Stephen Noerper, Senior Vice President of The Korea Society: It's a delight to welcome you to the Korea Society tonight along with our executive vice president Kevin Kehoe, in the back, and we'd like to mention before we start here, a few practical aspects and some upcoming events. First and foremost, director Bong has kindly agreed to sign some film posters afterwards. So for about 15 or 20 minutes directly afterward, you'll have the chance to collect the posters out front. And if you'd like, simply line up and he'll do us a courtesy of signing that to you. Importantly, in terms of some of our events here at The Korea Society, we would like to welcome as many of you as can make it back next Thursday night when hopefully it will be drier, for Masks of Night: Faces From Traditional Korean Dance Drama, and so we'll be opening that in our gallery here next Thursday. So, do come. On March 17th we have a showing of Crossing, and that's on our Facing the War: Six Decades of Film Since the Korean War card, that you may have picked up on your way in, or certainly can get it on your way out. And do come for our gala with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and there'll be more information soon up on our Web page about that.
I'd like to extend a few special thank you's to staff who have worked very, very hard in bringing director Bong Joon-ho here, both now and in the past: two or three years ago when we had the retrospective at the IFC. And first and foremost is Yuni Cho, our senior officer in film, and we have a very talented media and events team here, that's put together the technical aspects, and special thank you to Meena Cho who hand-designed the floral arrangement for this evening. I'd also like to thank Consul Choi from the Korean Consulate General, who is actually a former classmate of director Bong's who has come to join us tonight.
The Korea Society invests a lot in people in the back and forth between Korea and the United States, and really pushes to enhance said understanding. One of our investments, two or three years ago, was in trying to spread the word about this rising director Bong Joon-ho, and so some of you were along for that sold-out series at IFC, which we did in cooperation with Magnolia, the distributor, who has been kind enough to bring him here again this evening. So, if you have been along for that, or of you like to be with us in the future as we try to promote vibrant, young Korean voices here in the United States, please do join us a member of the Korea Society and do check out regularly www.koreasociety.org.
Our moderator this evening is Michael Atkinson, whom I'm sure many of you remember from his excellent work at The Village Voice, and who is really, I think one of the more profound writers and film critics that we have in our society today. And of course, without further ado, to welcome director Bong Joon-ho, who is with us, you know him from Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder, The Host, which showed to over ten million viewers worldwide, and Mother, which some of you may have seen. If you have not, it goes into wide release in another week here and we strongly encourage you to take a friend to see Mother. It's really a fantastic, fantastic film.
Director Bong Joon-ho is on his way to Boston, where he'll be speaking at Harvard. He's going to Washington D. C., and he will be in Los Angeles where he is an independent Spirit Award nominee. So, we wish him luck with that very distinguished award and ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome, director Bong Joon-ho.
Atkinson: Okay. Alright, so the question was about what's been perceived in this country, at least as a Korean new wave. And I guess the question is, do you perceive it that way and also if so, where did it come from? Why did it happen?
Bong: [through interpreter] Of course in the early '90s and the 2000s, there was that phenomenon called the Korean Wave that you're mentioning. It wasn't something that the collective group of us did consciously. It just happened to be that certain filmmakers were making good during that time. And at that time I wasn't really concerned about that and none of us really were. We were just focused on making our own films. And we weren't really trying to make that happen as it was. It just happened that way that we were making our own films and happened to be in that time period.
By the year 1992, the militaristic regime had ended and democracy was setting in. There was more freedom from censorship and freedom of film making that let new directors and new filmmakers try new things. There was a lot of fresh blood coming in to the system of filmmaking in the industry and of course people like Hong Sang-Soo and the ones we've mentioned are among that crop and even the older generation of filmmakers wanted to work with these younger people as well, so that was another push.
Atkinson: Do you think that there's a distinctive flavor to the new films for the last ten years, of films really, as compared to film in general, or compared to the Korean films the way they were before? Because it seems to us that there's a very distinctive Koreaness to a lot of the films that have come out over the last ten years.
