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Mother

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Hye-ja is a single mom to 27-year-old Do-joon. Her son is her raison d’être. Though an adult in years, Do-joon is naïve and dependent on his mother, and a constant source of anxiety, often behaving in ways that are foolish or simply dangerous.

Opens March 12, 2010

Interview with Director Bong Joon-ho

 

(Q): This lead actress, who is well known. What inspired you to cast her and write this film?
 
(Bong Joon-ho): Like you said, this is a very famous actress in Korea; she’s been acting for about 40 years. But the main reason that I wanted to make this film was because I had my own strange sense about her. Whenever I saw her in the things that she was in I felt that this person could be a very crazy person in real life, and I wanted to portray a kind of hysteric, crazy, kind of mother. And that’s where it started off.

I think as an actor, to be crazy is something that’s a very good quality. To be hysterical about something I think is something that will point them in a different direction that shows you something you haven’t seen before. Specifically in her case, she’s been portraying very stereotypical, loving mothers, so she never had to do something like this and I think there’s a different side of her that we get in contact with through this.

(Q): Because she’s famous for her motherhood roles, were you trying to subvert that genre of the Korean family drama that you see in TV with your film? Were you trying to subvert that genre just like you subverted the monster film with “The Host” and add your own unique spin?

(Bong Joon-ho): If you could count the genre of those kinds of family dramas as TV as its own genre, yes, I did want to subvert that and kind of play with that notion. I think it was interesting for me because the actress has been portraying this very role that she’s been playing for all this time. To have that actress subvert her own self and play with that and work with that was an interesting idea that I wanted to play with.

(Q): Were you concerned about casting Won Bin? Because he did some military service, and he hasn't been acting in a film for 5 years? 

(Bong Joon-ho): Unlike the role of the mother, who I was very set on from the very beginning, the son’s role I was thinking about and wondering who to cast while I was writing the script. It wasn’t until it was suggested by an acquaintance of mine that Won Bin might be a good fit because he was telling me that despite his pretty boy image in his previous films and the dramas that he’s been in, he was actually a very kind of country bumpkin kind of person when you get to know him in real life. He’s from the countryside and he’s a bit naive about it.

So I got curious, and when I had the chance to meet him I found out that he was very much in touch with the character and the lifestyle that the character leads. He was in the same area and he understood the mood and the sensibilities of living in those places, and there were many things that tied into the character. It was a very good fit for him. The two actors’ eyes – Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin – there was something very similar in both of them, in the light of their eyes, that kind of ties the two characters together.

(Q): Was there some sort of a political statement you were trying to make in regards to the police of that community and how they treated the son?

(Bong Joon-ho): It’s true that there is a bit of that in “Mother,” but it’s very much less so than in my previous films. I’d say, “With Memories of Murder,” that was trying to invoke a very specific sense of the ‘80s Korea and society of that time, and with “Host” I was trying to poke into the sensibilities and the paradoxes of American society and Korean society of more modern times. But this film is more about the relationship between the son and mother, but there are still some elements.

The very fact that she becomes her own detective because the cops and even the lawyer are not being very responsive, that simple fact alone I think says a bit about what kind of stance I’m taking and what kind of stance she’s taking in that sense.

(Q): Could you talk about the collaboration of working with the screenwriter Park Eun-kyo? She’s actually a female screenwriter so was she hired for you to have a female perspective so you could balance it out?

(Bong Joon-ho): Park Eun-kyo is of course a woman, but she also had the same kind of background as Won Bin. She’s come from the countryside and she’s a local of the region that we were shooting. She’s not a mother, she doesn’t have a child of her own or a family of her own yet, but I definitely consulted her because there were also the obvious senses that she brings as a woman.

She also functioned as an assistant director on this film for portions. There are always co-writers that I work with in throughout my films, specifically, for example, when I go on lectures at colleges or universities, or when I encounter some student work that is interesting for me. I keep my eye open for that, and when I see those I look forward to having the chance to work with them. For example, with “Memories of Murder,” it was a male student that I found, and this one is obviously a woman.
 
(Q): What was the toughest scene to direct in the film? I’ve noticed that you hadn’t done a sex scene yet, and the sex scene in this film is one of my favorite scenes. It was so tense, so taught. Can you talk about what was the toughest moment for you in directing the film?
 
(Bong Joon-ho): As you’ve said, that sex scene was particularly difficult because, as you said, I didn’t have a sex scene before and this was my first time doing one. It was very difficult and a challenge for me and I really wanted to get it right. But on the movie as a whole, that last scene of her dancing on that bus was actually a very big challenge. You could also say that the whole movie is running to that scene, it’s the scene that is essential and it’s something that we can’t replace with a different kind of scene.

We were running towards that scene and thankfully we had good fortune and prepared enough and it came out very much as I wanted it to. When I was writing the script for “Mother” in 2004, that scene was the scene that was there from the very beginning and it had to be shot and it had to be made possible.

Because the sunlight passes through the bus windows and comes into the camera, I really wanted to get that right, I really did not want to use any CGI; there’s no CGI in that section. We had to get the film right, the angle of the sun right, there had to be no buildings, we had to have the car coming at the same speed as the bus, so there were a lot of calculations that we had to make.
 
(Q): You’re dealing with a son who is mentally ill. Normally in films whenever there’s a mentally ill character there’s the leaning to make him sympathetic and not the bad guy. This one is. How do you know when you’ve got a character and you’re writing him and he’s mentally ill that you’ve gone too far? That he’s playing it to crazy, how do you rein that in and how do you know in some of your humor, like the scene where they’re reenacting the crime, when you’ve gone too far?

