Last night, Scott Feinberg interviewed Bong Joon Ho in Santa Barbara as he accepted the award for Outstanding Director. A wonderfully humble and very talented man, that Bong Joon Ho. Here are a few highlights:
- On news around a small screen adaption of Parasite: “The TV series with HBO and Adam McKay is something that I’ve been thinking of for a long time, since I started writing the script. I had all these ideas accumulated about the characters and the hidden backstories that I couldn’t include in the two-hour running time of the film, so I just want to spread them all out through this limited series. More than being a TV show, I really think of it as a six-hour expanded film.”
- On the critical and box office success of the film: “I didn’t anticipate it all. I never imagined that I would be here with an audience in Santa Barbara. I just shot the film as I’ve always done with my previous works. But last March when I completed the film I did realize that I had little regrets with Parasite. Whenever I finish a film I’m always entangled in all these regrets, but relatively I didn’t have as many. But obviously everything that happened since Cannes to now the [Academy Awards] and right now in Santa Barbara, I never imagined any of this. It is all very new and surprising.”
- On finding the perfect cast through untraditional means: “Personally, I don’t like auditions. I find them very awkward. Calling the actors into an office and have them perform…it makes me feel uncomfortable watching them, and for me it’s just difficult to get over how awkward the entire situation is. Personally, I love to watch their previous works, shorts, indie films, and if they’re performing onstage I try to go to the shows myself, and that’s how I form the cast one by one.”
- On art imitating life: “Coincidentally, I first came up with the idea for this film in the winter of 2013, which was when I was working on the post-production of Snowpiercer— and the themes are connected. They’re both about the rich and poor. But I wanted to explore a similar theme, not through sci-fi and action, but through characters that I can see around me in my daily life…When I was in college I also taught math for a middle school boy for a very rich family, and at the time my girlfriend was teaching the same boy Korean. He needed a math tutor, so she introduced me into the family. So you can say that she and I infiltrated their home one by one. I also wanted to introduce another friend into the family as an art teacher, but we weren’t able to proceed with the plan because I was fired after two months.”
And here are the videos:
