little bits of hair on her that you feel.”
When it came to the digital creation of Okja, Bong pays special tribute to his VFX supervisor Erik De Boer, who previously worked on the tiger in Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi. “He thinks about animals 24/7. He visits the zoo and studies animals for up to three to four hours. He’s a very observant and objective scientist. Okja’s muscle structure, bone structure, the fat, the ligaments, is all inside his head. We see only Okja’s skin in the movie but in his mind, they built from inside all the organs. That makes Okja look real.”
The final result is quite special – with the computer-generated Okja interacting brilliantly with her physical surroundings, whether in the jungle or in a chase through a Korean shopping mall. It’s every bit as startling as watching King Kong climb the Empire State Building or the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. “I thought she looked beautiful,” says Dano. “Just the simple moments of her stumbling in a puddle… God, it was gorgeous. It felt like people knew Okja. Like one existed and you wanted to go touch one.”
SWEETMEATS
Yet while De Boer and his team were busy creating a minor digital miracle, Bong was tinkering away with the film’s slant in post-production during the ADR sessions, when actors re-dub dialogue. “For Tilda, we revised some of the lines and those were based on the political climate,” he says. “We tried to make the lines with more political affiliation – she tried various voices that sounded like [President] Trump. She always asked me, ‘Does it sound more like Trump?’”
Rather like Okja himself, the film has endured a bumpy ride since being finished. The first Cannes press screening had to be stopped and re-started after ten minutes due to a technical fault. It didn’t help that the Netflix logo was booed by a small minority – some believing that a streaming company had no place at the world’s most famous film festival. Protests were also launched by France’s National Federation of Cinema Owners, complaining about the lack of the film’s cinema release in France.
Certainly, the lush cinematography by ace DP Darius Khondji belongs on the big screen – and the film will receive a limited theatrical run in the UK and US. But as Collins points out, Netflix are not quite the showbiz equivalent of the Mirando Corporation that some believe. “I think this film was made the way it was made because Netflix allowed Bong to do his thing and we’re very thankful for that. It wouldn’t have turned out the way it had if they hadn’t allowed him to do that.”
Food for thought, you might say.
Okja is on Netflix and in cinemas from 28 June.