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Five years ago, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho stood on the Oscars stage, stunned as his movie “Parasite” made history as the first non-English-language film to win best picture. The darkly satirical thriller about class struggle and deception had already won three other Academy Awards that night, for directing, original screenplay and international feature, cementing Bong’s status as one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation. In his acceptance speech, he joked about drinking until morning, and later, backstage, giddily made his trophies kiss like action figures.
With Hollywood at his feet, Bong could have done what so many international auteurs before him had done — taken a big-budget studio offer, signed onto a prestige drama packed with A-list stars or carefully plotted a film designed to bring him back to the Oscars. Fans and industry insiders speculated about what his next steps might be, wishcasting him into blockbuster franchises like “Star Wars” or James Bond.
Not that he hasn’t ever considered it, on his own terms.
“I’m not drawn to franchise films, but I did think at one point that I would like to do an ‘Alien’ film,” the 55-year-old Bong says over Zoom on a recent morning from New York, sitting beside his interpreter, Sharon Choi. He pauses, then adds with his trademark dry wit, “An ‘Alien’ musical.”
Robert Pattinson (and Robert Pattinson) in the movie “Mickey 17.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Instead of dancing xenomorphs, Bong made “Mickey 17,” in theaters Friday, a bleakly comedic sci-fi thriller set aboard a colonist spaceship bound for a distant icy planet. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a low-ranking crew member known as an “expendable,” who is relegated to take on the expedition’s deadliest tasks and dies over and over again, only to be “reprinted” each time with his old memories intact. Co-starring Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, the film — both an existential nightmare and absurdist comedy — taps into Bong’s signature themes of class, power and exploitation, examining a system that treats some lives as utterly disposable.
Not exactly the safest bet for a filmmaker fresh off an Oscar sweep, nor for Warner Bros., which is releasing the $115-million production, taking a big swing on Bong’s genre-hopping, bitingly satirical vision at a time when original sci-fi is becoming increasingly rare.
“For me, that is the point of making a sci-fi film,” Bong says, owning up to the gamble. “It seems to be a story about the future, about another planet, but it’s actually a portrait of us now and the reality around us, not of somewhere far out in space.”
Even Pattinson wasn’t initially sure what to make of “Mickey 17,” which is based on the 2022 sci-fi novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton. The actor had long admired Bong but never imagined working with him. “He was one of those untouchable directors,” he says by phone. When he heard Bong was taking meetings in L.A. about a “mysterious project,” Pattinson jumped at the chance. “Nothing like this was being made — especially at studios. So I thought, ‘OK, this is a big deal.’”
Then he read the script and was immediately struck by its wild tonal shifts. “You’re like, OK, how do you want this to be played?” he says. “Do you want this to be ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ or do you want it to be ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’?”
Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette in the movie “Mickey 17.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The answer, it turned out, was a little of both — and more besides. Beyond its sci-fi premise, “Mickey 17” explores power and exploitation, with Ruffalo’s grotesquely self-important (and more than slightly Trumpy) leader of the colonial voyage reigning as a wannabe cult figure, while his equally grotesque wife, played by Collette, fixates on making sauces out of the ice planet’s native creatures, known as “creepers.” As Mickey’s reprinted existence begins to disrupt the colony’s rigid hierarchy, their authority — and the very notion of what makes a person valuable — starts to unravel.
Bong didn’t lack opportunities after “Parasite” but, as he has throughout his 25-year filmmaking career, he followed his own distinctive path. Even as he navigated the Oscar campaign, he was already working on other projects, including one based on a true story about a person living in London that he ultimately abandoned due to ethical concerns about the actual people involved. He also began developing an animated film about deep-sea creatures, which he plans to complete next, before falling in love with Ashton’s novel and deciding to adapt it for the screen.
“What’s the saying after you win best picture?” says “Mickey 17” producer Dooho Choi, who also worked with Bong on his films “Okja” and “Snowpiercer.” “He got to make whatever he wanted, I suppose, and he chose to make ‘Mickey 17,’ which is full of ideas about the times we live in, yet in a fun, otherworldly way. Bong always follows his vision and creative instincts. He approached ‘Mickey 17’ exactly the same way as his other films.”
