BONG Joon-ho was born the youngest of four children in the provincial South Korean city of Daegu in 1969. At the time, his father, originally from Daegu and a member of the intelligentsia who had majored in visual design, gave lectures on the subject at a local art university. His mother, who had been an elementary school teacher but retired to become a full-time housewife with the birth of her first child, was the daughter of “Gubo” PARK Tae-won, one of the leading figures in modern Korean literature. PARK was a modern boy and member of the intelligentsia who had studied in Japan during the occupation of Korea by the Japanese empire, and he was noted in the 1930s and the era’s top man of letters with works such as A Day in the Life of Gubo the Novelist (Soseolga Gubossi-ui Haru) and Riverside Landscape (Cheonbyeon Punggyeong). His works were judged to have presented the landscape of colonial era Korea in the 1930s from a class-based standpoint, with an experimental prose style that abounded with wit and satire. But when he defected to North Korea during the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, his name became taboo in South Korean society, and his direct descendants, including BONG Joon-ho’s mother, experienced many difficulties. From the time after the Korean War to the 1980s, leftist, pro-North Korean and Marxist ideas were subject to suppression and taboo in South Korean society. Not only were the people connected with such ideas punished through the National Security Law, legal provisions were in place such that even their friends and family could be punished as guilty by association. After his defection, PARK Tae-won would go on to write works considered among the greatest works of North Korean historical literature, including History of the Gabo Peasant Uprising (Gabo Nongmin Jeonjaengsa). His works only recently received new attention and evaluation in South Korean society, where some of them are being republished.
The image of childhood remaining in BONG Joon-ho’s memory is that of a quiet and isolated life. His father was a reticent sort who rarely conversed with his family, spending most of his time in his study, and BONG Joon-ho did not associate much with his older sister and older brother. If he happened to meet them outside of the house, they would awkwardly ignore each other. He has few memories of family vacations, dinners out together or visits with relatives. It wasn’t that his relationship with his siblings was especially bad. They weren’t close, but there were also few of the fights that usually take place among siblings during childhood. To use BONG Joon-ho’s expression, he and the rest of his family members were all “solitary individuals.” He himself was a mild type with almost no friends from his early childhood into high school.
It was during elementary school that BONG Joon-ho moved to Seoul. His father moved to a position at a “Design Packaging Center” in Seoul, and the family moved into an apartment in Seoul’s Jamsil neighborhood, located by the Han River, which would form the stage for BONG’s later film The Host. The change in living space did not place a great burden on the young man, but he has uncomfortable memories related to language. Each of the regions in South Korea has its own distinctive dialect, and among them, the dialect in Daegu is especially strong and difficult to change. When BONG Joon-ho transferred to a school in Seoul, he would read from the book in Korean class in front of the other students, and they would all burst out laughing at his speaking style. Later, he says, he would change his speech and be able to converse with his friends at school in the Seoul dialect after a year. But the problem was communication with his family. At home, everybody spoke in the Daegu style, and he recounts that he didn’t know which style he should use if his friends happened to visit his home. He was embarrassed to speak the Seoul dialect in front of his family, and he was embarrassed to speak the Daegu dialect in front of his friends. In the end, he avoided bringing friends home after that. BONG jokes, “My split personality may have started at that time.” His discomfort and uneasiness about revealing himself completely to the outside world continue to this day, and the beginnings of that were in the trivial matter of speaking style during his childhood. He adds, “But I think that kind of uneasiness is a driving force for my creative activities.” Today, BONG speaks perfect Seoul Korean, and he finished changing his speaking style completely around the time he attended university.
Up until high school, he was introverted and a model student, though he also says that he may have been a “freak wearing the mask of a model student.” He never had any physical fights during school, and never got into any real trouble. His grades were exceptional, and he was content with one or two friends. He had no experience with the kind of groups or crowds that male students often form, and while there was one female student he had a crush on, he never dated. He would always sit in one corner of the classroom reading or drawing cartoons. Sometimes he would catch cockroaches at home, put them in glass bottles, take them to school and raise them there: “Cockroaches carry their eggs around on their stomachs. Do you know how disgusting it is to put them in a bottle and raise them?” There were indeed some friends who look at him strangely for it. But his grades were excellent, and he ultimately entered the social sciences department of Yonsei University, one of the top universities in Korea, in 1988.