(Bong Joon-ho): I must have a very perverse mind or something. Strangely enough, dealing with this kind of character is actually easy and comfortable for me; it’s not too foreign. Rather than simply to entice sympathy or portray him in a cruel manner, I think what’s more important with this character is that the ambiguous quality about him, that ultimately we don’t know what this son really is. As the film progresses, we learn more and more that this person is someone we can’t figure out.

There are a multitude of things that we come in contact through him – the fear, and the frustration, and the horror that he might be – and those are the qualities that we don’t completely get to have a sense of. And more importantly, this movie is from the perspective of the mother as she looks and takes care of and is concerned with her son. But I think the ultimate tragedy is that even she, for someone that was so devoted and so into the existence of her son, even she can’t figure out who this person really is, even though he is her son. That’s the ultimate tragedy.
 
(Q): Can you talk about the son and the mother’s bond or relationship? Has a lot changed between when you were growing up and now?

 (Bong Joon-ho): Personally, when I look at Korean society as a whole, I don’t think much has changed between the relationship of a son and his mother. Because that relationship is such a strong and still a distinctive character in our society, I think you could almost say that it’s to the point of a strange kind of lovers’ relationship beyond the offspring and parent relationship. Maybe a strange kind of romantic relationship; there’s some strange relationship in that way. But I do think the relationships between fathers and sons have changed a lot more.

(Q): How has that changed?

(Bong Joon-ho): Of course with fathers in these days I think a lot of their place and power has changed in greater society. When you consider that Korea was mainly a Confusion society for a long time, and a paternal society, I think that kind of power and that kind of relationship has changed.

But a mother’s relationship with her son is something that’s very primal. They’ve been in the mother’s belly inside, there’s something that speaks to that, and that relationship is something that is still very primal and still unchangeable, and I think that’s why there’s a difference there.

(Q): Do you have any filmmakers that you draw from or learn from? Or some that have instilled in you certain techniques that you use now?

 (Bong Joon-ho): I haven’t studied or tried to emulate any specific directors, but I do have many directors that I like and respect, and I think if that’s the case you tend to have similarities in your working style. There are filmmakers that I like.

(Q): Who are they?
 
 (Bong Joon-ho): There’s a Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who I believe approaches some very hidden aspects of human instincts and basic emotional responses. There’s a Korean filmmaker from the ‘60s and ‘70s, a master filmmaker called Kim Ki-young. Recently at Cannes Film Festival Scorsese had a restored print of “The Housemaid,” which was directed by this guy.

I think Kim Ki-young has a very unique style and in some ways a grotesque style of filmmaking. It might not be very big or auteurish kind of filmmaking, but I also like ‘70s films from America; the studio films that were mainly made possible by big producers from that era. I think they carried their own power and aura that’s very interesting; even popular box-office hits from those studios are some things that I enjoy.
 
(Q): How do you hope that Americans will react to “Mother”? And what are your thoughts in general about Asian filmmakers crossing over in the Hollywood realm? Would you be interested in that if it were proposed to you? Has anyone approached you to remake “The Host” for the United States?

 (Bong Joon-ho): I think the characters of “Mothers” are very unique to each person that will encounter them. Even in Korea, where it was made, audiences there had their own views and their own reactions. I think that will be the same wherever this film goes because a mother is a very universal person to everyone, and I really can’t expect anything. Of course there are lots of movies being remade from Asia and “The Host” obviously is another one and it is being remade by Hollywood.

But I think more importantly the question for us is what kind of new and fresh things can we come up with? In Korea, where I made this film and my other film, it’s obviously a much smaller industry and they give more control to the directors. But it also makes me question, given the opportunity to come here, would I have that same kind of control that I’ve had with my own films.

I’m actually not tied to that remake at all, I have no hand in it, and I think it’s more interesting when a remake is completely different from the source material. I hope that I can see some fresh things in the remake and I’m hands-off in that.
 
(Q): Of course everyone is going to wonder, what, if anything, reflects your relationship with your own mother?

 (Bong Joon-ho): There are very small bits and pieces of her in this film. My mom was a somewhat hysteric person; mainly she worried a lot about her offspring. Last year she watched the screening of this film and this is a movie that we don’t really talk about when we see each other. It’s something that we don’t bring up. [laughter]
 
(Q): Does your family ever make comments about your prior films? Are they your main film critics?

(Bong Joon-ho): Of course my wife is the first reader of the script and she is probably the cruelest critic. She’s the one that will be very cold in saying what she thinks about a film. “Your script sucks!” Very direct things about my films. And although I don’t live with the other family members, when we come together they do say things. For my dad in particular, “Barking Dogs” was not his favorite because he was actually a university teacher, and maybe that’s why he didn’t like the film so much.

(Q): What are the last three films you’ve seen?

(Bong Joon-ho): “Avatar,” in 3D. I’ve bought so many DVDs lately. [something about French filmmakers], and a newly restored print of “How Green Was My Valley” at Cinematheque. And I introduced the film “Deliverance” at Cinematheque.

(Q): What are you working on next?

 (Bong Joon-ho): I’m working on the script for an adaptation of a French sci-fi graphic novel. I encountered it about five years ago in a bookstore by chance and I’ve been so engrossed in it that I wanted to make a film. 3D, since “Avatar” is a very hotly debated topic amongst us in the industry whenever we meet, and it’s kind of a problem whether we do it or whether we don’t for a small industry like Korea.

End.