EXCLUSIVE Etrange 2013 Interview: Bong Joon-ho talks SNOWPIERCER

ScreenAnarchy: This was your first large scale production outside of Korea, the first with a principally international cast and crew. Did that have any impact on your directing style, or on the way you worked with your actors?

Bong: It’s true that this budget was significantly higher than that of my other films, and that only ten percent of our crew were Korean. But ultimately, this production wasn’t all that different from my previous. The way that I work remains the same, the way the set is run is the same.

When I shot Shaking Tokyo [his segment in the anthology film Tokyo!] in Japan, [as a Korean] I was alone there too. All of the actors and crew were Japanese. Even when we made The Host, we had Australian and American effects specialists on set as part of our crew. So working in a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan environment was nothing new, and was something I was very comfortable with.

To be clear, while Snowpiercer is an English language film, it’s in no way a product of a Hollywood studio. It is a 100% Korean production. I was very lucky for that. I was able to make this film my way, as I had my previous films.

ScreenAnarchy: SNOWPIERCER is adapted from a French comic book series with a very stark and singular style. You famously plan out your films shot for shot in preproduction. Did the wealth of existing visual materials change your storyboarding process?

Bong: It goes without saying that [Transperceneige illustrator] Jean-Marc Rochette’s work is extraordinary. He’s a phenomenal illustrator, and it’s because of his work, his cover art especially, that I ever stumbled upon the series in a Seoul comic shop.

The storyboards for the film, however, are linked inextricably to the screenplay. The graphic novel is our original starting point and it remains a source of inspiration, but the visual construction of the film is entirely drawn from the script.

Still, images from the books are omnipresent throughout the film. I think notably of the scene in the aquarium car. We see it very briefly in a few panels of the second graphic novel, but in the film we stretched it out and made it the site of a very important scene. The biggest visual influence from the books is felt most in décor and costumes. The way people are dressed and the look of the back of the train, these are very much taken from the first volume.

ScreenAnarchy: In your eyes, what is the central theme of the film? Does it have a message?

Bong: What draws us, I think, to science fiction, is that through the veil of a futuristic or fantastical world, we are better able to look introspectively at our own selves, and our own lives. What interested me about this story were the questions of free will it poses. What is it exactly that makes us human?

The main character, Curtis, leads a revolution from the back of the train to the front. Along the way you see the characters’ different ideas about what will happen when they get there. It’s difficult, because I don’t want to spoil too much, but through the characters’ conflicts, you can recognize contrasting ideas about the nature of real freedom and escape.

ScreenAnarchy: There are many characters in the film who talk about their “roles”, about the positions they occupy in society, and that’s reflected in part in the presentation of the film. While THE HOST had a naturalistic feeling, SNOWPIERCER is a lot more theatrical. What did you do to highlight this is new style, especially with regards to your previous films?

Bong: We never explicitly aimed for a more theatrical mise en scene, but I think its something that happened by itself.

Most importantly, it is tied to space. The world of the train is long and straight, and the characters move forward through it. Each new car they arrive in feels like a changing of the set, like on stage.

In The Host, the Han River, a symbol of Seoul, plays a major part. Memories of Murder takes place across the 1980’s, and the passage of time becomes a real character in the film. In Snowpiercer, for the first time there is not the same expanse of space and time. The characters come from many different countries, and are all stuck together on a never stopping train that runs in a loop. The blurring of the outside world is a natural consequence.

At the same time, when we were writing the screenplay, we tried to give the film a mythological, heightened quality. We wanted symbolic and archetypical characters, and the relationship between parent and child is one that we play upon a lot throughout. The dynamic between the good father and the evil father is one of the big themes of the film, and maybe that adds to its theatrical feeling.

There is one scene I find typically theatrical actually, when Curtis gives a long monologue about events that happened many years in the past. That scene gave me a lot of problems. One of producers insisted we cut to a flashback while the character is speaking, and show his story. I said, “Fuck no!” What’s most important was seeing him live that story in the present, not the past!

ScreenAnarchy: You mentioned your contribution to the anthology film TOKYO! before. In many ways it is similar to SNOWPIERCER Both films deal with the idea of imprisonment. Both feature characters with clear oppositions between the places they inhabit and the outside world. What is it about that theme appeals to you?