A quiet and introverted child, BONG Joon-ho mainly played alone at home. He particularly liked his father’s study. His father was a meticulous organizer, so inside of his study all of his books were organized in precise detail according to type. This study, empty during the day when BONG Joon-ho’s father went to work, was a space in which the young man first quenched his sensory and intellectual curiosity about images. The room was filled with sunlight during the day, and the young BONG Joon-ho would indulge in the various kinds of books his father had assembled there. He would look at collections of illustrations from overseas and try to copy those images every day in his exercise book. He read the red-bound Junior Britannica encyclopedia, more than 20 volumes, in detail. The ending pages of each bottom contained various illustrations, and he copied those images almost every day. Also, his father’s study contained collections of nude pictures of women, which were sufficient to stimulate a young boy’s sexual curiosity. They were photographs or drawings with a high level of artistry, but to the young Joon-ho, they were just dirty pictures. The study was essentially the first place that taught him different kinds of intellectual curiosity and the way to experience and express it through images.
More than anything else, he was deeply into comics during his childhood. Even today he has an outstanding skill for drawing (his storyboard drawings and the illustration skill he has shown in various media are renowned for their elaborateness and detail), and at the time he read various popular comics voraciously. His impression and memory of them is strong enough that he can list of the names of the books and their authors even today. However, he never once received a formal art education. He always watched his father doing work with art, but his father never taught the young Joon-ho anything in particular about drawing. Seeing his older sister following his father’s footsteps and studying at an art university, he was sick of studying it himself, he says. When he was in high school, the art teacher recommended that he go to an art university, but BONG thought it would be better to study art while majoring in the humanities.
For this reason, he has never had or handled proper art implements. He has always simply drawn his illustrations with a pen. During middle school, he would make flicker animation secretly during class, making over 30 volumes just of that. Starting out as simple 2-D drawings, these projects would later become elaborate enough to transform into 3-D1.
He mainly enjoyed drawing action “buddy” pieces with detective heroes, but his studies from his school days also included sci-fi pieces such as Shrewd Detective 0011, 0013. Also, he attended a Catholic church when he was in high school, where he had his works printed in the youth group bulletin. As we sat in the production office for Mother where the interviews took place, he took out a copy of the bulletin from one corner of his well-arranged office. The bulletin contained a piece adapted in graphic novel form from a novel by the Korean writer KIM Dong-ri. Considering that it was the work of a young amateur student, this piece demonstrated rather delicate lines and an especially distinctive sense of angle, as well as a sense for movement according to each frame, like a camera crane shot. He still has a great attachment to this kind of work, enough so that he continued contributing his own illustrations to various film media after going to college and even after making his debut as a film director2.
BONG’s family members were “solitary individuals” during his childhood, and the only time when they gathered together was when they were watching TV in the living room. Since his family did not particularly enjoy holidays or outings, they usually watched television dramas in the evening and enjoyed making their own comments on the actors who appeared in them. One of the actors who has appeared continuously in BONG’s films, BYUN Hee-bong, was mainly active in TV dramas at the time, and BONG’s family would always make jokes about his peculiar appearance. Later, BYUN would appear in BONG’s feature debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, and the director says that he cast BYUN out of curiosity, thinking that the actor’s distinctively protruding eyes would be amusing on a big screen rather than a TV screen.
For the young Joon-ho, TV was also practically his only avenue to cinematic experiences. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, he had difficulty gaining experience at cinemas in Korea. It was only in the 1990s that private cinemas began appearing in Korea. Before that, most film fans had to depend on television or commercially released videos to see films. Even with video, BONG’s family only got a VHS recorder in 1987, when he was in his senior year of high school, preparing for his college entrance exam. It was also one year before the year 1988 that the Olympics were held for the first time in Korea, in Seoul.
Before then, BONG was mainly able to watch movies only on television. During those days, Korea’s public broadcasting stations would show programs like “Classics of World Cinema” and “Classic Film Theater” on the weekends, showing classic Hollywood films and sometimes European auteurist films. There were also the Hollywood B-movies shown on AFKN, the public channel for US Army troops stationed in Korea. BONG would arrange a detailed TV schedule every week so that he would not miss these programs, and he succeeded in watching nearly all of them. The films of AFKN were shown only in English, with no subtitles, so the dialogue was difficult to understand, but the young Joon-ho did not care. Through this channel, he was able to see Hammer Films pictures from Britain, John Carpenter’s Dark Star and Antonio Isasi’s Summertime Killer.
His home atmosphere was such that he was not particularly restricted from watching films until late at night. His father was a quiet type, but one who gave his children maximal autonomy. When Joon-ho was in middle school, he found a small, old television somewhere and hid it under the desk in his room to watch it. He mainly watched the late-night AFKN films on this TV, and to overcome the limitations of the small screen he would use a magnifying glass, projecting the TV screen so that it would appear as a big image reflected on the wall. When he turned off all the lights in the room and set up the magnifying glass in front of the TV, the image would go through the glass and be projected on the wall as an inverse image, but he did not hesitate to turn the TV over to watch the image properly.
