A small-screen battle over a flick about a big pig
>> After Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean film director celebrated for his thrilling visuals and dark bite, debuted his new film at Cannes — Okja, about a steely girl and her imperilled giant pet pig — audience members leapt to their feet for a minutes-long ovation.
But when the logo of its studio, Netflix, flickered on screen, they jeered. To much resentment, Okja will not be shown in French cinemas, because of the country’s restrictive film rules.
Bong later said he understood the booers’ ire; of course films are best seen on a big screen, in the dark, with people all around. But were it not for Netflix, he continued during an interview in Manhattan a few weeks ago, Okja as he conceived it could not have been made.
The film, written by Bong and Jon Ronson and starring Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal and Paul Dano, tells of the tweenage Mija, an orphan who lives with her grandfather and her best friend, Okja, a six-tonne genetically engineered pig, on a verdant mountaintop in South Korea. The corporation that created Okja, and hundreds of her kind, wants the creature back and plans to use her as a green-washed publicity stunt to sell industrially produced meat. Plot points include a pignapping, Mija’s desperate pursuit, a bumbling Animal Liberation Front troop, an insecure corporate villainess (played with pitch-perfect iciness by Swinton) and a foray into the grisly mechanics of factory farming.
With Okja, Bong said, with the help of a translator, the studios the story was pitched to had seemed more or less onboard — at least until it came to that last bit.
“For the studios, the recurring questions was, ‘Are you going to keep the slaughterhouse scene?’” Bong said. “They saw a girl and beautiful animals. They wanted something like Disney. But Netflix, they gave me 100% freedom to do whatever I wanted.” (Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, is also a producing partner.)
Floppy haired and youthful at 47, Bong met to chat with The New York Times with his translator and Ronson in a 38th-floor corner room at the Mandarin Oriental by Central Park, with Midtown’s mash-up of stately old buildings and heaven-scraping new towers looming outside. The news conference and junket — which entails having reporters hop from one hotel room to the next to interview the movie’s principals for scant minutes as publicists count down the time — were to be held the next day.
It was, in other words, a traditional movie rollout for a film that is having an untraditional, if increasingly common, release. Okja will open on just three screens in the United States on Wednesday, the same day as its streaming debut. This “day and date” release, as it is known, is prohibited in France, where three years must elapse before a film that hits French cinemas is allowed to appear online. It was a rule that Netflix executives could not stomach. Meanwhile, in South Korea, where Bong is a star, the three top cinema chains have threatened to boycott the film unless Netflix delays streaming it there.
Bong said that he regrets that Okja is getting such limited cinema showings but that nowadays theatrical releases account for a short part of a film’s life span. There was also the matter of creative control. His 2014 film, the dystopian thriller Snowpiercer, narrowly avoided studio-mandated editing; its US distributor, The Weinstein Co, wanted to shave off 20 minutes, and backed down only after test audiences responded more favourably to Bong’s cut. (Harvey Weinstein came under fire for giving the film a very limited theatrical release). “These new providers,” Bong said, “are a new and fresh opportunity.”
The idea for Okja started, he said, when the image of a large, ungainly animal with a sad face popped into his head. He began wondering why this animal was melancholy and about who might harm it, and then about humanity’s Sophie’s Choice- esque predilection for deeming some animals edible and other animals pets.
Ronson, a journalist and author who also was a writer on the indie movie Frank, said that for him, Okja was about cognitive dissonance. “To eat the meat,” he said, “you have to ignore the slaughterhouse.”
Okja is technically a pig but also shares her lineage with hippos, elephants and manatees, the gentle sea cows that inspired her not-very-porcine face. While there are abattoir scenes, and no shortage of heartache, much of the film is madcap and light, and shot through with Bong’s wry humour. The Animal Liberation Front, a Three Stooges-like crew led by Dano, includes an attenuated young man so anguished about humanity’s carbon footprint that he refuses to eat. Swinton’s chief executive spends a good chunk of the film speaking through a mouthful of braces. Gyllenhaal’s bug-eyed zoologist is a certifiable nut.
The story line also hews to a socially conscientious thread that runs through Bong’s previous work. In his 2007 film The Host, a heavily polluted river yields up a monster. Snowpiercer, which was based on a graphic novel, is about the last human survivors of a climate change experiment gone catastrophically wrong, living in Dickensian privation on a socially stratified, perpetual-motion train.
Yet Bong said his intention with Okja was not to make a polemic about animal rights: “The main purpose of this film is to be beautiful.”
Still, he acknowledged being “very concerned and nervous all the time”. He worries that the air he breathes is dirty, he said, and that the water he drinks is polluted, and says all that anxiety might be rooted in childhood kidney problems and chronic throat infections that left him afraid of water and air. “I’m quite fine now,” he said.
Okja is indeed beautiful; it has been widely likened to the visually luscious work of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese anime great whose oeuvre includes Princess Mononoke. But certain parts are, by design, hard to watch.
As research for the film, Bong visited a slaughterhouse in Colorado, and the smell from the parking lot — dozens of metres from the plant itself — of blood, death, excrement and animal fear, almost brought him to his knees. He watched the cows waiting their turn to enter the plant and then watched them being slaughtered inside, with every bit of their bodies, including faeces — “everything but the squeal”, Bong said — put to another use.
“There are times where I wanted to inflict certain psychological pain,” he said, about the film, “because in reality, that’s what the animals go through.”
Still, the film stopped short of making its cast and key players outright vegetarians. Ronson remains a pescatarian, or, as he put it, “a fish and chipocrit”. An Seo Hyun, who plays Mija, said shooting the slaughterhouse scenes put her off meat, but she has since picked it back up, albeit with greater awareness about where it comes from. Dano, who first met Bong years ago, when Dano was playing in a band and spotted “a large Korean man” dancing around in the audience, said he probably won’t stop eating meat but will want to know more about its origins. Swinton said she’s an infrequent carnivore, limiting her intake to wild game caught near her home in the Scottish Highlands. “A very luxury position to be in,” she said.
Swinton, who previously worked with Bong on Snowpiercer, said with Okja, Bong succeeded at making a highly entertaining film about something that, along with climate change and the like, people would rather not think about.
“The sort of collective amnesia that we’re all encouraged to sort of hold hands on, which is not being awake about what we’re putting in our bodies, the way we’re treating each other, the way we’re treating the planet, that’s the thing, really,” Swinton said. “The whole idea of sleepwalking into sort of mindless consumerism.”
As for Bong, the trip to the Colorado slaughterhouse made him a vegan for all of two months.
“You know,” he said, “South Korea is barbecue paradise.”