BONG JOON-HO
WITH A STRING OF DAZZLING, HIGH-CONCEPT THRILLERS, BONG JOON-HO HAS DRAWN COMPARISONS TO HITCHCOCK. BUT HIS FILMS ALSO HAVE A STRONG SOCIAL MESSAGE, AND HIS LATEST, PARA SITE, IS NO EXCEPTION
With Parasite, the South Korean master of the thriller confirms his status as one of the world’s finest directors. He tells us how.
Bong Joon-ho has set movies in monster-infested sewers, on trains travelling through post-apocalyptic blizzards, and in abattoirs awash with the blood of giant pigs. Look a little closer, though, and the South Korean director’s films actually all take place in a single setting.
“In my films, you really see the people on the bottom rungs,” says the filmmaker. “normal human beings in conditions in which they can no longer act human, in situations where they become treated like ghosts.” Bong’s heroes tend to live at the foot of a ladder that’s impossible to climb. The people far above, meanwhile, are incompetent idiots, living lives of luxury, oblivious to the desperate, daily struggle of those beneath them. It’s these strugglers’ stories that Bong has dedicated his career to telling.
Parasite, Bong’s latest razor-sharp, darkly comic social satire, pushes this concept to new extremes. The less you know about it going in, the better: all you need to know is that it’s thrillingly unpredictable, the film scuttling between genres like cockroaches between floorboards. It’s part slapstick comedy, part home-invasion horror, part family drama and part pulse-pounding heist film — think Ocean’s Eleven if Clooney and co, instead of attempting to steal millions amid the bright lights of Las Vegas, were simply trying to scam their way out of the gutter, into minimum wage jobs. “It’s a story about capitalism,” its maker shrugs and smiles, running a hand through his soft, black mop of hair.
Empire greets Bong in Beverly hills, a place that epitomises the class divide at the heart of his work: on the palm tree-adorned street outside the hotel where we’ve arranged to meet, members of LA’S 60,000-strong homeless population hold cardboard signs up at passing sports cars, hoping their wealthy drivers might stop to give them change. For our photoshoot, a hotel room has been set up to resemble the fancy, modernist house in which much of Parasite takes place. “Uh-oh! You blocked up the hole to downstairs, right?” Bong jokes as the shoot begins, referencing a passageway in his film that contains a dark secret. It’s no surprise to find the 50-year-old in a playful mood.
Parasite, after all, another masterpiece from the Daegu-born director, has met with a wave of acclaim, proving a runaway cult smash and his biggest success by far.
In May, the film was named the first Korean film to win Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’or. Since then, it’s shattered records for a foreign-language film in America, with the movie expected to surpass $20 million at the US box office. It’s also predictably gone down a storm in the director’s homeland, where previous social thrillers like The Host and breakout thriller Memories Of Murder elevated him to rock-star status long ago, way before his Cannes triumph. After Parasite, his long list of admirers, dubbed ‘the Bonghive’ online and including many famous fans (see sidebar), is now bigger than ever.
“I didn’t expect it all,” says Bong of the film’s success, speaking via a translator and sounding a little bemused. Who can blame him? Mainstream audiences don’t normally bug out over films like Parasite, a twisty Korean-language meditation on class inequality that’s somehow ended up one of the most-talked about movies of the last 12 months. Why has it resonated so powerfully with audiences around the world? And how exactly did he dream up the film’s distressing message and imagery, both of which infest your brain for days after you watch it? The answer’s simple, Bong laughs: “I lived it.”
Parasite STARTS SIMPLY enough. The Kims, led by bumbling patriarch Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), are an impoverished family who spend their days folding pizza boxes for cash in a crummy basement apartment. They live in squalor, pissed on — literally and figuratively
— by a world that views them as no better than the roaches they share their home with. So when word reaches them of a wealthy family, the Parks, who need a tutor for one of their pampered children, they smell an opportunity. A plan is hatched that will allow all of them to worm their way into the Parks’ home and onto their payroll. A series of dark discoveries and farcical fights later, it all unravels violently.
