Bong Joon Ho sent a text message a bit past noon, naming a subway station in Seoul and asking me to meet him there at 7 p.m. In his imperfect English, he signed off with a cryptic tease: “I’ll show you some ordinary but strange area. See you in front of GATE No. 4.”
It was the summer of 2023, and I’d gone to South Korea to watch Bong work on his seventh feature film, “Mickey 17,” a sci-fi action-adventure featuring Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Toni Collette. Bong — or Director Bong, as he’s known among Koreans and collaborators — is his country’s highest-profile filmmaker, at home and abroad. His last movie, “Parasite” (2019), won four Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.
Bong is drawn to confrontational, tone-scrambling material. “Irony and paradox,” he told me at one point, are “the driving force for me when I make films.” His style is to deploy genre conventions while subverting them in audacious and ingenious ways. As he once put it to a Korean interviewer, “Whatever genre I choose, I intend to destroy it.”
His movies are also fun, which explains why Bong has enjoyed a long run not only of critical acclaim but also commercial success. His 2006 monster-movie deconstruction, “The Host,” broke all Korean box-office records. Among its champions is no less of a genre-subverter than Quentin Tarantino, who likened Bong to “Spielberg in his prime.” “Parasite,” a home-invasion deconstruction, earned even more, planting him firmly in the pantheon of bankable contemporary auteurs.
Originally conceived for the stage, “Parasite” was a tightly focused Korean-language suspense story with an achingly ambiguous ending, no supernatural creatures and, unless you count its operatically grisly climax, zero action sequences. “Mickey 17” is a different beast entirely. Based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton, called “Mickey7,” the film is about a desperate loser named Mickey Barnes, played by Pattinson, who signs onto the crew of a spaceship as part of a campaign of intergalactic colonization. He’s tasked with the crushing work of an “Expendable”: His memories are uploaded so that his consciousness can be installed, as often as needed, into endlessly reprintable replicas of his body. These come in handy, because his job includes gulping down lung-liquefying airborne viruses and bathing himself in radiation, among other torturous and fatal work. At its core, Bong said, “it’s a story about working-class people. And I was attracted by the idea that his job is dying.”
Social stratification has been the dominant theme in Bong’s films since he was a student. Whether he is working in more-realist registers or more-fantastical ones, he situates his heroes within superstructures of class and power that determine, and frequently deform, their lives. “Quite many of my characters are confused,” he said. “They’re in the middle of a situation and don’t know what’s going on. It’s sad and comic at the same time.”
Arriving outside the subway station a few minutes early, I heard muffled voices, raised in what sounded like celebration, through the fabric-sided walls of a nearby shack. It was 87 degrees, and cicadas wove a psychedelic drone through the swelter. Across the street, high-rise apartments were under construction, rising to meet others looming nearby. Two CCTV cameras peeked through the branches of a ginkgo tree, mounted to a yellow surveillance pole — one of thousands like it around the city.
Soon, a scuffed white Hyundai pulled up, and Bong emerged from the passenger seat. He wore black Nike Air Max running shoes, black jeans and a black short-sleeve button-up shirt. His hair was tousled, and his eyes glinted behind rectangular, rimless glasses, in what has become his trademark look. He greeted me warmly, then drew my attention to something I hadn’t noticed, even though it was in plain sight.
Behind a concrete wall some 20 feet in front of us stood a rambling, grayish, four-story house. It was a mishmash of architectural styles and materials, suggesting a kind of down-at-hdeel, lunatic improvisation: brickface, aluminum, fabric, corrugated plastic, all of it grungy and weathered. There was a balcony with circular stone ornaments arranged at regular intervals and, behind these, an irregular span of wire fencing that tilted forward precariously. The roof was covered in tarp.
“This house is fascinating to me,” Bong said. “We are basically in Gangnam. A very fancy area, where you see these modern, high-rise apartments, and more being built. But this house is a very classic 1970s kind of architecture that is very uncommon in Seoul now.” He added: “I think someone is still living here. I’ve seen a light on inside.”
He stepped a bit closer. “I’ve never talked to them, but I have a fiction where I imagine that greedy developers — which is all developers — tried to buy everything around here, but they, for some reason, resisted.”
