Bong Joon Ho: ‘I wish I had Ken Loach’s energy, but I’m just thinking about nap time’
How do you follow up an Oscar winner like Parasite? If you’re the South Korean auteur, you make a sci-fi satire where Robert Pattinson dies over and over again. The director discusses the inspirational Loach and Mike Leigh and why it’s hard being a ‘middle-aged film-maker’
We are in the run-up to the release of Bong Joon Ho’s latest, Mickey 17, and Warner Bros has got the Oscar-winning Korean director stashed away in what appears to be some kind of basement storage room, with grey-painted brickwork and exposed wiring.
Not that anyone is complaining. Bong, who speaks good English but prefers to conduct interviews via his longtime interpreter Sharon Choi, appears cheerful throughout our conversation, occasionally taking sips from a takeaway coffee cup, while dressed in his usual arthouse auteur uniform of a slate-grey blazer over a black T-shirt.
He is, for example, completely sanguine about the fact that this follow-up to 2019’s Parasite is only now reaching our screens, 12 months after its slated release date. Mickey 17 wasn’t the only production delayed by 2023’s Screen Actors Guild strikes, he points out, and besides: “My films are quite complicated in terms of distributing and marketing. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to package and when to release, because it’s a mix of so many different genres.”
That is certainly true of Mickey 17, which might best be described as a blackly comic, satirical sci-fi-crime caper. It stars Robert Pattinson as the dopey and desperate Mickey Barnes, who signs up to work a dangerous job on a space-colonising mission, led by a despotic ex-congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his unhinged wife (Toni Colette). Then, whenever one of Mickey’s assignments results in his death – which is often – he is simply cloned, using “reprinting” technology and sent straight back to work.
This is a notion Bong seems to find particularly discomfiting. “Y’know, there’s an HP printer right here in this room, as we’re doing this interview,” he says, eyeing the machine warily. “To think that, like, my head and my arms and legs would just be printed out of this printer, like a piece of paper …”