Bong can relate. Well, sort of. In the late 1980s, while enrolled at Yonsei University in the Sinchon neighborhood of Seoul, the budding filmmaker used to tutor children for extra cash. “The nature of that job lets you enter somebody’s home and witness their private lives. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a guilty pleasure, but there is a certain enjoyment that comes with seeing the interiors of these people’s lives,” he confides. When it was time for him to move on from his post as tutor for one particularly wealthy, well-paying family, a thought occurred to him: why not recommend a friend take over? This idea then mutated in his mind. “I never put this into practice, because, well, I’m not a con artist,” he giggles. “But I did think about it: how a group might infiltrate a family home like that.”
For years, this idea festered in his subconscious, as Bong went about realising his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. The son of an industrial designer father and professional housewife mother, he had grown up in Daegu devouring as many movies as he could. Spielberg thrill rides like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Jaws were particular favourites. “The films that really flow in my bloodstream are the American genre films I watched growing up,” he says today. “I watched a lot of American crime, action and sci-fi.” As he learned to make movies himself in the early ’90s, completing a two-year programme at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, he found himself gravitating towards a brand of cinema that at once paid tribute to American film and culture, and also retaliated fiercely against it, savagely skewering its capitalist values.
“I love to take the conventions of American genre films, then brutally break them,” he explains. This was especially apparent in 2006’s
The Host, Bong’s international breakout success. After making his name in 2003 with crime drama
Memories Of Murder, about cops on the hunt for South Korea’s first serial killer, The Host saw him turn his ambitions towards an Americanstyle monster movie that would harbour a sly anti-american message. Hidden inside this
Godzilla-style flick were metaphors for the Bush administration’s reckless foreign policy and misused military might. The film’s monster, a mutated fish creature with a sweet tooth for children, is created in the movie after a US officer orders 200 bottles of formaldehyde be dumped down a drain leading into the Han River. (As with
Parasite, the idea came from personal experience: after reading in a newspaper about a real-life formaldehyde incident, Bong cast his mind back to his adolescent days staring into the Han River, daydreaming about the mysteries it might contain.)
That movie made a decent $2.2 million at the American box office, impressed one Quentin Tarantino (who promptly listed The Host as one of his favourite movies released since the early ’90s) and put Bong firmly on Hollywood’s radar. After another South Korean hit in 2009, the astounding Mother, Bong carried his anticapitalist warnings into his first English-language movie, Snowpiercer. It didn’t exactly go to plan. Bitter fights between Bong and distributor Harvey Weinstein threw the Chris Evans-starring satire’s release into disarray, delaying the movie and ultimately sabotaging its box-office impact (the director was given the choice between a wide release of Weinstein’s cut and a very limited release of his cut; Bong chose the latter). Critics lauded his tale of the last human survivors of a climate apocalypse all the same, championing its powerful commentary about the gulf between what Bong calls “the haves and have-nots”.
“I’m very focused on the human condition,” says the director, explaining the forces within him that keep him returning to the subject of inequality in his movies (his Snowpiercer follow-up, 2015 drama Okja, explored similar territory, this time through the prism of animal rights). “The environment around humans, the basic level of decency we should keep. I grew up in a middleclass family but went to school in a neighbourhood where the gap between rich and poor was very high. Some kids lived in very fancy apartments. There was one kid, on the other hand, who lived in a greenhouse in a farm field, whose classmates avoided him because he supposedly smelled. I was close to him. He used to come to my house.”
Bong grew up sandwiched between people at opposing ends of the economic spectrum like this — exposed from an early age to the ways the rich might discriminate against the poor, the invisible hierarchies that offer advantages to those who have money and punish those who don’t. Six movies into a glittering career, at the top of the economic ladder himself, you might have thought Bong would be done drawing attention to the injustices of that system in his movies. But he wasn’t.
Instead, after Okja, he returned to his memories of tutoring, for that family with seemingly infinite riches. He sat down at his laptop and, over a whirlwind two-month writing period, something new tumbled out. Parasite was born.