‘I was attracted to the idea that his job is dying.’
Bong brought me past the house, up a dirt path, where a dozen or so shanties came into view. Some were overgrown with weeds. Others had simple stacked-stone cairns decorating tidy front yards. Almost all had tarp roofs, secured in place by car tires. Down an alley, an elderly woman crouched in the dirt in flip-flops, staring blankly.
Bong took my pen and notebook from me and wrote down the words panjachon. “‘Flat wooden town,’” he translated. “I like these because they remind me of my first film” — his 1994 student short, “White Man.” “I shot it 30 years ago. That neighborhood was not far from here. And there’s a scene where you see houses like these surrounding a high rise.
“Now, it’s the reverse,” he went on. “The high rises surround the panjachon. I don’t know why they’re still here, so close to Gangnam. Maybe it’s the result of successful organizing. It’s very interesting to me.”
He added, “It’s almost like two different times exist in one space.”
Bong led us back to the sidewalk, toward the fabric-sided structure where I’d heard muffled voices. It turned out to be one of his favorite restaurants in town. “It’s dirty and stinky,” he said with affection, “but very friendly drinking and food place.” He pulled open the door. “Let’s get dinner?”
Inside the restaurant, the décor was funky, with gourds strung from the ceiling alongside bare bulbs and pendant lamps. The walls were clad with bamboo matting here, tree bark there. The clientele seemed to draw more heavily from the high-rises than from the panjachon. Bong chose a corner table, ordering Terra beers and assorted grilled dishes from the small open kitchen. In a hospitable gesture, he plucked a battery-powered fan from his bag and pointed it at me, to help with the heat.
I asked Bong why he thought his films — and so much of Korean pop culture — seemed to resonate so deeply with Americans. In answering this, he described Korea as a “crazy melting pot” of “different, incoherent” influences, extending back into the dynastic era, as Chinese and Japanese imperialist incursions gave way to warring Soviet and Western interests. This “incoherence,” as he put it, was “quite inspirational to creators.” Bong ventured that since America had exerted such strong influence over contemporary life in South Korea — occupying it immediately after World War II and then backing repressive dictatorships for decades — “maybe you guys are using Korean culture as a mirror of something in yours.”
He emphasized, though, that American audiences were not front of mind while he was making “Parasite”: “I never had the thought of ‘This will translate well globally.’ But I talked with Hwang Dong-hyuk, the director who made ‘Squid Game’” — the hit streaming Korean series in which impoverished contestants enter a sadistic survival tournament spectated by the hyperrich — “and he told me he never intended it, either. He just made it, and it’s on Netflix, so it spread all over the world. But it wasn’t surprising, because ‘Parasite’ and ‘Squid Game’ were about the hierarchy of society. Simply speaking, they’re about capitalism. And except for one or two countries, everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language.”
With little more than a piece of fabric separating the restaurant from the shanties, I thought about something that has occurred to me watching Bong’s films. No other director is as skilled at mapping action, pathos and intrigue onto vividly rendered physical spaces — spaces that arrange and undo the lives of the people within them and that embody the unequal distributions of power and freedom that are his career-spanning concern. This is perhaps unsurprising for a Korean filmmaker. Following the postwar ouster of the Japanese, who controlled Korea from 1910 until 1945, American military bureaucrats took a map and drew a profoundly consequential line across the 38th parallel. Soviet forces occupied the peninsula to the north of the line, while Americans, pursuing a strategy of anti-communist “containment,” took hold of the south.
But Bong has followed his interest in space further than any of his compatriots. You can see it in “White Man,” the student short, in which a white-collar worker climbs a staircase from a low-lying slum to Seoul’s affluent heights — a cosseted milieu that Bong disturbs when the protagonist discovers a severed finger outside his home and, in a bit of Lynchian perversity, decides to keep it. He extrapolated on that upstairs/downstairs schism in “Parasite,” whose action unfolds between a cramped basement apartment and a glass-and-concrete hilltop mansion. The mystery in “Mother,” from 2009, revolves around the peculiar sightlines of an abandoned dwelling. All these sets were chosen or built to accommodate the precise geometries of Bong’s scripts: When the films’ big twists arrive, they are narrative shocks that double as architectural ones.
In other Bong movies, the spaces he imagines are vessels. “Snowpiercer” (2013) follows a revolutionary underclass, jammed into the back of a train, as they fight their way toward the front. “Mickey 17,” set on a spaceship, is another vessel movie. Like the ship in “Sea Fog,” a 2014 Shim Sung-bo film about a fishing boat that Bong co-wrote, the spaceship has its own caste system, with Mickey at the very bottom. He spends much of his time in a dark, damp boiler room, whereas the ship’s despotic commander, Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo, lives in opulent chambers decorated in a garish Beaux-Arts pastiche.
‘Everyone’s living under capitalism — it’s a universal language.’
Bong is no polemicist though. His protagonists — often portrayed by the wonderful actor Song Kang-ho — have included charmingly bumbling agents of the state, as in “Memories of Murder,” about 1980s-era detectives who, while searching ineptly for a killer, find time to beat up student protesters and to violently interrogate a suspect with developmental disabilities. Other characters are flawed would-be revolutionaries, as in the factory-farming parable “Okja” (2017). Still others are working-class strivers who simply fight tooth-and-nail against fellow working-class strivers, as in “Parasite.” In “Mickey,” it’s Pattinson’s sad-sack grunt, who signs a contract granting him everlasting life in exchange for everlasting servitude — a human being transformed into an immortal cog.
Bong suspected that Korean audiences would readily identify with Mickey. “Korean history is very traumatic and quite harsh to the people,” he told me, drinking his Terra. When the dictatorship ended, it gave way to a merciless rat race and ever-widening wealth gap that many Koreans find unbearable. “We have a very workaholic country,” Bong said. “People are very hard to be relaxed.” In the late 2010s, some young Koreans took to bitterly calling South Korea “Hell Joseon” on social media. It is “a very sarcastic and very sad term,” Bong said, that nods at the stifling hierarchies of the country’s feudal past. (Joseon was Korea’s last imperial dynasty.)
“Hell Joseon” reflected a hopelessness about the future that Bong captured in the bleak coda of “Parasite.” But it has since been supplanted, he said, with the “very popular concept” of sohwakhaeng. He translated this for me as small but touchable happiness. “There are some young people saying, ‘I reject this, I hate all this, I’m not joining this craze of competition,’” he said. “And their lifestyle is different. They are not hippies, but they organize a calm and small life. My generation, and older generation, never had that. But the younger generation, they invented that concept. Don’t need a lot of money. Not that ambitious goal. Relatively less interested in politics, just trying to keep their own small universe.”
Our food arrived, steaming hot. Noticing sweat on both our brows, I picked up Bong’s electric fan and turned it toward him. “I want to share this fan,” I said.
“This is a small happiness,” he replied. “Clear and evident.
“Mickey 17” is the first feature that Bong has made with a Hollywood studio, and his most expensive one yet, with a budget just under $120 million. On this last score, though, he was ambivalent. “I prefer small productions, and I dislike big productions,” he said.
I’d heard chatter that when Warner Bros. greenlighted “Mickey 17,” the studio hoped it might spawn a new franchise, centered on a hero conveniently defined by his own potential for infinite undead sequelization. But Bong’s sensibility has proved consistently idiosyncratic in ways that fly against the logic of the multiplex. Most of his endings are depressing, and his English-language features, all of them science fiction, can feel especially strange, with heightened performances and a tonal volatility that has become his signature — a “switchback energy,” as Tilda Swinton, who has acted in two of his films, put it to me.
This energy is an effect not of wild abandon on Bong’s part, however, but of an extreme degree of control. He creates highly detailed storyboards for all his films, and these serve as unbudging blueprints during production. The cinematographer Darius Khondji, who worked with Bong on “Mickey 17” and “Okja,” and who has shot films for David Fincher, Alejandro Iñarritu and the Safdie Brothers, said that Bong “functions on a different wavelength I never felt with anyone before.” He compared the storyboards to a musical score. “Everything is written, and you can change the rhythm and the way you play the notes, but if you try to pull out a note, or a group of notes, he’ll say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’”
Mark Ruffalo described this as a productive constraint. “It’s the most auteur-centric filmmaking style I’ve worked in,” Ruffalo said. “Every shot, every angle, every gesture is storyboarded, and he shoots the storyboard frame for frame. But that’s not to say he’s controlling. The exciting thing as an actor is that you’re free, in that frame, to reinvent the performance.”
