Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Okja’ offers food for thought
ong Joon Ho has learned good with the bad.
The master South Korean filmmaker — his crime mystery “Memories of Murder,” goofball monster movie “The Host” and Hitchcockian thriller “Mother” are all rightly considered classics — has enjoyed ambition-fueling resources as well as some release-related heartbreaks with his two most recent, mostly English-language productions, “Snowpiercer” and the new “Okja.”
The 47-year-old director appeared sanguine about it, though, over coffee in West Hollywood earlier this month. It was a few weeks after “Okja” — the story of a Korean farm girl determined to rescue her genetically engineered giant pig creature from the slaughterhouse — debuted at the Cannes Film Festival amid controversy over its Netflix backing, which prevents it from a commercial theatrical release in France (it begins streaming worldwide on-demand Wednesday, and running in a handful of L.A., New York and South Korean theaters).
“Despite the controversy regarding the distribution, as a creator it was a good opportunity because you have 100 percent creative freedom as well as a 100 percent financial investment from Netflix,” says Bong, who mainly uses an interpreter but speaks his own, often poetic English when passionate about a topic.
And, let’s be frank, who but Netflix would pony up to the high $50 millions for this sometimes cartoonish, often heartfelt, graphically brutal, anti-capitalist satire about tomboy Mija (An Seo Hyun), who loves her hippo-pig-manatee-future-foodsource pet enough to do anything to rescue her from the corporation that spliced it together, and now wants to feed Okja and her like to the world?
Mija’s mission takes her from the idyllic mountain paradise where she and Okja to take the romped their whole lives to incredible chases through Seoul to a bizarre media event on Wall Street to a horrific climax at a New Jersey meat processing plant. The extended cast of characters is played by such not-cheap performers as Tilda Swinton as sisters Lucy and Nancy Mirando, who run the multinational that made and now wants to market Okja; Jake Gyllenhaal as a completely whackazoid TV zoologist; and Paul Dano, Steven Yeun and Lily Collins as animal rights terrorists who may help Mija, but will more likely make things worse.
Where did all this come from? Bong likes watching animal shows on television, and one Sunday morning, that got him to thinking.
“The first animal I imagined was a pig, and this naturally led into considering the food industry because there’s no animal more related to food than the pig,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious progression in the world. “In reality, pigs are very smart and clean, but people consider them as food and rather dumb. Now, they’re trapped in this system of mass production.”
So, what is in some ways like a Disneynature show morphed into disturbing directions from there. But Bong still thinks it’s OK for kids to watch “Okja.” Probably.
“There are some uncomfortable things in this movie, but I intended them and was never afraid of them,” he says. “There’s the girl and the loving animal living in peace in the beautiful Disney kind of realm, and at the same time there is the very dark world.
“When we buy meat products in the market, how they got there is very vicious and sad. So in film, as in life, you always try to separate those two worlds, but in this film we tried to merge them together. I’m not saying children should not watch this film, but it definitely requires parental guidance. I hope it doesn’t give anyone traumas; Netflix does their own ratings, and they’re going to give this film a Mature rating, which I feel is appropriate.”
And no, Bong’s not trying to sell any vegetarian agenda, although he does admit he turned vegan for a few months after his visit to a Colorado meatpacking plant for “Okja” research.
“I’m from South Korea, and Korea is a barbecue paradise,” he points out. “Even Mija’s favorite food is chicken stew, if you’ll notice. What I did want to oppose is how tragic it is to have animals be part of this capitalistic, mass production system. For them, every day is a holocaust.”
Few characters except Okja are let totally off the moral hook by the movie, and the closest one to an out-and-out villain ends up being someone you can make a deal with. Humans are omnivores, after all, and even at their most caricatured and ethically compromised, Bong’s people tend to be quite messily complex.
“Whenever I write a script, I always move like that,” the filmmaker says. “I cannot describe pure evil or a pure superhero. In my mind, there can never be a perfect hero or a perfect villain. Everybody’s in a gray zone.”
If Okja herself seems to have some human qualities too, well, she was made that way. Although the beast we see onscreen is fully digitally animated, she has so many close-quarters interactions with people and props (check out her bull in a Seoul shopping mall bit) that the traditional tennisball-on-a-stick tactic for interacting with future CGI creatures just wouldn’t do.
Enter the stuffies, puppeted full-scale Okja parts that were shot practically and later covered in pixels — by, crucially, the same guy who operated the full-size Okja pieces.
“I had experience of a creature monster movie with ‘The Host,’ but this was totally different,” Bong explains. “We needed some intimacy, close contact. We made five different parts of Okja’s body as stuffies; same size, same shape. The most important one was the face stuffy, for Mija, who is always hugging it. The stuffy is very simplified, but the volume and the shape is accurate. We had a great animation supervisor, Stephen Clee. He was inside the stuffy, doing some performance. So the person who puppeteered the stuffy was also the person who animated it in post production.”
It’s all quite something to see. And after his disheartening fights with U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein over the release length of “Snowpiercer” (now, ironically, being turned into a bingeable TV series), Bong does express at least a little bit of melancholy about how most people will watch “Okja.”
“Myself and our director of photography, Darius Khondji, never were influenced by the fact that it would be on a streaming service like Netflix,” Bong reveals. “We created the film considering that it would be on the big screen. I’m happy it was premiered in the Lumiere Theatre at the Cannes Film Festival. There are screenings in L.A. and New York, and in Korea a wide release, about 100 theaters, was planned simultaneously with the streaming service. Those opportunities to share the film in a theater is very precious to me.”
Since Bong made that statement, several Korean theater chains have announced that they will not be screening “Okja”; like here, exhibitors consider day-and-date ondemand video availability a capitalist business killer.
“Compared to my prior films, the number of theaters that will be showing ‘Okja’ is relatively less, which is sad in some ways,” Bong admits, then philosophically — and quite accurately — adds, “but considering the lifespan of a single film, its theatrical life is very short and the rest of its life is in digital now.”
Contact Bob Strauss at rstrauss@scng. com or @bscritic on Twitter.