Bong: Although I'm not sure if there's a distinct difference, the newer generation of filmmakers like Kim Joon and Park Chan-wook are what I would call "film maniacs." We were really into films and we really love films and watching it, including myself, we were the generation that frequented video stores, renting videos and watching the videos and movies like that. Someone like Im Kwon-taek who is much older than us obviously has a rich tradition of filmmaking on set, being on set, and having made films already for many, many years before us, and so I think that's the difference we're kind of not from that film, on-set kind of environment whereas the older generation was already making film for a long time. I believe Hong Sang-Soo has studied in America and there's obviously a lot of newer generation, younger generation directors that have studied abroad outside of Korea.
Atkinson: Starting with Barking Dogs, which first of all the original title translates to "a higher animal", who decided on Barking Dogs Never Bite?
Bong: My distribution company. [laughter] [overlapping conversation]
Atkinson: It's a very different...It's a very different kind of title. At the movie in which the beleaguered hero is a teacher kills dogs more or less had a frustration, it seems, your main characters starting here, your main characters are always either dim-witted slobs or nearly sociopathic [laughter], and never responsible for their actions, always impulsive. That's part of the action the gets the story usually going, and yet we're never compelled to judge them, and I guess I'm asking why and do you, I mean why and do you empathize consistently with characters like that?
Bong: I'm not a person that can really be set about one person's attributes and I am not able to really say that I'm inclined towards one personality or another, but I think I always have a kind of duality of accepting a person and kind of hating the person but also having sympathy for them as well. So those characters are things that I recognize and I'm not easily prone to judge or make judgment on making them distinct as one side or the other.
Even the detectives in Memories of Murder, they are what you would call bad cops, they hit their witnesses and their suspects and their violent towards them and stuff like that, and those are obviously qualities that we shouldn't accept for everybody, but you can also, you really can't hate them either for it because everything else about them is so admirable.
I think there's always a duality of the victim within the instigator, someone that instigates something, also has an aspect of the victim inside them as well.
Atkinson: How thoroughly did you...Well, before I actually get to that, is the first hint of kind of a enigmatic sense in the first movie of an unseen world beneath the one that we ordinarily live in, this one there's ghost stories and then, there's a possibility of ghosts and big dogs, yapping, that the hero can't quite get to and it's pervasive, and this is something that I think that arises in the other movies. It presents a pervasive sense of like, a secret world haunting, the one that we're sensibly trying to live in and trying to survive in. And this is something that kind of mysteriously creates anxiety for the characters. I guess how much of that is actually something you consciously thing about?
Bong: In both people and in spaces, I do like to deal with the secrets and hidden sides of them, and the apartment basement is somewhere that I've had some strange memories of myself. And I have shot a couple of my short films in that kind of underground apartment basement space, and people like, the security guards and other people who dwell in that kind of space, I've also had an interest in dealing with that.
Especially with characters, I tend to leave a lot of things ambiguous about their motives and their actions and especially in my latest film Mother, I kind of wanted to have people wonder about what was really being dealt with, and I wanted that there to remain some questions that they had to think about, and some people have called me out on it saying that I was too ambiguous, and they didn't understand what was going on with the film and I'm kind of... They express their frustrations that way and [laughter] I'm kind of... And I'm kind of sorry for that and not having made that so clear to them. But, it's something that I like about leaving things a little ambiguous.
Atkinson: Well, we'll get to that too, but speaking of ambiguity, let's look at the clip of Memories of Murder. Could be the greatest police procedural ever made. [laughter] This was based on a real case from the '80s and I guess why, what was the thing that drew you to that case to make a film... I don't know how close... Well, I guess that sounds like question... How close were it... Does [it fit the] circumstance of that case?
Bong: That last scene, in particular, was based on a real incident where a mentally unstable man killed himself in front of a train, in the path of a train. So, I combined a lot of actual things that happened in real life, as well as my imagination, and for this film particularly play that I came into contact with. With that, a stage play and I combined a lot of those things with my imagination and my thinking for making this film.
The first I idea that came into my head about this... Making this film was, because I had an interesting crime thriller from a very young age. Even to the point where the Barking Dogs Never Bite, as my first film, I consider... Myself consider that to be a crime thriller movie as well. A serial dog-killing movie, as you said before. But unfortunately, it bombed at the box office. And for my next film I really wanted to do a true crime thriller, a film that deals with a very gritty, real crime. I didn't, I never really wanted to do it in the style of any Hollywood film or anything like that but wanted to make a very Korean crime movie... Crime thriller movie. And what brought me to it was the 80s, Hasang, serial murder of young girls and that's where I start making this film.
