Nearly six years after the worldwide success of Parasite—and four Oscar wins—South Korean director Bong Joon Ho has followed up with Mickey 17, an ep
Nearly six years after the worldwide success of Parasite—and four Oscar wins—South Korean director Bong Joon Ho has followed up with Mickey 17, an epic sci-fi satire in which Robert Pattinson dies over and over again. Bong wrote, produced, and helmed the movie, and he admits he’s feeling pressure. He’s now completed eight films in his 25-year career but says he’s never grown accustomed to the nerves that come with releasing a fresh project. It’s a trait he shares with Pattinson’s character, Mickey, when he starts every fresh life.
“Mickey repeatedly says he always gets scared despite how many times he’s died,” Bong says. “It’s similar for me. Every time I release a new film, I get scared and worried. There’s a lot of anxiety. Of course, it’s fun and exciting, but it’s always a mix of emotions.”
Bong makes this charming revelation while sitting next to his longtime interpreter, Sharon Choi, on a recent morning in New York. The 55-year-old director speaks English well but prefers Choi’s precision and nuance for his answers. I thank him for the forthright answer about his somewhat agitated mental state at the moment and tell him he’s relatable. “I’m such a fucking nerdy film geek!” he says, suddenly switching to English for added effect. I tell him he’s not just a cinephile, but a prestigious, widely beloved filmmaker. “Does my life seem like that?” he says. “No, no. I’m worried about the release of the film. The countdown has begun.”
Mickey 17, is a dim, comedic, science fiction thriller set aboard a colonist spaceship bound for a distant icy planet inhabited by fantastical creatures. Based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, the movie centers around Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), an average, befuddled, and heavily indebted man who joins an intergalactic expedition as a low-ranking expendable—a worker doomed to harsh labor until death, only to be cloned over and over again through a reprinting technology with his elderly memories intact, and sent straight back to work. This plot of the book immediately caught Bong’s attention. “What would it feel like to get printed all the time?” he says. “I put myself in their shoes and think about what it’s like. Then you sense all these emotions associated with that experience.” He adds, “A nice, unfortunate guy who keeps getting printed out so that he can die—that in itself breaks your heart. That feeling was so important to me.”
With Mickey 17, Bong taps into his signature themes of class, power, and exploitation, examining a hierarchical society that often treats workers as if they’re literally disposable. “I don’t have a particular political or ethical agenda—it’s more of a matter of personal taste and what I’m biologically drawn to,” he says. “I’m not interested in superheroes like Tony Stark in the Marvel movies. He’s so cool and sexy, but I’m more interested in people who aren’t that smart, and how they are faced with a mission that they can’t really handle. I think true human drama comes out of that set up.”
Pattinson was instantly struck by Bong’s bitingly satirical tone. “He’s extremely fearless and totally idiosyncratic, and he touches on deeply personal and emotional aspects of the human experience,” he tells me by email. “I’ve never worked with a director who has Bong’s unique style. He has an incredibly powerful aura, is systematic, and executes his vision flawlessly, and just makes you see things differently. That’s always the kind of director I want to work with.”
Bong’s unique storytelling has propelled him to mainstream stardom. At the 2020 Academy Awards, his Korean-language thriller Parasite picked up the trophies for director, original screenplay, and international feature film prize, and then made history as the first non-English language film to win the Oscar for best picture. “It was such an honor to win the awards,” Bong says. What he remembers the most about that momentous night, though, was feeling fatigued and longing to see his Norwich terrier. “I was so exhausted,” he says in English. “It was the very last day of the whole campaign. I was, like, ‘Let’s hurry up and go home! I want to go rest with my Zzuni.’”
From Warner Bros/ Everett Collection.
He recalls arriving home in Seoul a few days after the ceremony and watching on YouTube the moment he won the original screenplay award. As his name was announced, the camera had captured Sandra Oh suddenly jumping out of her seat and applauding enthusiastically. “I’ve never met her and she looked like she was going to cry,” he says. “Seeing her cheering so passionately for me made me really emotional. I got choked up, and that’s one of my lasting memories.”
Following the Oscars, Bong says “nothing really changed,” and his work and lifestyle remained the same. He didn’t take any time off and continued on working on various projects, including Mickey 17 and an animated film about deep-sea creatures, which he plans to finish next. The majority of the cast of Parasite remained busy and went on to star in highly popular and acclaimed Korean dramas that were featured on Netflix. But, in December 2023, beloved movie and TV star Lee Sun-kyun, who played the patriarch of the wealthy Park family in Parasite, died from an apparent suicide at the age of 48. Lee was under investigation for alleged recreational drug exploit, which is illegal in Korea. Reportedly, he had submitted to multiple police interrogations for months and was questioned for 19 hours the weekend before his death. Bong and other Korean artists made an unprecedented display of support by holding a press conference to publicly inquire about how the police and media had handled the prolific actor’s death.
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