Replaying "The Host" with Bong Joon-Ho

By Jennifer Young

Monday afternoon, the Four Seasons played host to the Honorable ex-Mayor Willie Brown at its bar while the director of South Korea’s top grossing film of all time, Bong Joon-Ho, replayed “The Host” to reporters. As the day wore on, waits were long — SF360’s interview got pushed back 90 minutes — but Bong’s candid and thoughtful responses made it worth our while. After finishing his day at the Four Seasons, Bong headed off to appear in person at the San Francisco Film Society’s tribute to his earlier works (“Memories of Murder” and “Barking Dogs Never Bite”) at the Clay.

SF360: I love the moment in ‘The Host’ when the exhausted Park family takes a break from scouring the sewers for little Hyun-seo, (who’s been abducted by the monster), to have a meal in the family food stall when suddenly little Hyun-seo appears at the table, eating alongside and being fed by each family member, like a manifestation of their collective memory. Can you talk about this scene?

Bong Joon-Ho: Actually that scene is the reason why I shot the film. It’s a crucial scene. If I were to pour my heart out to you regarding that scene it would take an hour at least and we wouldn’t get to your other questions so I will compress my answer! Food, to eat but more importantly to feed, (I’m sure you felt that), it’s like a repetitive motif, whether it’s in the dialog or an action, throughout the film. And this scene is like a highlight of that motif.

When the family decides to escape the hospital, you know make this great escape in order to save their youngest, the trigger behind it is when Nam-joo, the girl’s aunt, says ‘I wonder how many days it’s been since Hyun-seo has eaten?’ And like everyone’s eyes just go wild and they’re like okay we’re getting out of here! And that’s like the trigger behind that concept. Even the last scene focuses on the food; Se-joo, the little boy who was able to fall into the arms of Kang-du because of being saved by Hyun-seo, shares this warm dinner plate with Kang-du. So there’s definitely a flow of food here.

This family, they’re doing everything they can. This weak family is trying to save the weak daughter Hyun-seo. Meanwhile the weak Hyun-seo is trying to save the even weaker Se-joo. So even though the society and the country have turned their backs on them, the weak person is trying to save the even weaker. It’s sort of the focal point of the story, the focal message. So going back to that scene the whole protecting and saving is being expressed through this feeding. And so if you go back and watch that scene it’s like everything I wanted to show you through the film is in there. It’s like a simple dream that the family has of wanting to just feed their daughter, which they do in that manifestation.

SF360: In ‘The Host,’ there’s a good deal of establishment bashing: thoughtless, stupid, greedy individuals representing those in power. In America these days, one rarely encounters, in a mainstream format, even a fictional implication that a government backed by that country’s leading health practitioners might ‘create’ a virus or some sort of false health scare. This concept for me rings uncomfortably true thanks to an increasing number of virus scares [whose eventual impact dwarfs in comparison to the expectations built]: SARS and the Avian Bird Flu are two that come to mind, not to mention other incidents of instilling fear into the general populace. Have you yourself had doubts about all these somewhat dubious infectious diseases and the extreme response to them?

Bong: You know with a virus you can’t see a virus so I think it’s a great setting for prejudice or wrong dogma. Something like even Weapons of Mass Destruction — they’re supposed to be huge, but even stuff like that it, ends up ultimately there was misinformation. Obviously I’ve used that in this film and it’s in the structure of the virus. Regarding SARS, I think the scene where people are waiting in line with the masks on that’s just a recreation of images I saw from Hong Kong at the time. When this was shown at festivals in Hong Kong or Canada a lot of people did ask that question. What’s really funny is that in Korea there were no actual SARS patients but because the fear and phobia were so great, this was about the time in 2003 when ‘Memories of Murder’ was about to come out, there were a lot of funny SARS-related episodes. What’s really funny is they took a person who was a suspected SARS carrier from the Korean airport and stuffed him into a similar medical container like the one you see in the film for 15 days! The hospital didn’t want him because the patients at the hospital complained and the hospital was afraid that their popularity would suffer — so it was actually set, the container was set, in the middle of a schoolyard of a nearby school. So stuff like that did inspire me.

SF360: There has been great debate about the screen quota system in South Korea. (Screen quotas are basically a mandate to movie theater owners to play homegrown product for a specified amount of time with the intention of protecting that nation’s film industry). Over the past few years the United States put so much pressure on your country to reduce the quota that in 2006 that the South Korean government finally caved, reducing the 40