Bong NEEDS TREATMENT. At least, that’s what his doctor once advised him. “He told me I should be on medication for two things: my anxiety and my compulsions,” the director reveals. He laughs, because these two things are what he credits with for the creation of the beautifully constructed visual world of Parasite. “I’m very obsessive. I obsess over getting the exact image that I want and I can’t relax until I have that image in my hands. And because of my anxiety, I’m crazy meticulous in my preparation process. That’s the only way I can not panic.”
The meticulousness that went into Parasite was next-level, even by Bong’s standards. Rather than hire an existing expensive-looking house to film the scenes set in the Park family home, he and production designer Lee Ha Jun designed and constructed their very own lavish hilltop home, so they could imbue every inch of it with metaphor and meaning. When it came to the Kim family’s home, they created an entire floodable street. “We built their entire neighbourhood in a giant swimming pool. I don’t think that had been done before,” he says. Every element required hands-on attention from Bong — all the way down to creating convincing sewage water for a scene viewers won’t forget in a hurry. “We had to think of the density and viscosity, to make sure it looks real. And at the same time, for our actors, I was thinking it’d be great if they all didn’t get a skin disease from it,” he jokes.
When they finished, Bong and his team of collaborators had no idea what they had just created, what exactly they had on their hands. “As a filmmaker, I’m always concerned whether my film will break even. I had a lot of worries about Parasite. On one hand, this film is very fun. But
it’s also very raw and realistic, which can make people uncomfortable.” He and his team had created a profound, elegant thriller that broke new cinematic ground and blurred the barriers between horror and hilarity. “It’s very natural to me to have two or three emotions mixed in one scene — or even one frame,” Bong laughs. But would its unflinchingly honest depiction of the dog-eat-dog dynamic of capitalism cut too close to the bone for audiences who live that experience daily? “There were definitely concerns,” he admits, playing with the pieces of a chess set built into the table we’re sat at.
He needn’t have worried. Parasite’s reception has been so overwhelmingly positive, there are even whispers of Best Picture and Best Director nominations at 2020’s Oscars. A win would be unprecedented: no Korean film has ever been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, let alone Best Picture. “I think right now I’m very unsure,” he says. “But I never imagined I would win the award at Cannes, either.” He’s similarly tightlipped about his next projects. Bong has two films currently in development — one a Korean-language drama shrouded in mystery, the other an Englishlanguage offering inspired by a 2016 news article that he’s looking to shoot in London. “Sorry, but it’s confidential,” is all he’ll say on the matter of those.
Whatever comes next, it’s unlikely Bong will abandon the themes of inequality and capitalism that he’s spent over 15 years engaging with in his movies. Maybe that’s the reason Parasite is striking such a chord: the worse the problem gets, the more global audiences crave narratives that sum up and process capitalism’s capacity for cruelty. “Look at Jordan Peele’s Us,” Bong exclaims, drawing attention to another 2019 movie about a financially comfortable family who meet their disadvantaged mirror images, with distressing consequences. Lee Chang-dong’s Burning covers similar thematic ground, and there’s echoes of the movie’s eat-therich message in Todd Phillips’ Joker, too, he points out. “All those great filmmakers, it’s not as if we decided to form an alliance to interrogate this issue. It happened naturally and I think it’s easy to understand why. Creators always reflect their worlds and the times that we live in.”
Parasite’s popularity is bittersweet for Bong. “When I first created the film, I felt it was a very Korean story full of Korean nuances and context. I’m coming to realise that wasn’t the case,” he says, reflecting on how universal its tale of systemic poverty is proving to be. The local problems he wanted to distil into Parasite are, the film’s resonance around the planet seems to suggest, also problems worldwide.
Until the ladder between rich and poor becomes easier to climb, or is done away with altogether, don’t expect Bong Joon-ho to stop doing what he does best. Making movies about those at the bottom, the ghosts looking up from the gutter.