5 years in the past, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho stood on the Oscars stage, shocked as his film “Parasite” made historical past as the primary non-English-language movie to win greatest image. The darkly satirical thriller about class battle and deception had already gained three different Academy Awards that evening, for guiding, unique screenplay and worldwide function, cementing Bong’s standing as one of the crucial influential filmmakers of his era. In his acceptance speech, he joked about consuming till morning, and later, backstage, giddily made his trophies kiss like motion figures.
With Hollywood at his toes, Bong may have executed what so many worldwide auteurs earlier than him had executed — taken a big-budget studio provide, signed onto a status drama full of A-list stars or fastidiously plotted a movie designed to convey him again to the Oscars. Followers and trade insiders speculated about what his subsequent steps may be, wishcasting him into blockbuster franchises like Star Wars or James Bond.
Not that he hasn’t ever thought of it, on his personal phrases.
“I’m not drawn to franchise films, but I did think at one point that I would like to do an ‘Alien’ film,” the 55-year-old Bong says over Zoom on a latest morning from New York, sitting beside his interpreter, Sharon Choi. He pauses, then provides together with his trademark dry wit, “An ‘Alien’ musical.”
Robert Pattinson (and Robert Pattinson) within the film “Mickey 17.”
(Warner Bros. Footage)
As a substitute of dancing xenomorphs, Bong made “Mickey 17,” in theaters Friday, a bleakly comedic sci-fi thriller set aboard a colonist spaceship sure for a distant icy planet. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a low-ranking crew member often called an “expendable,” who’s relegated to tackle the expedition’s deadliest duties and dies time and again, solely to be “reprinted” every time together with his outdated reminiscences intact. Co-starring Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, the movie — each an existential nightmare and absurdist comedy — faucets into Bong’s signature themes of sophistication, energy and exploitation, inspecting a system that treats some lives as totally disposable.
Not precisely the most secure wager for a filmmaker recent off an Oscar sweep, nor for Warner Bros., which is releasing the $115-million manufacturing, taking an enormous swing on Bong’s genre-hopping, bitingly satirical imaginative and prescient at a time when unique sci-fi is changing into more and more uncommon.
“For me, that is the point of making a sci-fi film,” Bong says, proudly owning as much as the gamble. “It seems to be a story about the future, about another planet, but it’s actually a portrait of us now and the reality around us, not of somewhere far out in space.”
Even Pattinson wasn’t initially positive what to make of “Mickey 17,” which is predicated on the 2022 sci-fi novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton. The actor had lengthy admired Bong however by no means imagined working with him. “He was one of those untouchable directors,” he says by telephone. When he heard Bong was taking conferences in L.A. a few “mysterious project,” Pattinson jumped on the probability. “Nothing like this was being made — especially at studios. So I thought, ‘OK, this is a big deal.’”
Then he learn the script and was instantly struck by its wild tonal shifts. “You’re like, OK, how do you want this to be played?” he says. “Do you want this to be ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ or do you want it to be ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’?”
Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette within the film “Mickey 17.”
(Warner Bros. Footage)
The reply, it turned out, was a bit of each — and extra moreover. Past its sci-fi premise, “Mickey 17” explores energy and exploitation, with Ruffalo’s grotesquely self-important (and greater than barely Trumpy) chief of the colonial voyage reigning as a wannabe cult determine, whereas his equally grotesque spouse, performed by Collette, fixates on making sauces out of the ice planet’s native creatures, often called “creepers.” As Mickey’s reprinted existence begins to disrupt the colony’s inflexible hierarchy, their authority — and the very notion of what makes an individual helpful — begins to unravel.
Bong didn’t lack alternatives after “Parasite” however, as he has all through his 25-year filmmaking profession, he adopted his personal distinctive path. At the same time as he navigated the Oscar marketing campaign, he was already engaged on different tasks, together with one based mostly on a real story about an individual dwelling in London that he finally deserted attributable to moral considerations in regards to the precise folks concerned. He additionally started creating an animated movie about deep-sea creatures, which he plans to finish subsequent, earlier than falling in love with Ashton’s novel and deciding to adapt it for the display.
