The Untold Truth Of Bong Joon Ho

When South Korean director Bong Joon Ho's Parasite launched into the 2019/2020 award season, it started things off with a unanimous Palme d'Or selection at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, then finished with four Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and the much-coveted Best Picture. As the first foreign language film to ever win the top Oscar, Parasite has earned a historic level of recognition. Consequently, Bong Joon Ho has become not only one of the most talked-about names in Hollywood, but the entire world.

But although Joon Ho's name is on the tip of everyone's tongue now, just a few years ago no one really knew who he was. In fact, unless you were already an aficionado of one or several of his six films leading up to Parasite, it's unlikely that you'd heard of him at all until recently. While many of his previous films garnered high levels of success, none of them were exactly mainstream smashes, especially not by the standards now set by Parasite.

Here's the untold truth of Bong Joon Ho.

While Bong Joon Ho received critical success and industry praise for his work on Memories of Murder, it was his monster flick The Host that would place him in the international spotlight.

Set in Seoul, The Host tells the story of a man (played by Song Kang-ho) who must rise to the occasion when his daughter is abducted by a mutated river monster carrying a deadly virus. Joon Ho famously made the film under an extremely limited budget, and the end result impressed audiences and critics everywhere, especially considering the fact that he showed a large creature for long periods of time in broad daylight. The fact that he pulled off his ambitious special effects under restricted means translated into big attention from major studios.

Bong Joon Ho's work has been strongly influenced by a number of history's most acclaimed directors, and the eagle-eyed viewer can spot homages to these greats scattered throughout his movies.

For example, John Hurt's Snowpiercer character, Gilliam, was named after Terry Gilliam, who directed such renowned dark science fiction films as Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, and The Zero Theorem, all of which share themes with Joon Ho's movie. In the same film, Jamie Bell's character, Edgar, was named after director Edgar Wright, who made apocalyptic movies like The World's End and Shaun of the Dead.

More recently, Parasite featured a slew of allusions to director Alfred Hitchcock, such as the use of stairs as a motif, its more than a dozen instances of voyeurism, and, most on the nose, a copy of the Alfred Hitchcock collection lying out in plain view in the wealthy family's home.

It's also worth mentioning here that John Hurt played Winston Smith in the film adaptation of 1984, which also dealt with a Snowpiercer-like dystopian scenario. It just goes to show how carefully Bong Joon Ho considers every aspect of his work.

By the time his film Okja came out in in 2017, Bong Joon Ho had already made a name for himself within the industry as a talented filmmaker. That didn't mean insiders were happy to see him working with Netflix when the company began producing its own movies, of which Okja was one of the first major releases.

When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival it was met with boos the moment the Netflix title card hit the screen. Then the first ten minutes of the movie were projected in the wrong aspect ratio, which elicited further catcalls from the already angry audience. Finally the movie was restarted in the correct format, and the boos swelled even louder at the second appearance of the Netflix title card.

In the end, however, Okja was accepted, earning high scores from both critics and the audience on Rotten Tomatoes.

For all the international acclaim Bong Joon Ho has achieved, it rather astounding that he's released only two films in English — or really one and a half, to be more precise.

2013's Snowpiercer was his first venture into English, though it did feature two Korean characters who could only be understood via a translating device. They were played by Joon Ho regulars Song Kang-ho and Ko Asung, who portrayed a father/daughter duo in Snowpiercer as well as The Host.

Bong Joon Ho's follow-up Okja was delivered in a combination of Korean and English. The movie's central characters were all Koreans speaking in their native tongue, while English was spoken by supporting characters played by Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, and others. His success in spite of all this underscores something he told the press in the weeks leading up to the 2020 Oscars: "Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."

Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein has long held an infamous reputation for his... let's call it "questionable" behavior. For our purposes here, we're focusing on his habit of hacking up a director's work in the editing room, which accounted for perhaps the least of his awful actions.

Bong Joon Ho's work became the target of the producer's inclination to over-edit when the Weinstein Company bought distribution rights to Snowpiercer in 2012. Weinstein wanted to cut 25 minutes from Bong's version, including one of the director's favorite scenes, in which a masked train guard guts a fish with an axe in an attempt to intimidate Chris Evans' character and the rebels that followed him.

Later describing the situation, Bong Joon Ho recalled, "Harvey hated it. Why fish? We need action! I had a headache in that moment: What do I do? So suddenly, I said, 'Harvey, this shot means something to me. It's something personal. My father was a fisherman. I'm dedicating this shot to my father.'"

Weinstein agreed that family is the most important thing and allowed him to keep the scene.

"It was a f***ing lie," Joon Ho admitted. "My father was not a fisherman."

The initial ideas for Parasite began percolating in 2013, but it wasn't until after he finished Okja in 2017 that Bong Joon Ho finally sat down to write the script in earnest. Early drafts were started by his production assistant Han Jin-won, who later received a co-writing credit, but the bulk of the final script was produced by the director himself.

In interviews, Bong Joon Ho has reported that it took him four months to complete the script, and has called writing screenplays a "very lonely" process. Writing is a famously solitary endeavor, forcing the wordsmith to stay secluded for want of focus. Perhaps that loneliness contributed to the dark and strained tone of the final screenplay — but either way, audiences were all the richer for Bong Joon Ho's creative travails.

In early 2018 it was announced that a TV version of Snowpiercer was in production, and that Bong Joon Ho would serve as an executive producer.

The show ended up locked in development limbo for years as creative differences flared between the producers and the network — it even moved from TNT to TBS and then back again. There was extensive debate through rewrites and reshoots over whether the show would be a sequel to the movie or an expanded retelling of the original story, and in the end it seems that the latter approach won out.

Set seven years after a climate disaster left the world frozen, the story revolves around a train full of survivors who circle the Earth endlessly while locked in a struggle for simple human dignity. It features renowned film star Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs from the stage play Hamilton, and will air on TNT starting in May of 2020.