For some actors, that feeling of freedom arrives only after a period of intense disorientation. “Normally you shoot a whole scene,” Pattinson explained, but with Bong’s approach, “he knows exactly which shot he wants for exactly which line, so sometimes we’re just shooting one line at a time. You show up on the first day and they say, ‘We’re gonna shoot the seventh line of this scene.’ You go: ‘What do you mean? I don’t know how I’m going to say the first line.’ Usually, I’d have to do the whole scene to get the line right.
“So, everyone has a nervous breakdown for a week,” Pattinson went on. “But then you say, ‘Oh, this is great.’ If you’re shooting an entire scene, there’s a more legato rhythm, a crest and a fall, some gradation. But you don’t really need it for the style of performance Bong wants, and that frees you up to do these very discordant turns: If you’re just doing one line, you can do maximum intensity out of nowhere. It has this feel of anime — it can go from completely placid to enraged in a split second.”
Pattinson told me that Bong “seems very pleasantly amused by everything.” They talked a lot about the movie in the months preceding the shoot, but when it came to filming, Pattinson said, the director gave him license to explore: “It got to the point where I was just trying to make him laugh, trying things in playful ways. And he’d say, ‘Yeah, do whatever you want.’”
Bong explained that, despite the rigor of his storyboarding, he invites his actors to “relax,” because “good actors always do good improvisation that reinforces the story.” His own methods have grown more relaxed, too, over the years. He used to insist on shooting a large number of takes, in a spirit of perfectionism. “Ten, 15, sometimes 20 takes,” he said. “But during ‘Okja’ and ‘Parasite,’ I would only shoot four, five, six, seven. ‘Mickey 17’ also. I don’t know why. Maybe now I have a small insight of, This will all look the same in the editing room.”
He credited his son with inspiring this change. “When I was shooting ‘Memories of Murder,’ my son was 6, and he was on set, watching his daddy working. I was on Take 16 or 17, and my little son came to me and said, ‘Dad, you look so stupid.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You repeat the same thing again and again and again.’ And I told him, ‘No, no, no, it’s all different, very subtly and delicately.’ And he said: ‘No. It’s all the same. You look stupid.’” Bong chuckled. “That was the start of an awakening,” he said.
Bong was born in Daegu, in 1969, the youngest of four siblings. His grandfather, Park Tae-won, was a novelist who defected to the Communist North during the Korean War. His books were banned from South Korean bookstores. Bong’s father was a graphic designer and professor. His mother raised the children. When Bong was in third grade, the family moved to Seoul. “It was a rather normal, average family,” Bong said. “There was no tragedy or huge drama. But one thing is that we didn’t really go out camping or enjoy any leisure or sports — we watched TV, lots of it, all the family members. No trips, no traveling around. It was just, keep watching TV every day.” He added, in a deadpan, “This wasn’t particularly a sad thing for me.”
Bong spent his childhood reading graphic novels and watching domestic and international movies on VHS, South Korean television and AFKN, the American armed-forces network. “Most of the masterpieces I watched when I was younger played on TV,” he said. “Almost all of them were quite censored, though.”
These included films by Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, Sam Peckinpah and Alfred Hitchcock, who left a lasting impression. “Hitchcock’s movies overpower me,” Bong said. “I often have unsettled feelings and anxiety — I have a history of getting prescriptions for my anxiety — and that part of me is maybe drawn to Hitchcock’s movies. He translates the anxiety and fear I have in me into beautiful cinema.”
It was in middle school that Bong decided to become a director himself. In 1988, he enrolled in Yonsei University, cofounding a film club called the Yellow Door. They organized screenings of uncensored, black-market copies of films. “My major was sociology,” he recalled, “but I’m not interested much in sociology. I spent all my time at the cinema club.”
Campuses at this time were rocked by frequent demonstrations, as students agitated for expanded democratic rights, labor unions and reunification with North Korea. The government’s response was violent. In June 1987, a Yonsei student named Lee Han-yol suffered a skull fracture after a tear-gas canister hit him. He became a symbol of the movement and later died of his injuries.