Bong had been as surprised as anyone by the success of “Parasite” — which earned a stunning $258 million at the global box office — but he didn’t let it alter his rhythm. “It was such an honor to win the awards — it was also quite surprising, because I had never really gone through something like that before,” he says. “But in terms of how I work, nothing really changed. I didn’t take any time off afterwards. I just kept on working.”
What’s the secret to Bong Joon Ho’s success? Keep it simple and channel your angst into your work.
That work ethic carried straight into “Mickey 17,” for which he once again constructed a world governed by its own warped, Bongian logic, sketching out the film through highly detailed storyboards before a single frame was shot. The “Mickey 17” universe is lived-in and tactile, filled with analog-looking technology and industrial grime inspired by films like Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Bong and his team designed the spaceship, the Drakkar, to feel both futuristic and oppressively bureaucratic, like a deep-space factory where human life is mechanized and survival is optimized at the cost of individuality.
“Despite the joys of designing a sci-fi film, the characters in this movie belong more in grimy back alleys than in a sleek spaceship,” says Bong, whose filmmaking process and influences will be explored in an upcoming exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opening later this month. “Instead of fancy, polished ships, we chose to go in more of the gritty, cargo-ship route.”
Beneath its retrofuturistic design, “Mickey 17” offers a pointed critique of how capitalism treats workers as replaceable — sometimes literally.
“They’re printing Mickey out so that he can die, and in that concept is all the comedy and tragedy of the film,” Bong says. “In real life, you see a lot of jobs that end in fatal accidents. When that happens, the worker leaves, another worker comes. The job remains the same — it’s just the people who get replaced. You can call it the capitalist tragedy of our times, and in this film it’s even more extreme.”
With “Parasite,” the academy gave best picture to the actual best picture. It also made history.
Yet for all its heavy, sometimes downright bleak themes, Bong considers “Mickey 17” his funniest film. “I think in real life, humans are just funny creatures,” he says. “No matter how harsh or depressing reality can get, people always manage to have a laugh. We’re kind of just these goofy, ridiculous creatures, always making the same mistakes.”
Pattinson, who plays multiple iterations of Mickey in the film, saw that mix of the weighty and the absurd firsthand each day on the set in England in late 2022. “Bong has this joyfulness to him, which does feel quite strange,” Pattinson says. “We were shooting this montage of grotesque deaths and he just had this lightness to his touch. There’s something so playful and almost childlike — it inspires a lot of trust in him.”
Bong isn’t convinced that our machines will ever outpace human control — or fallibility.
“Technology will always advance, but in the end, humans are the ones managing it, interpreting it, creating the ethical and political environment around it — and humans will always have this foolish side and will always make mistakes,” he says. “I feel like we’re going to see more and more of what happens in the film in our own reality.”
He feels the same about AI, which has loomed with increasing urgency over Hollywood in the years since “Parasite.” While some see it as a threat to human creativity, Bong regards it just as another source of material.
“We’ve seen from films like ‘The Terminator’ that AI can be a great source of drama and we can create a lot of stories around it,” he says. “I honestly don’t think AI programs will write a fun story about themselves and how s— AI can be. I feel like I am a better writer for those stories.”
Even Pattinson could sense the weight and difficulty of what Bong was trying to pull off. “I just remember him saying, when he was in the edit, ‘I’m trying to land a 747 on an inch-wide runway,’ ” Pattinson recalls with a laugh. “He’s literally the only director who could have made something like this. It’s sort of a unicorn.”
Still, Bong shrugs off the notion that he ever agonized over the risks involved in making a film like “Mickey 17.”
“I feel bad for the producers and the marketing team for saying this — I know they have a very hard job,” he says. “But once I find a particular story or character or situation fascinating, I just go ahead and I create a movie based on it. I really don’t think about the risks. Maybe I can’t.”
