A Pig’s Tale How Jon Ronson, a Welsh nerd, came to write a South Korean action film
THE STRANGEST MOVIE villain of the summer was inspired by a TED Talk. Oh, and a robot hummingbird. It was February of 2012. The Welsh writer Jon Ronson had traveled to Long Beach, California, for the annual TED conference, where he was to deliver a talk about psychopaths. (Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test had been published the previous year.) While there, he was unexpectedly captivated by a presentation from Regina Dugan, then-director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “She comes on in a poloneck jumper looking like Steve Jobs and gives this TED Talk about weaponry,” Ronson recalls. While lecturing on the miraculous rise of flight, Dugan welcomed to the stage a hummingbird drone, which began zooming, eerily birdlike, above the crowd. Audience members gasped.
“I was gasping too,” Ronson says—with delight, but also a creeping trepidation. He suddenly realized that, given DARPA’S military work, “bad things” could happen because of that robot bird. “It might go in through somebody’s window and, you know, kill them. That’s what DARPA does, right? There was a really interesting incongruity between the presentation of her message and the message itself.”
Ronson had this strange moment in mind when he began work on the screenplay for Okja (Oak-shah), the captivating new film from South Korean director Bong Joon Ho. It’s a dizzying, cross-continental flick that flirts with action-adventure and furious satire. A primped, blond Tilda Swinton plays the villain, Lucy Mirando, the domineering CEO of Mirando Corp., a multinational meat company. When we meet her, she’s giving a charismatic public address in which—as with the TED Talk—cute animals obscure a more sinister reality. Mirando reveals that her corporation has sent a litter of enormous genetically modified “super pigs” to local farmers around the world. A South Korean farm girl named Mija (Ahn Seo Hyun) cares for and adores one such pig, the Cgi-fueled Okja. You can guess what happens when the corporation decides it’s time for their property to become dinner: Mija goes to death-defying lengths to save her doomed friend.
Ronson is a screenwriter and author best known for The Men Who Stare at Goats, a 2004 book about the U.S. military’s interest
in the paranormal that became a film starring Ewan Mcgregor. Later, he wrote The Psychopath Test and 2014’s Frank, a quirky flick loosely based on Ronson’s early misadventures with a band. Ronson, 50, has round glasses and a thick, charming accent. We’re chatting in his Manhattan apartment’s small office, with a framed image of Frank Sidebottom, the papier-mâché-masked musician who inspired Frank, on the wall.
So: How did a Welsh-born journalist wind up co-writing a wildly original South Korean action movie? Ronson’s improbable involvement began with a phone call: Bong wanted to meet him. It was October 2014, and Bong was fresh from the success of Snowpiercer, a harrowing, postapocalyptic action film that takes place on board a train during a near-future ice age. (Bong’s first primarily English-language film, it drew international raves.) Ronson was preparing to publish So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a book that examines the troubling phenomenon of shaming campaigns on social media. Not much overlap there.
Ronson trekked downtown to meet with Bong, Okja star Swinton and Swinton’s partner, Sandro Kopp. The good news, Ronson was delighted to learn, was that they were fans of Frank. The better news: They had a very rough draft of a screenplay, and they wanted his help.
The cross-cultural collaboration of the screenwriting process mirrors the global scope of this film, a bracing corporate satire with tightly choreographed rescue sequences that speeds from Asian farmland to corporate Manhattan. Bong had already sketched out the narrative’s wilder twists and turns. Ronson’s job was to help develop the English-speaking characters: Mirando (Swinton), the nefarious but occasionally sympathetic evildoer; members of the Animal Liberation Front (headed by Paul Dano), who are determined to help Mija save the genetically modified animal from becoming genetically modified meat; and Dr. Johnny (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonishly deranged zoologist who serves as a sort of Mirando Corp. mascot (inspired by an actual person, the host of Animal Magic, a BBC show Ronson watched as a kid).
Ronson turned vegetarian several years before working on Okja— a fortuitous coincidence, he says: “I was quite pleased that I wasn’t a meat eater while I was writing this.” The film gives a brutal and uncommon glimpse of the cruelty inherent in postindustrial meat production— during a climactic moment, the viewer sees, quite literally, how the sausage is made—circling around questions of compassion and capitalism and whether they are ever compatible.
As Okja stomps, farts and poops her way into our collective affection, it’s no great leap to assume some viewers might be tempted to give veganism a try. But while Ronson is clearly an animal lover, he does not regard Okja as a provegan film. “I don’t think that’s the message,” Ronson says, noting that there are shots of South Korean villagers eating fish or meat stew. “I think that’s deliberate on Bong’s part. He’s saying, This is not an anti-meat polemic.” Ronson does think it’s an “anti-factory-farming film.”
What was certainly deliberate is Ronson's treatment of the animal rights activists who swoop in to rescue Okja; the group behaves bravely, but they are equally absurd. “I didn’t want them to be knights in shining armor,” Ronson says. “I always find it a bit of a turnoff when you make the heroic people just so heroic.”
Okja, on its surface, has little to do with So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. But Ronson sees a link. It has to do with cognitive dissonance on the part of consumers who shell out for products made by harmful corporations, as well as maybe that robot hummingbird. “You don’t want to think about the slaughterhouse, so you deliberately find ways to block that thought out of your head... like, we destroy people on social media and then come up with psychological tricks to make ourselves not feel bad about it.”
Both works might be regarded as pleas for compassion in a compassionless world. With Okja and Shamed, Ronson is evincing a studied ambivalence about technology that enables the human capacity for cruelty. A heavy message, but the film delivers it with ample heart—and the most likable pig since Babe. Okja is released on June 28.