But upon writing the script for Memories of Murder, I kind of changed the idea of making a crime thriller... Genre movie into making this about, more about a film for the victims or for those who were left behind because I became really shocked and very angry when I was looking through the files and the research about this case. was engrossed in the story and the research and the incident so much that I was... I thought that I could probably find the true killer because at that point it was still an unsolved mystery. And it gave us a lot of thought about why we... Made us wonder why we couldn't find this killer all these years. And becoming engrossed in these research files and having done so much research on the possible killers, I was thinking that maybe I could find and catch this killer. And it was very emotional response to making the film for me.
Atkinson: Did you ever find out the killer? [laughter] You said at this point, so I thought...
Bong: [laughter] I've met the killer about 3 times in my dreams. There were about 30 questions that I had ready for... To ask him when I had the chance but it was only in my dreams. Unfortunately, it still is an unsolved case and because of limits, of statutory limits, you can't really go into more or know more about the case. So, it's still unsolved.
So while we were making the film, the staff and I did a lot of talking about the subject matter, and we kind of came upon the idea that, if we put this film out onto the screens, one day the actual killer of the incident will be watching the movie. And they're going to be in the theater watching my film on the screen. And so in the last scene of the movie you see the main detective look into the camera, straight at the audience and it was about having the eyes of that failed detective who couldn't find the killer look directly into the eyes of the killer. And I wanted to have that moment in the film.
Atkinson: Okay. You seem to deeply respect the weight of off-screen events in all of your movies. You could say that Memories of Murder was actually like a document of like the peripheral story that happened that, while the actual story was going on, that we never see and was never a movie. And I guess, well I mean, it seems to me that, you've already talked about the ambiguity that you like to put into movies, but it seems like you might have chosen this case particularly because it was unsolved. And the inconclusiveness of it allowed you to explore all.
These things that happen off the frame, out of the frame. You know all these things that... And it was, I know, it's a very complex thing that the movie does in terms the way it explores what the detectives find. But in the meantime, there's all these things happening outside of their experience.
Bong: Of course, at first I wanted to make a true crime genre film, a crime thriller. And that naturally evolved into me making a very emotional film about anger and sadness about the incident, and why it was unsolved. And asking the question, why did we fail in catching this killer? What conclusion we came to was that, we weren't ready to catch, and we weren't prepared to catch that killer. The cops at that time, the government, the society as a whole was not ready for that situation. What I really wanted to emphasize in this film, and what ended up happening was that, you see the camera follows the detectives and the possible suspects in the action of the camera. But I wanted the audience to also feel the very distinct taste of the '80s at the specific time that Korea was in; that '80s period when these things were going on outside of Korea's society. I wanted people to feel that, and have that sense of something going on outside of that frame, and get the sense that the '80s of Korea is something that wasn't prepared for this incident.
Atkinson: Yeah, I was going to ask why you mistrust police so much.
Bong: I do in fact love families of the cops and detectives very much. Especially when shooting Mother, I had a lot of help from families of cops and detectives as well. If you watch Mother, they are a lot more advanced than the '80s cops that you saw in the clips just now. They would never hit a suspect like they do here. Instead they'd hit the apple.
Atkinson: The apple, yeah.
Bong: I wouldn't say I hate cops. But in the movie Mother, they do make similar kinds of mistakes that cops in Memories of Murder also made. But those are mistakes that I would say is not anything against cops. But rather those are human mistakes that anybody can do. Cops are human as well. And I think it even makes these people endearing in a way.
Atkinson: Who are your favorite dead American filmmakers?
Bong: Dead American filmmakers? I like the living filmmakers as well. I don't know why you're asking...
Atkinson: I'm interested, though.
Bong: Recently, I had a chance to watch one of John Ford's films at CinemaTech in Seoul, called How Green Was My Valley. Seeing his film, on the film brought back memories of him as well. I tend to like the movies of the '70s. The films from the '70s... I can't really say if I remember which of the directors that made films then are living or dead right now. But, the films from that era, even the studio films of that era, I think are very powerful and have their own distinct aura that inspires me and I think of, as well.