From the films shown on TV, the names of directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah became engraved on his mind. He says that he had a powerful memory, as though copied on his brain, of the final scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the car submerged in the swamp is pulled out with a rope. Sam Peckinpah in particular was a representative figure whose existence and name BONG recognized as a film director. He watched Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs and The Getaway on TV before he even entered high school. But even the middle school-aged Joon-ho sensed that the films had not been televised in their entirety. In his eyes, the connection between scenes seemed strange, with jumps that suggested deliberate deletions. There was no way that this young man, with an already keen sense of and taste for film, would fail to see it. This was the era of the military dictatorship, in which South Korea was passing from PARK Chung-hee to CHUN Doo-hwan, and on television, political themes, sex and moral issues were being subjected to strong censorship and supervision. Peckinpah’s frank scenes of violence and sex were frequently censored by the TV stations. BONG liked to imagine what the deleted scenes might have been and fill them in himself, and it was through the distribution of classic films on DVD in the 1990s that he was finally able to confirm what he suspected.
BONG’s first experience with a film theater came before he entered elementary school. His mother and father took him to see a documentary on animals, though that film did not leave a very profound impression on his memory. He was first able to fully understand film and experience it at the theater in 1976, when he was seven years old. At that time, he went to Daegu’s Asea Theater with his older sister and saw the Korean animated film Robot Taekwon V (directed by KIM Cheong-gi). He also saw Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music at around the same time. But even as he watched this film, featuring singing, dancing and love amid the beautiful background of the Alps for three hours, the only thing that drew his interest was a scene near the film’s end where the heroine Maria, the Captain and the children are nearly captured while fleeing the Nazis. In this scene, the family is going over the mountain, and they narrowly manage to hide themselves behind a big tombstone as a Nazi soldier shines his flashlight at them. BONG says, “Watching such a long film, I only liked the scenes with suspense. Maybe my tastes became that way around that time.”
He first declared openly that his dream was to become a film director around his third year of middle school. BONG recounts: “I’m not sure what made me have the idea, but I naturally thought that I should become a director. At the time there was a film magazine called RoadShow, and I remember buying every issue of that magazine. It mainly had pictures of stars of the day, like Sophie Marceau and Phoebe Cates, and gossip, but there was a section of about ten pages at the back that presented deep film analysis or theory and director introductions. For instance, it had things like an analysis of Orson Welles’ use of deep focus or Sergei Eisenstein’s use of montage in Battleship Potemkin. I took those pages out and made a separate scrapbook, and I thought ‘I need to study film’ as I was looking at those pieces.” In addition, BONG organized the top 10 lists tallied every year by the British film magazine Sight and Sound or the best film lists published every ten years, gripped by a desire to see those films himself. BONG recalls: “One year, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander was chosen on one of the best film lists. I was really, really curious about this film, but it was almost impossible to see that kind of film in Korea at that time. In those days, the best you could do was watch movies on TV or see videos of films released for commercial purposes. I had a growing dissatisfaction with being unable to see the masterpieces the film books talked about for myself, and after we got a VHS player in our home, I bought blank tapes and recorded all of the classic films they showed on TV. And after I entered university, I would go from time to time to the wholesale video market in Hwanghak-dong3 and find rare films there. I have over 600 tapes that I recorded at that time off the TV or from tapes that I borrowed from people around me, which I treasure to this day.”
BONG Joon-ho matriculated into the sociology department of Yonsei University in 1988. Yonsei’s department of sociology had many of Korea’s young sociologists with progressive tendencies employed as professors, and it naturally became one of the major theoretical strongholds for the country’s social movements in the 1980s and 1990s, which centered on universities. IM Sang-soo, who directed The Good Lawyer’s Wife, The President’s Last Bang and The Old Garden, attended this department before BONG, who recalls: “At the time, there were not a lot of film departments in Korea, and they weren’t easy to get into. The rate of competition was high, and they had a skill test, so I found that burdensome. Most of all, though, I watched films from the 1980s by directors like LEE Jang-ho and BAE Chang-ho4 and thought, there’s no reason you can’t become a director without necessarily studying in a film department. I thought it would be a lot more helpful to be active in a film club while majoring in the humanities and sociology than to just major in film.”