Bong regards his own involvement as minimal. “I didn’t see myself as a very strong politically opinionated person,” he told me. “I participated in demonstrations, but it was very common at the time. I wasn’t part of the leaders. I was on the bottom of the pyramid.” Nonetheless, there are traces of this history throughout his work. Discussing “The Host” several years ago, Bong said he “was able to teach” the actor Park Hae-il “how to throw a Molotov cocktail because I had seen many protests.”
Bong briefly attended film school in the early ’90s, but “I spent one year,” he said, describing himself as mostly self-taught. He benefited from the spread of VHS and the gradual loosening of government restrictions on the arts. “Pop culture exploded, and everything poured out,” Bong said.
He taught himself screenwriting by buying and studying the scripts for three movies: the Korean crime comedy “No. 3,” by Song Neung-han (whose daughter, Celine Song, directed the critically acclaimed 2023 film “Past Lives”); the Coen Brothers’ “Fargo”; and “Silence of the Lambs.” You can sense a Coens-ish streak in Bong’s debut feature, “Barking Dogs Never Bite,” from 2000, a queasy dark comedy about a young academic living in a vast apartment complex who murders two of his neighbors’ pets. Bong expresses no great affection for this movie today, and few people have seen it. But after this relative misstep, he refined his formula. His breakthrough serial-killer deconstruction of 2003, “Memories of Murder,” harnessed his interests in social critique to a propulsive genre vehicle.
In that film, Bong suggested that the Korean state, unable to catch the country’s most infamous serial killer, functioned with ruthless efficiency when it came to quashing populist demonstrations. In his follow-up, “The Host,” an amphibious beast emerges from Seoul’s Han River, spawned by toxic pollution from an American military base. (This last detail is based on a true story.) It eats people, causes vast destruction, and — in a signature Bong twist — provides the government with the perfect pretext for an authoritarian crackdown more insidious than the monster attack.
With “Mickey 17,” Bong brings these themes into space. Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner, who oversee the production company Plan B, first sent Edward Ashton’s novel to Bong. Kleiner said the book “felt like something Bong might have come up with on his own: There was this class allegory, this funny mix of comedy and violence and an anti-authoritarian ethos that feels so core to who he is.”
On an enormous screen, in extreme close-up, an eyeball filled the frame. It was large and glistening, ringed by lustrous eyelashes and pebble-grained skin. Horselike hair drifted across the shot, catching snowflakes.
It was a couple days after our dinner, and I was with Bong in a postproduction suite on the west side of Seoul, watching as he fine-tuned the look of the creatures in “Mickey.” When the earthlings reach their destination planet, they encounter a population of many-appendaged beings they nickname Creepers. These are treated by some of the colonizers as objects of curiosity, but mostly with revulsion and fear.
Bong was cycling through chunks of footage and giving notes to his visual-effects team in Los Angeles. Sitting beside him was an assistant named Michelle Youngbin Ha, who translated for him intermittently as he drifted in and out of English.
“One question here,” Dan Glass, the film’s VFX supervisor, said, “is whether you like the veins visible in the whites of the eye.” Bong replied, “The amount of vein is good.”
“Mickey 17” marks the third time that a Bong Joon Ho movie has featured a fantastical creature, all of which he designed in collaboration with Jang Hee-chul. They gave the toxic river monster in “The Host” a hideous look — an enormous legged fish with an overbite. They made the titular, sweet-natured superpig in “Okja” lumberingly cute, like a puppy crossed with a hippo. For “Mickey 17,” they intended the Creepers to split the difference. From some angles, they look like fleshy, nubby, writhing centipedes. From others they resemble majestic buffalo or woolly mammoths. In their squeaking infancy, they call to mind Tardigrades crossed with Baby Yoda. “In the very early stage of creature design, we shared many images of armadillo,” Bong noted. “Also croissant.”
This duality suited the story. “In the opening, I make it feel like the Creeper is scary and disgusting,” Bong said. “But gradually, we discover how they’re intellectual and some of their other characteristics. So we designed the Creeper in that direction. Once you’ve spent some time to look at it, you discover the loveliness.”
