Global News Journal

An Interview With South Korea’s Box Office Champ Director Bong Joon-ho

The South Korean director whose movie about a mutant river monster became the country’s biggest box office hit has a new film on what might be an even more terrifying subject — an maniacally obsessive mother.

Bong Joon-ho sat down last week for an interview with Reuters about his new movie called “Mother”that debuted last month at the Cannes International Film Festival and has quickly become one of South Korea’s biggest hits of the year.

The movie is about a mother who goes to extremes to protect her emotionally and mentally unstable son after he is charged with murder. It follows Bong’s movie “The Host,” which was the first South Korean film to make more than $100 million at the local box office.

The following are excerpts from the interview in Korean and translated by Kim Junghyun 

Reuters: How would you describe your movie “Mother”?

Bong: It is a movie that brings this issue of motherhood to the extremes. This movie is about a mother, but not just a mother. It’s a mother whose son is facing a murder charge. International audiences might find it easier to approach this movie at first as a thriller.

Blood-suckers and blood-thirsty revenge: an interview with South Korean director Park Chan-wook

South Korean director Park Chan-wook talked vampires and the movie industry at an interview with Reuters in Seoul this week as his movie “Thirst” prepares to enter the competition at the Cannes International Film Festival which opens today. Park’s movie “Oldboy” won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004 and this is his first film in competition since then.

“Thirst” stars Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin  as a priest turned vampire and a femme fatale respectively.

Here is a transcript of the Reuters interview with Park,  translated from Korean.

 SPOILER ALERT: About halfway through this interview, Park speaks about the ending for “Thirst”

(Reuters pictures by Jo Yong-hak. Park Chan-wook at his office in Seoul and actress Kim Ok-vin)

Reuters: Your film “Oldboy” left such a deep impression with global audiences. A lot of people at Cannes are going to be comparing this film and “Oldboy”. How do you think these two films compare?

Park Chan-wook: Well, I made several other films after “Oldboy”, and now it feels like I only have dim memories of making that movie. So while shooting “Thirst”, I didn’t particularly have “Oldboy” in mind, nor did I try to make a better, or more interesting film than “Oldboy”. Of course audiences will be comparing the two. But as a person who made this film, it’s a difficult question to answer. I would like to direct the question to audiences and I’m curious about what they would say.