BONG Joon-ho began activity in a film circle immediately after entering college. But during the time he was attending college, from 1988 to the early 1990s, the situation in Korea was one that did not allow university students of a progressive character to concentrate fully on their major coursework. Continuing the oppressive authority that began with PARK Chung-hee’s “Revitalizing Reform” system, repressive military rule was carried out throughout the 1980s with the seizure of power by the new military government, which used Gwangju as a scapegoat in 1980. Then, once the CHUN Doo-hwan administration relinquished power to CHUN’s military junior ROH Tae-woo in 1987, social forces of citizens who had previously been cowering began to resist the government explosively. The June 1987 uprising, called the representative democratization struggle in modern Korean history, fueled the union movement in the labor world and the political struggle of university students. Any student with some degree of conviction launched himself or herself into the class struggle or the ethnic liberation movement (anti-American struggle), regardless of major.
BONG, who entered college in 1988, also naturally shared the generation’s consciousness of the times. But his awakening to social consciousness did not start simply when he entered college. When he was in middle school, he often heard his father angrily venting about his irrational workplace life at the dinner table. BONG says, “I wouldn’t call it a political position, but my father, who was an artist, had a profound hatred for the military government. When he took the family and moved to Seoul, it was when he was starting to do design center work, and the chief director there was a retired military man. In those days, director positions, whether at national organizations or privately owned ones, were very frequently occupied by people who had started out in the military, and here, even a design center that demanded professional discernment had a soldier as its chief director. Whenever my father came home, he would let out his stress and hatred for this director, and as a result I came to learn about how Korea was a military dictatorship from a young age.”
That wasn’t all. BONG’s family was also Catholic. The young BONG Joon-ho was not only an altar boy, he also was active in a Bible study group in high school. This was around 1986 to 1987, and at the time Catholicism in South Korea had a more progressive position than any other religion. During the period of CHUN Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship, Cardinal KIM Sou-hwan was the only person who could say anything about the administration. BONG recalls: “During my high school days, it was like South Korea had fallen into a political furnace. It was no different for me. At home, my father was sharing his hatred of his former soldier chief director, and in Bible study, the teachers, who were university students, would teach us about the contradictions of Korean society. The church bulletin would publish things about social issues like labor, the poor and citizen movements.” It was also at church that BONG came to first hear about the massacre of civilians in Gwangju, which took place in 1980, and about the various methods used by Korea’s military government to suppress KIM Dae-jung, who would later become president of South Korea. Such a situation naturally led the high school student BONG to join the struggle in the streets during the 1987 democratization struggle. BONG says: “During the democratization uprising in June 1987, I was there in the battle on Eulji-ro Street in Seoul too. When 6 pm came around, the citizens all sounded the horns of their cars and the people in the streets started cheering. I can’t find the words to describe the excitement. It was my first experience with a stunning spectacle of sound. When we fled from the combat police into the back streets of Eulji-ro, the shop owners and residents there not only voluntarily hid the protestors, they even made them stuff to eat.”
Life in high school was not much different. At the time, Jamsil High School was also under the control of a principal who had started out in the military. BONG explains, “Three times a week we had to have military drill practice, and I had a profound aversion and hatred toward that. There were also violent acts committed by people like the head of the school patriots’ group. Those brutal characters seen in YOO Ha’s Once Upon a Time in High School really were there in school. I really wanted to thrash him, but I was too timid and weak to do that.” But BONG would join another friend in 1985 to voluntarily make a class newspaper. Not only did this paper contain explicit satire of and opposition to the former soldier principal, it also included erotic stories capable of sexually exciting high school freshmen, written directly by the publishers. BONG sold the paper, printed on two sheets of A3-size paper, to friends for 100 won a copy, and the publication was popular. But when the second edition was published, he was called to the teachers’ room. Fortunately his homeroom teacher did not scold him too much, only saying, “You need to stop. The other teachers also enjoyed looking at it the first time, but enough is enough.” At the same time, the teacher gave him a copy of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History as a gift. This kind of chastisement was unimaginably generous in the Korean society of the time. Later, at a street rally, BONG would meet the same teacher, then affiliated with the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, which was formed in the late 1980s to call for the democratization of education in South Korea.
BONG’s university life naturally came to center on the film circle and the social movement. Academic immersion in sociology was not easy. Instead, during his university days, BONG came to experience the diverse lives of common people that he was unable to experience previously, coming from a middle-class family with parents in the intelligentsia. The diverse forms of common life running through his short films and Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder and The Host could be said to have resulted from the highly diverse experiences BONG had during his university days rather than being connected with the background in which he grew up. BONG recalls: “The landscape of the lives of ordinary people seen in my films may be closer to the imaginary rather than anything that I’ve actually experienced. Through high school, I led a typical, quiet life comfortably at home. But after I entered college, I came to meet a diverse set of friends, and I experienced the lives of ordinary people for the first time doing volunteer work in a farming village with those friends. But I find that kind of life surprisingly well suited to me. And when I did work in the farming village, I meshed well with the ‘women’s group.’5 It was from them that I saw the image of ordinary life like PARK Gang-du’s family in The Host. In contrast, my background was more like the character of the suspect played by PARK Hae-il in Memories of Murder, the person who quietly read a book or drew a picture in the corner.” In addition, he devoted himself during his university days to reading the works of major literary figures who had superbly captured the historical scars of the nation and the lives of common people. He was captivated by the works of HWANG Suk-young and PARK Kyung-ni.
Amid all of this, BONG finished the first semester of his third year in university in 1990 and entered the military. (In South Korea, all able-bodied men are required to serve for a period of over two years in the military.) During the first semester of his third year in school, he had participated in a Korean Teacher’s Union demonstration, where he was arrested for violation of the law on assembly and demonstration. For this, he was held in a jail in Yeongdeungpo for one month, after which he was released with a suspended sentence on the condition that he immediately join the military. But this month of confinement was not all bad for him. The diverse array of people he met there would form the basis for several characters in his films. He recounts: “In the Yeongdeungpo detention center, there were seven of us living together in one room for one month. It was a truly diverse group, people you’d expect in the family operating the store in The Host. Besides me, the people there were all in for an assortment of petty crimes. I marveled at their gift for coarse speech, and from their standpoint, I was a marvel as a university student. Over the month I was there, we talked about all sorts of things. The stories they told me were about lower-class life or dirty jokes, things I could never experience or imagine. Maybe 90% of it was exaggerated, but it was just so enjoyable in itself. The line in Memories of Murder, where Detective JO Yong-gu asks PARK Du-man if the male and female university students who go to membership training (A form of university orientation) all sleep together in one room and have sex indiscriminately, that was something I actually heard from one of the petty criminals there with me when I was in the detention center. The images of the people I met in my university days, doing agricultural work or at the detention center, are the characters who have appeared in my films so far. I think they could be called people who aren’t nice, but aren’t bad either.”
After BONG’s military service period ended and he returned to school, he formed a film club called “the Yellow Door” with two acquaintances. Starting out with three people, the club would later attract so many members that it was split into three teams: the production team, the script team and the criticism team. Its name came from the fact that the door to the room where they gathered and held their seminars was indeed yellow. It was in this club that BONG came to make his first short film, White Man, and met the woman he would later marry.
BONG recalls: “White Man was both my first film and the first film done by the Yellow Door. The production cost 3 million won, which the team members studying direction borrowed from their friends. The postproduction cost another 3 million won, which I got from my parents and relatives. Maybe because it was the first film I made, I was meticulous in planning the continuity and I shot it on 16 mm film.” The film begins with a man, established as a yuppie, discovering a severed finger in a parking garage one day on his way to work. “The idea of the severed finger was originally the idea of a friend of mine, and I thought that there would be some kind of interesting story in it, so I fleshed it out more,” BONG says.
The short film shows the yuppie perversely carrying the finger around all day. The finger, a scream from the lives of laborers, becomes nothing more than a toy to the yuppie worker, and the next morning it is simply thrown away with no further thought. This experimental work, which features almost no dialogue and emphasizes images depicting the man’s acts, as well as the collision of various sounds from the TV (the news, advertisements) in the space where he exists, also displays the striking mise-en-scène that would appear in BONG’s later films. “I think there was obviously some ambition regarding space. He may be a yuppie, but through his life and his actions, I wanted to show a contrast between the mountain village set to be redeveloped and the high-rise apartments that have appeared beyond that landscape.”
White Man was introduced to the public by the Association of Korean Independent Film and Video and even received prizes at small regional film festivals. But the interesting thing was that the work was clearly somewhat removed from the major tendencies of the time in Korean short film, which usually dealt mainly with labor, political struggles, division and alienated classes. BONG says, “I was first able to meet the audience through a screening of this film. In those days, independent and short films were mainly made from the perspective of film as popular art, with stories about socially alienated classes like the labor movement. But with this film, the main character was a yuppie, a man with strange tastes and perversions. Since it was somewhat removed from the atmosphere of the times, maybe 30% of the audience would have been saying, ‘What kind of film is this?’”