Bong moved from the close-up of the Creeper to a wider shot. He used a stylus to circle the creature’s mouth, requesting a modification to “the wave of the three tongues.” Then he drew a U shape on its belly, and said, “That part should be wet.”
Next came a shot of Pattinson pushing a cart through the spaceship’s claustrophobic innards. Bong told me that, while developing the film with his production designer, Fiona Crombie, “we talked about the spaceship as a factory flying in outer space.” He added that, “if you think of luxury hotels and department stores, there are spaces for the guests and shoppers, then you enter through the door for employees and suddenly you see pipes on the ceilings. Mickey occupies the staff-only space.” Bong had hoped to release live rats into the set — “it would have been the first time in cinema that we’d have rats in a spaceship,” he said — but that proved too impractical.
‘We have this saying in Korea: “We fall for it, even though we know what’s up.” ’
Bong shot “Mickey 17” over four months, starting in August 2022, in the same studios, north of London, where “Harry Potter” was made. “We were in an old hangar,” he said. “They were making ‘Barbie’ on another soundstage at the same time, and ‘Fast and Furious.’ I bumped into Vin Diesel at lunch one day.”
Postproduction began in tandem, with an on-set editor assembling provisional cuts of scenes as Bong shot them. “Next to me is an editor, plugged into the monitors,” Bong explained, “and I’m telling him, ‘Use Take 4, cut it here.’”
That efficiency allowed him room to fiddle now, and the VFX work progressed methodically, at times pixel by pixel. A snowy exterior shot needed a bit more haziness. A light bulb glowing behind Steven Yeun in another shot needed a fixture inserted around it. The degree of digitally simulated camera rumble during a Creeper stampede was good. But Bong wondered if the needle of a syringe shouldn’t glint a bit more brightly before it plunged into Robert Pattinson’s neck.
“Years ago,” Bong said, “a Japanese actor told me that sometimes you shoot movies with a telescope and sometimes you approach them with a microscope. I prefer shooting with the microscope. So even when the budget is huge, I always try to look through a microscope.”
Now Bong was in electron-microscope mode. This work had been going on “for six months or so,” he told me, and it would continue, along with the rest of postproduction, for several months more, until the film was due at Warner Bros. ahead of a scheduled Spring 2024 release.
On the screen, Glass scrawled one of hundreds of directives like it across a Creeper, to be tackled later: “More wetness.”
At the start of 2024, word broke that Warner Bros. had pulled “Mickey 17” off its release calendar. Variety reported that this was done, according to unnamed sources, “to allow more time to finish the project, which had been affected because of last year’s strikes and other various production shifts.”
Several months later, the studio slotted “Mickey 17” for January 2025. Some speculated that Warner Bros. was unhappy with the film, since January is often a dumping ground for anticipated flops. But then the film moved again, and again, finally landing — dizzyingly, if you were paying attention, but more auspiciously — in March.
Not long ago, I got on a video call with Bong, who was at his office in Seoul. He wore a fuzzy brown-wool cardigan over a black T-shirt and was sitting in front of a wall of bookshelves. “I’m very happy with how things turned out,” he said. (Bong spoke to me both in English and through his longtime interpreter, Sharon Choi.) He waved off all the rescheduling, pointing to the fact that other Warners films, such as “Dune 2,” had moved around as well. He attributed the delay in the case of “Mickey 17” to “the SAG strike,” to the fact that Darius Khondji had been “very meticulous” during postproduction and to his own time-consuming attention to the Creepers: “I was quite ambitious with the visual effects.”
When I asked if he ever got the sense that Warner Bros. was unhappy with the cut he first submitted, Bong was politic. “I have to confess that, during 24 years, I made eight films, including ‘Mickey,’ and the marketing and distribution teams have always had a difficult time.” Bong furrowed his brow and added, “They start with a clear-cut answer about what something is, and my movies defy that.”