Atkinson: It's funny, I thought of those movies too, especially from the '70s, the satires in the 70's. The whole sense of...a lot '70s films, films by, like, Michael Ritchie or Paul Mazursky or Network. [These] movies that were all about America, about slices of America and yet they made merciless fun of the culture. And, it seems that you are doing kind of, the same thing, albeit in strange genres, and murder mysteries, and monster movies, and things like that. You're also really slicing up the Korean culture in a sense. And it seemed that mixing those with genres...That seems kind of strange because they're funny movies, and all these...
Bong: I like American genre films in general, and I really like to work with the genres and also break them. I tend to follow conventions for a little while, then break them completely and insert a little bit of "Koreaness" into those broken segments where for someone else, it might seem different and strange, but in fact, that's the Korean side that I'm putting in into that break of the genre. And, that's the kind of mode that I work towards.
In fact, if you live in Korea for about a year, you'll realize that Korea is a very strange and unique place that really, you can't fit it into one genre. And, if you really think about it, all genres were probably reality at one point, before they became the genres that they are. Like something like the '30s gangster movies... A thing like that, we consider a genre today. But, at some point in history that was reality. And, I think Korean society and Korea has a different kind of sensibility that is different from those.
Atkinson: Well, I would agree. Especially, in terms of the way it's shown in The Host and begin show clip of The Host, that would be great... Also, based on a historical incident, I understand tons of... With the army, toxic... Whatever it was, right? Do you consider yourself a political filmmaker?
Bong: Well, on my day off... They give us a day off to go vote... And I find myself going to the movies on my day off instead of going to vote... So, I'm not really sure if I could call myself a political filmmaker. Since, this was a monster film, it was definitely a genre film, we kind of felt that we probably put something a little more obnoxious and a little more direct in poking fun at the politics than the society. If you look at the sci-fi films of the '40s and the '50s, let's say the Aliens come out and they look like, they seem like the Soviets or something like that with this very direct poking fun at the politics of that era. So, I think, we did try to put in a little more directly some comments about that in a more outlandish way. Hope you can comment on that.
As you mentioned, the beginning, the opening sequence of the film The Host is, we're in the military lab where they pour the chemical down the drain and that in turn causes the mutation that we see the monster come to be. It's a real case and it happened in 2000 called the McFarland incident and when I read that in the newspapers I was very excited about using that as the opening scene. It was so perfect because it was a very genre-like opening, like it fit into the genre of a sci-fi, fantasy-ish movie. And that dark lab pouring out the chemicals and causing this mutation is so genre specific and what we tried to do is use the very specific genre of creature monster movie that is so very American and kind of satirizes American society and pokes fun at the American government and its ways. Of course there's films like Godzilla that take on Japanese norms as well but in this one I wanted to make a very specific American genre movie which is the science fiction genre movie and monster movie and use that to satirize America.
Atkinson: Godzilla versus the smog monster. [laughter]
Bong: Godzilla versus the [overlapping conversation]
Atkinson: Have environmental... Never mind, okay [laughter] Again, here also a lot of off-screen business going on a lot of what happens is a mystery in the film and in Mother as well. I guess... I mean, you've already told how much... Spoken about how much you like doing that but I'm trying to get at exactly why you like... You leave the gaps of knowledge to accentuate the impact of what happens in the story or... Is a matter of like expressing a certain theme or certain attitude you have towards story telling or towards your material.
Bong: It's not because I have some kind of philosophical aversion to showing what is the meat of the story. As a storyteller and because I'm writing the script myself for all my films, I tend to find that I like to express characters that have confusion and miscommunication amongst them. And when they misunderstand each other, especially in Mother, that's probably the most obvious case where the mother who had been raising her son so lovingly winds up finding out that she does not know her son at all and that's big gap in communication and understanding between those two characters. And you could say that... I could also say that it was like that like... Some degree to that of that in my family as well, in my own family, growing up and I think that kind of miscommunication and misunderstanding between characters creates a very dynamic story in general and makes me want to explore that more.
Atkinson: Cinephiles in the U.S. love the Asian and European movies for, among other reasons, for their scarcity of CGI special effects. In fact, The Host is something of an exception of a movie that was kind of universally praised and that centered on using CGI that was an import, you know... Anyway, there aren't many of them and, but I've talked to many non-American film makers who would love the opportunity to have, to use them at the same time. I guess the question, was it a motivating factor behind The Host? Or was it just a means to an end?
