Bong Joon Ho, the Korean master filmmaker and three-time Oscar winner, is the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the first part of which was recorded in front of an audience at the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, just days before Bong’s Parasite became the first non-English-language film to ever win the best picture Oscar; and the second part of which was recorded via Zoom last month, just days before Bong’s Mickey 17 was released in U.S. theaters.
Bong, 55, has been on the radar of cineastes since his big screen directorial debut, 2000’s Barking Dogs Never Bite. His following grew with each of his next five features, 2003’s Memories of Murder, 2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja. But it was Parasite that made him a household name. A dramedy that centers on a poor family and a rich family in present-day Korea, it proved to be a cultural phenomenon, garnering rave reviews (it’s still at 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and generating huge box office grosses both domestically ($53.85 million) and abroad ($208.75 million), bringing its worldwide haul to $262.60 million, a sum bettered by only nine non-English-language films made outside of the U.S. or China ever.
Parasite premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it became the first Korean film to win the fest’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. It later became the first non-English-language film to win the best ensemble SAG Award. And on Feb. 9, 2020, it became the first non-English-language film ever awarded the best picture Oscar. (Bong personally won three Oscars that night — for producing, directing and writing — and brought back a fourth to Korea, best international feature, which it had never won before.) A.O. Scott, the New York Times’ chief film critic at the time, called Parasite “the movie of the year” and Bong quite possibly “the filmmaker of the century.”
Some five years — and a global pandemic — later, Bong is back at the center of the global film conversation. On Feb. 7, Parasite was re-released in IMAX. On March 23, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles will debut the first-ever exhibition about him. And last Friday, March 7, Warner Bros. released his first feature since Parasite, Mickey 17, which stars Robert Pattinson. So this seemed as good a time as any to put together and share these two interviews with Bong, both translated by the great Sharon Choi.
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