Bong has said he sees “no distinction between commercial and art films.” “Mickey 17” bears that out. The film looks beautiful, the way you would expect from a visionary director given a huge canvas and a large amount of money to spend filling it. And though Bong’s script tells a classic story of a hapless nobody who gets the chance to become a hero, it behaves in all kinds of unlikely ways for a top-dollar sci-fi action-adventure movie. Its protagonists take hits of a drug called Oxyfozol and act loopy. Pattinson wears a Lloyd Christmas “Dumb & Dumber” bowl-cut and speaks in a golly-gee, aw-shucks 1940s register out of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Toni Collette’s character is obsessed with blending the Creepers into what she insists is a delicious condiment.
In interviews, Bong has referred to “Parasite” as “a staircase movie.” When I asked him how he describes “Mickey 17,” he said: “Maybe it’s a repetition movie. Repetition of foolishness, repetition of death.” In an expository montage early on, we see Mickey dying a string of grisly and goofy deaths and emerging over and over again, slippery and naked, from what looks like an M.R.I. machine crossed with an inkjet printer.
It’s a nightmarish vision of immortality that Bong plays for morbid slapstick laughs. But partway through, it occurred to me that “Mickey 17” was also a kind of fun-house-mirror companion to “Parasite.” In that film, the underemployed Kim family, which sees itself as locked for life into a zero-sum economic game, expends immense ingenuity in pursuit of nothing more than systematically replacing the domestic staff of the wealthy Park family. Early on in “Mickey 17,” the dopey titular Mickey is mistaken for dead and reprinted as Mickey 18, and these doubled Mickeys see themselves in competition — for the ship’s food rations, for its most miserable jobs and, since “multiples” are strictly prohibited by law, for survival. But with time, they join forces against the ship’s ruling elite in an act of solidarity that never arrives in “Parasite.”
Given that “Mickey 17” was shot in 2022, one scene in particular thrums with remarkable prescience: an assassination attempt on Ruffalo’s blustering Commander Marshall, in which a bullet grazes his left cheek. Bong filmed this scene some two years before a gunman shot at Donald Trump, grazing his right ear. “I remember watching the breaking news, and I thought, My god, what?” Bong said. “Mark joined me in the screening room, and when we watched that scene, we felt an uncanny feeling.”
Some audiences may be tempted to read the film as an allegory for the current American political and economic environment, with Marshall as a direct stand-in for Trump. Anticipating this, Bong said: “There’s no one-on-one match with someone in real life. I was wondering, What are the common characteristics of all these crazy leaders across history?” One of his answers was “they’re kind of contemptible and grotesque and strange, violent leaders, but what’s ironic is you see this dangerous charm they use to appeal to the people at the same time. That’s what makes them dangerous.” He went on: “We have this saying in Korea, almyeonseodo sogajunda: ‘We fall for it, even though we know what’s up.’”
The film’s final act revolves around Marshall’s plan to commit genocide against the Creepers, clearing the way for settlement of the alien planet by wiping its Indigenous inhabitants from its face. “There were contemporary tragedies that influenced my process,” in writing this story line, he told me, but Korean history was heaviest in his thoughts. “I grew up witnessing the military dictatorship, I saw the Gwangju massacre on TV,” he said, referring to a series of protests in May 1980 that were brutally suppressed. After students, activists and everyday citizens took up arms against the police, the Korean government sent in troops with support from the Carter administration, which feared the unrest might spread and lead North Korea to interfere. Hundreds were tortured and killed by the South Korean Army. “It’s a layer I carry with me,” Bong said. “It’s always in the undercurrents of my creative process.”
This plotline in “Mickey” tied into the film’s broader themes of repetition, he went on. “What’s most tragic is that these genocides repeatedly happen, throughout mankind. That’s what causes fear for me. We see these things repeat.” The most Hollywood thing about “Mickey 17,” in that light, is its ending, which suggests that maybe we are not doomed to repeat tragic errors forever.
“There is an optimism planted in there,” Bong said. “I see it as an optimistic movie.”
Before we ended our call, I asked Bong about the panjachon he took me to in 2023. Was it still there? “I recently passed by,” he said, “and everything around it is going through major construction. More skyscrapers are going up. But the food stalls are still there. And that house is still there. Even more surrounded now. Even higher fortress.” He craned his neck for effect, as though peering at a point some 100 stories high.
“Spaces like that can become inspiration for me,” Bong said. He thought he might make a movie about it someday.
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