Bong: So, there's lots, obviously there's lots of films that use a lot of CG and in turn, they have a very big, bulging budget that happens because of that, and I'm not one that particularly likes that kind of scenario. I didn't really want to make a creature or CG-effect movie, but simply the reason why I made The Host was because from a very young age, I kind of wondered what would happen if such a monster came out the Han River. It was just the thought that popped up when I was younger. And that's what made this movie. And in this day and age, I can't have a person wearing a suit being the monster. So, CG was obviously the way to go and it did take a good chunk of money to do it with the CG company in America called Orphanage, and they were a studio based in San Francisco. They're gone now, but it's kind of ironic because I was satirizing America and using American resources to make, American technical resources to make the creature. And besides Orphanage, there was also a studio in New Zealand, and another Korean company that contributed to the effects of that film. And, I think it's definitely not an easy thing for the Korean market to sustain that kind of CG spectacular kind of film. There's a recent film called Haeundae by the filmmaker Yun Je-gyun that came out sometime summer last year about a big wave in Pusan. And, I met the director in front of the editing room one day and I asked him, "CG's really difficult, isn't it?" And, we both kind of broke down crying. [laughter] And yeah, I wasn't supposed to tell you guys that but... [laughter] He said, "Don't say it." But...
Atkinson: Don't say it.
Bong: It's funny.
[laughter]
Atkinson: Okay. Let's look at the trailer from Mother and we'll have a Q&A, okay.
[pause]
Atkinson: Okay, just a few questions, because I'm presuming most of you haven't seen it so, I don't wanna ruin it. Is this another true story, loosely adapted, or...
Bong: There is no true story behind this or any other case. It's something that I've kind of come up with.
Atkinson: Despite the presence of, as you can see from the clips, a retarded man who is violently interrogated for murder, kind of like, from Memories of Murder. It's kind of the opposite of Memories of Murder in a sense, isn't it? I mean, all the mysteries and hidden spaces and all the unanswered questions that were in Memories of Murder are... We, eventually find out. We, eventually... Mother is more of a traditional genre piece in that sense, but all the things that are hanging in the air through the whole movie as mysteries are eventually solved. And, I guess, I was wondering if you had a change of heart.
Bong: Memories of Murder is obviously an unsolved case and it kind of ends with the fact that you can't know the killer in the end. And it ends with the mystery in that sense and it's a mystery film that ends with a mystery. In Mother's case, we kind of find out who the killer is. We have an answer but you also don't know... You still don't know why it happened and what was going through their minds when it happened, and there's still a certain mystery to that.
Rather than change in my filmmaking approach, I would say that Memories of Murder was definitely concerned with conveying the sense of the '80s period, time period and the society and the greater things around that era, and I think in Mother I'm very much more focused on a singular character and because I find myself, I find that it's hard to trust or know what's a person's truly, a single character very deeply. And I would say that I don't even know myself completely either. So when you're dealing with one specific person, it gets much more difficult to completely understand them. And in Mother we see, we encounter the son, Do-Joon, through the eyes of the mother, from the point of view of the mother and she finds that she doesn't completely understand that person that she was so focused on either and that was a concern that I was working with.
Atkinson: Okay. We're, I guess, running a little close with time, at least as far as I'm concerned, so if I could take some questions from you guys? Yes. Oh, microphone's coming.
Audience: Hi there. I'm Heesan. We've been talking a lot about genres tonight, Mother obviously is a thriller, so what genre are you looking at next? Maybe a love story?
Bong: Of course I've been talking about breaking a lot of genres and stuff like that but I do want to work with a whole bunch of different genres as well, except musicals. [laughter]
My next film will in fact be a science fiction film. It's based on a French comic book called The Trans-Personage and it's ultimate... And because it's sci-fi, it's ultimately about humans and humanity and it's about a group of people living on an enclosed train and struggling amongst themselves.
Atkinson: Okay. You had a question? You, I'm sorry.
Audience: Yeah. You mentioned about at the end of Memories of Murder sort of having the character look directly at the camera, looking back at the audience. I recall something very similar at the end of Barking Dogs Never Bite, as well, sort of after the credits roll where they're walking up the hill and they look directly at the camera and they flash the mirror at the audience. What extent are you consciously pointing your films back at the audience and saying this is not just about these characters but this is about you? And take it as sort of, even an indictment perhaps, sort of a personal look inside the audience or the culture.
Bong: Of course in Mother there's a scene in the beginning where she's dancing on the field and she looks straight in the cameras. Well, I think I'd like to do that at the beginning and the end of entering a text and coming out of a text... So that border, that edge where we come find coming in contact with this film. I feel that maybe because it's at the beginning or at the end that I feel kind of allowed to direct something at the audience that way and make something very direct in contact to the audience. Though it's not something and...
Of course the mirror at the end of Barking Dogs Never Bite, I was kind of playing with the things of light and dark. In the previous scenes, just up to the ending we see that the professor finally has his tenure and he goes behind a kind of dark room and we see a shade come over him even though he's got the tenure. In this scene we see the female character walking in the forest, she'd been fired from her job but she's receiving the sunlight through the forest. This is kind of cheesy, but it was kind of my way of rewarding people who stay over past the credits. Usually people leave when the credit start rolling, so if you happen to stay in the theater after the credits roll, you kind of get a little present from me: that scene.
Audience: I have another question about Mother because I saw it at New York Film Festival and what struck me, I think you've mentioned it before, Mother's much more based on a single character. I mean there are other important ones around her but it's much more focused on a single character... And it's really built around the really wonderful performance by Kim Hye-ja. So I'm just wondering if you wrote the film with her in mind, I know she's been around for a long time and she was very familiar to your audience... So I'm just wondering if you wrote it for her in mind or after her.
Bong: The beginning of this film Mother was in fact specifically for her and she was the starting point of this movie. I didn't write the script and then find the actor. I wrote the script for her knowing the actor who's going to be in it.
Kim Hye-ja is obviously a very respected actress of her time. She's been acting in Korean TV for 40 years, to the point that when you say mom, Kim Hye-ja is like the symbolic person that you think of especially in Korean media. Despite that I had a perverse kind of sense about her that when I saw her on screen I would think she's kind of a psychotic person. She has a dark psychosis about her and that's how I approached her.
Because Kim Hye-ja is, in the symbolic sense, the mother to take on that person's psychosis equally means to take on psychosis of the mother. And, in viewing with that actor's psychosis, I was kind of dealing with a greater psychosis of mothers in general. And, that was where I was trying to go with this film.
So, in 2004, I went to meet her at a hotel restaurant in Yoido, which is a part of Seoul. And, I was kind of nervous because if she didn't like the movie this is not going to be made. This was a movie that I specifically wrote for her. If she says she doesn't like it, it's not gonna be made at all. And fortunately, she'd loved the idea. She accepted it, very welcome and she said, "This is the kind of movie I was looking for. I've really wanted to do this kind of film." And from then on it was a very easy process of making the film with her.
Audience: Hi. I'm a film student at NYU, and I was just wondering how you've changed and refined your artistic process, and your directing through the years? And, in general, what advice would you have to aspiring filmmakers?
Bong: It's in fact very difficult for me right now. It's still a very difficult process of coming up with a new story and a new script. And in fact, you can also look at, I was looking, reading through some books about some great filmmakers of our past and even they struggled a lot with making films and continuing what they were doing. Someone like [mumble] had 500 extras waiting for him on a set and while he was driving out to go there, he had to get out of the car because he was so nervous he had to throw up on the side of the road. Someone like Kurosawa almost killed himself. And, I think it's not to that point for me yet. And, I'm not too worried about that so, I really can't say much about how or what, I don't have too much, about good... Anything specific that I can tell you. But, I think for myself, I wanted to make something that others didn't do before in general. And, I think as a creator, as someone who makes something, as someone as an artist, someone that does make something new, I think that's one of the joys that we can have and aspire to. To make something that someone else hasn't done before and someone won't be able to do again. Like, last year when Michael Jackson died, his style of dancing, his style of music was something that is probably irreplaceable right now. And I think something like that is what's important to aspiring artists, aspiring filmmakers...to do something that you can be proud of and that you can say hasn't been done before, or will be again.
Audience: I read in a magazine interview that you once said that the most important film element in your films is the element of food or eating. My question was, in relation to your next film, the sci-fi picture that you're going to make, is that also going to have a theme of food in it?