BONG first met the theater actor KIM Roe-ha while working on this film. KIM was a talented performer working with the theater troupe Yeonu Mudae, and he too was making his debut through BONG’s short. After forming a connection in this way, KIM has come to appear in all of BONG’s feature films to date: as a homeless man in Barking Dogs Never Bite, as Detective JO Yong-gu in Memories of Murder, and as the man with the megaphone who appears at the group memorial in The Host.
BONG graduated from university in 1994 and entered the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA), a professional film education institution sponsored by the government. The KAFA became a major source of new Korean directors, as many talented individuals emerging from it became major players producing significant films in the country beginning in the 1990s. BONG’s classmates included various individuals who have all become film directors or professors, among them SON Tae-woong (director of Anatomy Class), JANG Joon-hwan (director of Save the Green Planet, JO Yong-gyu (cinematographer for Secret Sunshine and Family Ties) and KIM Byeong-cheol (film professor). At the time the academy operated a one-year curriculum, and the classmates completed their projects working as production staff members on each other’s films. “We did labor sharing. It was a time when we knew no fear and could immerse ourselves in film with youthful vigor. It was a happy and enjoyable time. Back then, the academy was located in the Namsan Motion Picture Promotion Corporation (The present-day Korean Film Council) building, which had an interesting structure. It had real Chungmuro film sets, and there were also screening rooms to show the completed works to journalists. The set for the comic rental library in KIM Hong-joon’s Rosy Life was there, and you could catch a glimpse of the work of directors and cinematographers like YU Hyun-mok and JUNG Il-sung on the photography sets. Just being able to see their method of working was a good experience in itself. And another thing that was good was that you could see all of the films they showed in the screening room for free.”
BONG’s first workshop piece at the KAFA was the three-take Memories in My Frame. This film is an oneiric piece dealing with the dreams of a young girl late at night. BONG explains: “The cinematographer for that film was done by JO Yong-gyu, a classmate of mine at the academy. Actually, with my other classmates, it was like they were working for the first time, but JO had already done professional work, so many people preferred to work with him. And the film where the shooting was done was really JO’s cousin’s house. Actually, we needed a horizontal alleyway outside of the window, and we couldn’t find such a house anywhere we looked. So we ended up shooting in the room of JO Yong-gyu’s nephew. The equipment, if you can call it that, supplied by the academy at the time was of really poor quality. There was a ridiculous lack of lighting equipment, and so if you look at the film, we couldn’t do complete lighting. It’s ultimately only partially lit, though there are some people who say it appears more meaningful that way.”
But it was primarily BONG’s graduation piece, Incoherence, that informed the world about this director, who at the time was still only the maker of short films. An omnibus film in three parts, it is a character piece depicting hypocritical and comical events occurring through three conservative characters: a professor who imposes all manner of authority and solemnity on his students, then reads dirty magazines in his office; a newspaper columnist who steals milk from in front of other people’s houses every morning when he jogs, then shifts the blame to a poor paper boy; and a public security prosecutor who is returning home drunk one night when he gets an upset stomach and has to wander around looking for a place to relieve himself. BONG shows his characteristic humorous yet cynical derision in the epilogue in particular, which has the three men appear on a TV debate crying out for conservatism in Korean society. BONG explains: “One night I was watching a TV debate, and these conservative figures, who were referred to as social experts, came out and said the most ridiculous things. It was so ridiculous that, rather than getting angry, I just laughed at the way they looked and the things they said. Then I suddenly thought that it might be fun to think about what they are really like in their daily lives after presenting this grave and authoritarian image on TV. In most cases, social perceptions are influenced by decorations such as job titles and external appearance rather than character or personality, right? I wondered how people would react when you showed them these men’s real identities, without the viewer knowing about the job titles that dress them up. So my thought was that in order to do that, I had to wait until later to tell the viewer what their jobs are.”
Incoherence includes not only characters, but also the chase motif and spatial metaphors that would later appear in BONG’s feature films. In particular, the underground spaces of the chase scenes shown in BONG’s films represent the unsightly hidden interior of the real world, and it is underground where the women’s bodies are left in the drain pipe of Memories of Murder and the corpses of the monster’s victims in The Host are left to rot. The chase scenes and underground spaces in Incoherence already give a sufficient indication of this later feature. BONG says, “I think those spaces are interesting. I only found out later after shooting Incoherence, but the scene of pipes installed in the ceiling of the apartment’s basement in that film is just like the composition of a scene in The Elephant Man. I saw the film on TV when I was in middle school, and I guess it lingered in my mind. Only later, as I watched the film again, did I realize that it was like a scene in my film. And I like the motif of chase personally. It’s tense when you have people chasing and being chased, you know?”