“What’s the saying after you win best picture?” says “Mickey 17” South Korean producer Dooho Choi, who additionally labored with Bong on his movies “Okja” and “Snowpiercer.” “He got to make whatever he wanted, I suppose, and he chose to make ‘Mickey 17,’ which is full of ideas about the times we live in, yet in a fun, otherworldly way. Bong always follows his vision and creative instincts. He approached ‘Mickey 17’ exactly the same way as his other films.”
Bong had been as stunned as anybody by the success of “Parasite” — which earned a shocking $258 million on the world field workplace — however he didn’t let it alter his rhythm. “It was such an honor to win the awards — it was also quite surprising, because I had never really gone through something like that before,” he says. “But in terms of how I work, nothing really changed. I didn’t take any time off afterwards. I just kept on working.”
That work ethic carried straight into “Mickey 17,” for which he as soon as once more constructed a world ruled by its personal warped, Bongian logic, sketching out the movie via extremely detailed storyboards earlier than a single body was shot. The “Mickey 17” universe is lived-in and tactile, stuffed with analog-looking know-how and industrial grime impressed by movies like Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Bong and his crew designed the spaceship, the Drakkar, to really feel each futuristic and oppressively bureaucratic, like a deep-space manufacturing unit the place human life is mechanized and survival is optimized at the price of individuality.
“Despite the joys of designing a sci-fi film, the characters in this movie belong more in grimy back alleys than in a sleek spaceship,” says Bong, whose filmmaking course of and influences can be explored in an upcoming exhibit on the Academy Museum of Movement Footage opening later this month. “Instead of fancy, polished ships, we chose to go in more of the gritty, cargo-ship route.”
Beneath its retrofuturistic design, “Mickey 17” affords a pointed critique of how capitalism treats staff as replaceable — generally actually.
“They’re printing Mickey out so that he can die, and in that concept is all the comedy and tragedy of the film,” Bong says. “In real life, you see a lot of jobs that end in fatal accidents. When that happens, the worker leaves, another worker comes. The job remains the same — it’s just the people who get replaced. You can call it the capitalist tragedy of our times, and in this film it’s even more extreme.”
But for all its heavy, generally downright bleak themes, Bong considers “Mickey 17” his funniest movie. “I think in real life, humans are just funny creatures,” he says. “No matter how harsh or depressing reality can get, people always manage to have a laugh. We’re kind of just these goofy, ridiculous creatures, always making the same mistakes.”
Pattinson, who performs a number of iterations of Mickey within the movie, noticed that blend of the weighty and the absurd firsthand every day on the set in England in late 2022. “Bong has this joyfulness to him, which does feel quite strange,” Pattinson says. “We were shooting this montage of grotesque deaths and he just had this lightness to his touch. There’s something so playful and almost childlike — it inspires a lot of trust in him.”
Bong isn’t satisfied that our machines will ever outpace human management — or fallibility.
“Technology will always advance, but in the end, humans are the ones managing it, interpreting it, creating the ethical and political environment around it — and humans will always have this foolish side and will always make mistakes,” he says. “I feel like we’re going to see more and more of what happens in the film in our own reality.”
He feels the identical about AI, which has loomed with rising urgency over Hollywood within the years since “Parasite.” Whereas some see it as a menace to human creativity, Bong regards it simply as one other supply of fabric.
“We’ve seen from films like ‘The Terminator’ that AI can be a great source of drama and we can create a lot of stories around it,” he says. “I honestly don’t think AI programs will write a fun story about themselves and how s— AI can be. I feel like I am a better writer for those stories.”
Even Pattinson may sense the load and issue of what Bong was attempting to tug off. “I just remember him saying, when he was in the edit, ‘I’m trying to land a 747 on an inch-wide runway,’ ” Pattinson remembers with fun. “He’s literally the only director who could have made something like this. It’s sort of a unicorn.”
Nonetheless, Bong shrugs off the notion that he ever agonized over the dangers concerned in making a movie like “Mickey 17.”
“I feel bad for the producers and the marketing team for saying this — I know they have a very hard job,” he says. “But once I find a particular story or character or situation fascinating, I just go ahead and I create a movie based on it. I really don’t think about the risks. Maybe I can’t.”