Bong: Rather than all the other previous films, I think I kind of emphasized that aspect of food much more so in The Host, my last film before this. Rather than food itself, I think the more important thing is someone feeding another person, a mother or someone, a caretaker feeding someone else. In the end of The Host, there's that scene where Song Kang's character feeds the younger child.
The most important dilemma for the family in The Host is that they want to rescue Gang-du, who's been taken by the monster and eats together and have a delicious meal. That's their most important concern for them. They want to share this meal and feed her. And in fact when we see Gang-du in the monster's hiding place, she's also protecting and feeding another younger boy that's with her. And I think it's that idea of someone protecting and someone caring for another person and feeding them and taking care of that person in that way. It's kind of a relation of links in that way in the film.
Audience: I have a question about the casting Won Bin as the main character Do-joon. Why, in the course of casting him, do you have any problem because he's kind of a really polished and handsome guy in Korea so a lot of girls like him? And some of my friends say I didn't like the film because that Won Bin was not really like the character they expected. And like, yeah, so... Do you have any problem in the course of casting him or did you persuade him or did he just happily say okay to being in the film?
Bong: Lee Byong-woo, who was the music director for two of my films, The Host and Mother, he told me one day, came up to me and said, "I think Mr. Bong you have a tendency to destroy the beautiful and nice things around you." [laughter]
Kim Hye-ja is obviously a very unexpected character that she's playing after her long history of playing very stereotypical mothers in the movies. And like so, I wanted to cast someone that was very unexpected and very different for the role. And in trying to think of who would fit this role, I kind of looked at and one day came upon stills, the head shots of the actors, Won Bin and Kim Hye-ja, kind of found that their kind of, the light in their eyes, their look, their glance, their gaze was something... There was something very similar about the 2 people. And you know how families, members take after themselves, they look like, a son looks like the mother, the daughter looks like her dad, things like that. So, I found that there was some kind of thing in their eye that was very similar in both people when I looked at the head shots. That was one of the more immediate shallow, reasons for picking them.
In fact, I had never met Won Bin in person until the point that we came to casting and talking amongst one of my staff and crew, he mentioned to me that Won Bin, despite his very pure, pretty, kind of pretty face kind of image, he's really a country bumpkin kind. And, he's from the countryside of Kangwan-do, which is on the outskirts of Seoul and that's what this staff member told me. And so, when we...the movie takes place in this gray area between city and the rural areas so, when I met Won Bin, he mentioned episodes of him playing around in the fields, catching snakes, and this guy really knew what it was like to live in that kind of area. And, he knew that kind of mood, the thinking, the thoughts that went through the people, young kids that didn't have anything to do in the area. You know, those kids that were playing around in the fields. He knew that kind of sensibilities much more than I do myself. So, I thought it was perfect. And, when he looked at the script and took it over that next day, he came to me and said, he'll do it. And, that's the occasion where we offered the part.
Atkinson: We have time for just one more. You? [chuckle]
Audience: Yeah. I just, I was just wondering, is there a particular film that is more dear to you than another? And, I guess kind of specifically, I was just thinking, if you kind of like Mother or I mean, if you might like Mother better than Memories of Murder or vice versa.
Bong: I'm trying not to, I'm not trying to be coy but all films, when you're making them, are difficult and straining especially, there are times when I go to film festival and even occasions like this where I see my films, my past films on the screen, and I really want to shoot certain scenes over again. I want to do, think completely different from the last time that I did. And, I think in Mother, there is exactly one scene that I want to change and do over again. [laughter] But besides that, there is nothing else. [laughter] I'm sorry. There's one scene that I'm terrified to side with and I want to really do over. Yeah.
Noerper: Before we close here, just to random poll, how many people in this room have ever worked on a school newspaper or school publication? I found out right before we started that director Bong and Consul Choi from the Korean Consulate General actually worked on their high school paper together. He wrote and he did cartoons and art. [laughter] So, all of you who have started from those roots... Great things ahead. We really would like to thank Michael Atkinson for a superb job. We hope to see you back, Michael. Thank you for kindly facilitating this. Ernest, thank you for the translation and to director Bong Joon-ho, thank you so much for spending time.