Bong: [Laughs] How long was the man stuck in his place for in Tokyo? Ten years or something?

ScreenAnarchy: It was definitely a while! Though it’s been a while since we saw it…

Bong: [Laughs again] Well, both films are really about escape. Like I was saying before, that idea really inspires me.

It’s something you will find in all of my films, come to think of it. Like in The Host, where the young girl is fighting to escape from the monster that’s holding her prisoner.

I think I will always go back to escape because it’s a simple and direct way to talk about freedom.

Ever since I was young, I’ve seen countless movies about the subject. The Great Escape and THX 1138 were my favorite movies growing up. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear really fascinated me when I was a kid. That is also another movie about escaping. They want to escape that terrible town they’ll do anything, so they get into that truck with the nitroglycerin. I would watch it again and again when it played on TV.

I love the theme of escape, always, in any dimension. Shaking Tokyo is a very personal story, and a Second World War movie is very different, but in the end, they are both about the same thing.

It's the same with Snowpiercer. Like THX 1148, it’s about the escape from a system. Here, the system is the train.

ScreenAnarchy: One of the films we were reminded of was THE WILD BUNCH. In both your and Peckinpah’s films, characters can go out at any moment. No one is ever safe. Where there ever any moments, when writing the screenplay or making the film, when you were ever really tortured about deciding who had to die or when?

Bong: When we were shooting the film, one of the actors in the cast came to me at lunch and said, “Director Bong, don’t you think I die too early? I want to go to the next part of the film! I have a lot of great ideas, I can do many interesting things!” They were just kidding, but in those periods I thought of Alfred Hitchcock, who killed off Janet Leigh after 40 minutes, and didn’t feel too bad.

A Korean director friend came to me and complained, “you had the chance to work with all these amazing actors, and you just killed them off like that. What’s the matter with you?”

I said, “Well, it’s just based on the script!”

ScreenAnarchy: This was a huge, huge production, and had one of the biggest budgets in Korean film history. What’s impressive about it is that for all the epic action, it very much keeps your voice. Did you run into many difficulties making a personal film on a blockbuster scale?

Bong: When making Snowpiercer, I never felt impeded from pursuing my particular vision of how it should be.

It’s an English language film, with international, mostly English speaking cast. If I had brought the project to an American studio, things would have probably gone differently. I think there would have been a lot of interference reaching all the way back to the scripting and pre-production phases. I think they would have been very annoying!

Thankfully, the production resources and financing for the film came from entirely Korean sources, and that made a huge differences in the freedom I had as a director.

I was also able to count on the support of Park Chan-wook. He was my producer on the film, but as a director in his own right, he understands the creative process, and he helped shield the film from the constraints these projects usually have. For that I feel extremely lucky.

ScreenAnarchy: The film is in large part about movement. The train is always moving forward, characters are always moving forward, and the camera parallels that, always moving forward alongside them. Does having a very deliberate and planned out formal aesthetic ever prevent you from improvising spur of the moment on set?

Bong: The preproduction period on this film was extremely long, and extremely meticulous. I spent a lot of time working on storyboarding and visual design, so by the time we got to the actual shooting, we were able to stick closely to what was detailed before.

But it would be wrong to think there was no improvisation. I simply do it a lot earlier. When I was making the storyboards, I would work directly from the script, and I would also improvise and play, letting my imagination run.

For example, at one point before a fight, a group of characters dip their weapons into a gutted fish. That fish was not in the script. I don’t know why, but when I was making the storyboards for that sequence it suddenly hit my mind, this strange moment of fish gutting, showing the blood on the tips of the axes. I love that shot.

ScreenAnarchy: We have time for one last question. I think just about everybody who reads and writes for ScreenAnarchy is going mad with anticipation. We don’t know yet when the film will be released in English territories, so until then, what films can people whet their appetites with, waiting for SNOWPIERCER?

Bong: Check the history of movies about trains. It’s just some kind of small subgenre.

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train, with its Akira Kurosawa script, is a great appetizer.

Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine fight on a train.

I strongly recommend John Frankenheimer’s The Train. Burt Lancaster battles Nazis on a train to protect works of art.

Europa, by Lars von Trier, for amazing images of the train.

I also really love Ingmar Bergman’s black and white film The Silence. It’s not a “train movie”, but the first half takes place on one, and the images are beautiful and really emblematic.