At the time, Incoherence gained a considerable amount of attention as a short film not just from critics but from the public as well. BONG recounts, “At some small film festival at the end of the year, they edited together a program mixing together the noteworthy films and shorts from that year, and my film was shown together with Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour. It did seem like a kind of odd combination, but I remember calling all my family members and watching it with them anyway.”
Released in 1994, Incoherence was rather successful for a short film. It has a high degree of recognition with the public, and it was helpful to BONG in making his debut at Chungmuro. Critics responded well, and the short was invited to overseas festivals. BONG also married immediately after graduating from the KAFA, with a friend he had met in the Yellow Door film club. “She was older than me, but sweet, kind of wacky, and cute. We married in 1995, when I was just 26, and she was 30,” BONG recalls.
However, at the time, the Korean film world still had many traces of the apprenticeship method. Even if someone announced himself with a superior short film, no producer would allow him to start working immediately. Following their graduation from the KAFA, new directors were obliged to spend a few years working as production staff for established directors. The film set that many recent graduates from the academy most coveted was that of the director IM Kwon-taek. But many prominent graduates from previous years were waiting in line to get such jobs, and BONG had difficulty finding an appropriate production staff position.
A bigger problem was the issue of taking care of living expenses. BONG recalls, “I was unemployed, having just come out of film school, and my wife didn’t have any job either, so our married life was one of bitter poverty. We lived in a tiny apartment like the one you see in Barking Dogs Never Bite and were on the verge of being unable to go out at all because there was no money. At that time, we lived off of 300,000 to 400,000 won a month from doing monitoring work for broadcasting and shooting wedding videos. On top of that, my wife got pregnant right after we married, so we were even more destitute. At the time, one of the part-time monitoring jobs I did with my wife was for a TV program on PBC6 hosted by the director PARK Chan-wook. He wasn’t getting attention either in those days, and so he would come out on cable TV with the nuns and do these somber film introductions. My wife and I would check to see if he used vulgar language or strange gestures.”
One of the production staffs BONG wanted to work on was the one for PARK Kwang-su’s A Single Spark. Dramatizing the true story of a worker who committed suicide by self-immolation to protest labor conditions, the film also became a popular issue, with the collection of money to cover some of the production costs through citizen contributions, and PARK was a major director leading the Korean New Wave in the late 1980s. But BONG was unable to work on this film. As great as the interest was cinematically, staff positions were already filled. Around this time, JANG Sun-woo was gathering a staff for his film A Petal, set against the 1980 Gwangju massacre, and BONG interviewed for a position, but was frustrated once again. BONG remembers: “I went to an interview for prospective staff, and the assistant director, who had already been decided on, asked me if I liked drinking, and I said I didn’t. He asked if I was married, and I said I was. He asked if I had kids, and I said I did. He then said that I wouldn’t be suited well to working with JANG Sun-woo. If you want to work on his staff, you basically have to like drinking, and so it’s better for you if you’re unmarried.”
Round about the time he was having difficulties finding any production staff work to speak of, a relationship began to form between BONG and PARK Chan-wook. BONG explains: “Incoherence was released just before I graduated from the academy, and PARK Chan-wook was actually the first person from Chungmuro to contact me, around February 1995. At that time, he had made The Moon Is the Sun’s Dream, which was a disaster at the box office. He was close with the director of the Association of Korean Independent Film and Video, and I guess he went there and saw White Man. He even ended up reading the script for Incoherence, and I think he got a good impression. He called me up and said he was preparing a film called Affection Between Father and Son and asked me to try writing a synopsis. It was a hard-boiled kind of film, where a son abducts his father.” But this film project ultimately failed to materialize, later becoming the foundation for director LEE Moo-young’s Humanist. “I really don’t think PARK liked what I wrote. In his idea, the level of hard-boiled emotion and violence that would be shown later on was already pretty high, and what I did was pretty removed from that,” BONG recalls. In any event, this connection formed the start for a relationship built between the two, and it was through PARK that BONG met the director LEE Joon-ik (director of the film The King and the Clown, which drew 10 million viewers in Korea), who was working at the time as a producer. LEE too recognized BONG’s skill at screenwriting and suggested writing a script for another work entitled I Really Should Die Today, a black romantic comedy about a spinster who intends to commit suicide. BONG worked on this script with his wife, but it wasn’t easy. He realized that as a director who always wrote short film scripts, he lacked the know-how to write one for a feature film.
