Parasite director Bong Joon-ho: ‘Korea seems glamorous, but the young are in despair’
February 1, 2020After an indifferent sojourn in Hollywood, the film-maker went back to South Korea to do his next film and produced an undisputed masterpiece. Why is his stunning critique of the class system striking chords all over the world?
The past year has been a whirlwind for Bong Joon-ho, and he is still in the midst of it. His movie Parasite has whisked him to places few directors and certainly no South Korean director have been before. It started with winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival last May, and the momentum has not let up: critical adulation, box office success, US talkshow appearances and a ridiculous 170 awards and counting.
And not just not just awards in the foreign film categories; Parasite is the first foreign-language film to win the Screen Actors Guilds coveted ensemble performance award. It is also up for six Oscars, including best picture and best director. Before, it was only connoisseurs who appreciated Bongs singular output including Donald Glover, Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro and Quentin Tarantino. Now theres a whole online #BongHive sharing memes, news and general love about the 50-year-old film-maker. Hes this seasons must-have selfie for Hollywood stars to brandish on Twitter. Even Bongs ever-present interpreter, Sharon Choi, has become a minor celebrity.
Bong has kept his feet on the ground throughout. He brought his eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes to a close because he was hungry. Similarly, he described the Oscars as no big deal because they are not an international film festival. Theyre very local.
When we meet in London on a rainy, wintry morning, Bong is looking pretty windswept. His bouffant mop of hair is just about back in place, but he is wrapped in a big scarf, and has a cough. The most difficult part has been the double, triple jetlag, he or rather Choi says. Bong understands English and speaks it a little, but prefers to answer in Korean, trusting her to translate the nuances. Physically, it has been really horrible but right now Im doing good.
Bong is no wide-eyed ingenue, though. His two preceding films, 2017s Okja and 2013s Snowpiercer, both effects-heavy sci-fi tales, were primarily in English and featured the likes of Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ed Harris. He loves British and Irish actors, he says, not to mention British cinema he claims to have watched Hitchcocks Psycho at least 50 times. He has also been around the Hollywood block long enough to have had a run-in with Harvey Weinstein of which more later.
The irony that Bong has scored his biggest success by returning to his native country and tongue is not lost on him. I actually came up with this idea back when I was working on Snowpiercer, he says. It wasnt as if I was motivated to return to Korea and do a Korean-language film, although I did want to pack this film with very Korean details. There is a great deal of local specificity in Parasite, from its reference to a craze for opening Taiwanese pastry shops to an invented dish of packaged instant noodles mixed with sirloin steak (which has, of course, become a real-life trend), but Parasite is that rare local film that has struck a resounding global chord.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us