Amid all of this, BONG came to meet the PARK Jong-won, director of Eternal Empire. BONG sensed that he needed experience on a film set even more urgently, so he asked LEE Joon-ik to introduce him to PARK. As it happened, PARK not only enjoyed Incoherence, he was working on preparing a film called Killing KIM Dae-jung. He had bought the rights to a best-selling book of the same name, written by political critic GANG Jun-man, and he suggested that BONG write a synopsis. Though this project too evaporated even before the synopsis was finished, the connection formed in this way led to BONG’s participation in PARK’s segment of the multi-director omnibus film Seven Reasons Why Beer Is Better Than a Lover. Because it was a short segment, it was only 15 minutes long, and it was at this time that BONG first realized the difficulty of a feature film.
Later, PARK Jong-won would introduce BONG to PARK Ki-yong, director of Camels. It was thus that BONG came to work as an assistant director on Motel Cactus, directed by PARK and BONG’s KAFA classmate JANG Joon-hwan. But this film too was more a new style of film than the Chungmuro style. At this time, BONG got to know CHA Seung-jae, director of Uno Film and a friend of PARK’s. He ended up going naturally to Uno Film with JANG, and they would both shoot impressive debuts with CHA as producer. BONG’s debut was Barking Dogs Never Bite, while JANG made Save the Green Planet some years after that. BONG says, “I entered the CHA Seung-jae system at this time, and back then you had to serve as an assistant director and write a really good feature film script to be able to become a director. But I don’t think I did a good job as an assistant director then.”
BONG ended up preparing his feature debut within the CHA Seung-jae system at Uno Film. That debut was Barking Dogs Never Bite, but its realization was not easy. A casting issue arose when a star-level actor who had originally been cast in the lead suddenly disappeared, and funding difficulties naturally ensued. At this, CHA even arrived at the decision to cancel the whole production. During this time, BONG felt conflicted between his affection for short and independent films and the commercial system of Chungmuro. He had a growing desire to tell his stories in his own way rather than accept the commercial system completely. But the experience of Barking Dogs Never Bite, where the film was ignored not only by the public but most of all by the critics, he was unable to resolve his conflict for a while after that. However, as BONG admitted, he seemed to regain his identity and sense of himself as he made his second film, Memories of Murder.
BONG confessed that the screenwriting stage and production situation for Barking Dogs Never Bite presented him with new hurdles to overcome. But Memories of Murder, the film that emerged after his long ordeal, found him at a different starting point from the beginning. Word of mouth about the excellence of the script ran around Chungmuro even before the production started, and this evaluation made the film the most highly anticipated Korean film even before filming started. The anticipation continued after the film was completed. As soon as it premiered, it gathered the support of critics, and it registered the best box office results in Korean film that year, drawing 6 milion viewers. It also provided BONG with a chance to solidify his position both domestically and abroad as it was screened at overseas film festivals. And in 2006, BONG completed his third feature film, The Host. The film, made in a genre that had rarely been attempted in Korea, the monster film, overcame its limited budget with the director’s distinctive compositional ability and imagination. Not only did it register the biggest box office results of the year in Korea, with 13 million viewers, it also maintained strong support from critics.
BONG followed it up by making “Shaking Tokyo,” an episode in the Japanese-filmed tri-national omnibus film Tokyo!. He is currently working on his fourth feature film, Mother. After that, he plans to film Transperceneige, an adaptation of Jean-Marc Rochette’s sci-fi graphic novel, in 2010.
1. At a video interview of prominent individuals celebrating the inaugural edition of the Korean monthly Fantastique, which mainly deals with literature in the fantasy genre, BONG Joon-ho gave a demonstration of the Star Wars space travel flicker animation he had made during middle school. This video became very popular, posted on the blogs of various Korean internet users.
2. Like his meticulous father, he has stored all of these old documents bearing traces of his childhood in perfect order in his film office today, and he took them out and showed them periodically during the interviews.
3. A market where stores were clustered together selling videos wholesale. At the time, it was often possible to find foreign masterpieces that had been released but failed to make a profit commercially and were immediately recalled or cleared out. It thus also became a required route for film buffs in the 1980s.
4. LEE Jang-ho and BAE Chang-ho were major directors in Korean film in the 1980s, neither of whom received education in film at a university.
5. People performing volunteer service in agricultural communities were divided into different areas: a youth group, a women’s group and a children’s group. The youth group centered on debates over real issues centering on the village’s men, while the women’s group performed social activities focusing mainly on talking and games with the village’s women. For this reason, the women’s group mainly consisted of students who were sociable and had a good sense of humor.
6. Pyunghwa Broadcasting Corporation, a Catholic television network in South Korea.