From Monsters to Mothers

"The Host" director Bong Joon-ho on his new murder mystery "Mother" and why Korean moms make tough in-laws.

You’ve cited the American films of the ’70s as an inspiration for the look of “Mother.” How did you first have access to them?

When I was a kid, it was easy to experience 1970s American cinema in the theater or especially on television. I saw many wonderful ’70s American movies by television — Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” many violent Sam Peckinpah movies and my favorite, “Marathon Man,” the John Schlesinger movie. The movies were very popular, but at the same time, they were movies with a very strong narrative, good characters and their own dignity and beauty. For example, a movie like Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” I was fascinated by the mood and the feeling — but it was on television, so many of the violent shots were censored. I imagined again and again what kind of shots were cut out from the film.

When I was in university, I was fascinated with ’70s Claude Chabrol crime dramas, it was all very influential to me, and when I was in middle school and high school, I was also a big fan of crime novels by Ed McBain, William Irish, Francis Iles and Raymond Chandler, so this kind of dark crime story is very, very familiar to me.

A lot of the directors and authors you mentioned are rebellious in nature and I’ve noticed police haven’t been treated so well in your films. Do you consider yourself a political filmmaker?

In “Memories of Murder” and “The Host,” there are many criticisms about Korean society and [those films can also be] satirical about Korean society or the system itself or, in “The Host,” the United States. But “Mother” is a little bit different. Of course, there is a stupid policeman and some very bad lawyers. (laughs) But it’s just in the background. As I mentioned before, I strongly focused on the mother — this was very personal. But in Korean society, it’s hard to differentiate between the individual and the society. When you focus on going into the depths of an individual character, naturally you make a comment about the society itself. I think it’s much more intertwined than what you see in Western society.

I’m most interested in human nature in general and what it means to be human. Even when I made the film “Shaking Tokyo” in [the 2008 anthology film] “Tokyo!,” it was about exploring the lonely life of this man living alone, his nature and his character. The fact that it was set in Japanese society with Japanese characters, that wasn’t a big deal at all. I was focusing on the human side.

And this one, you made a point of not naming where the film is set.

Yes, that was quite intentional. We can compare that to “Memories of Murder” because the mood and the feeling of that age — the 1980s — is very important. At the same time, [it was important to have the feel of] the city of the murders like San Francisco for “Zodiac,” the city of London for “From Hell.” But “Mother” is totally different. I intentionally erased the specific locality, so even Korean audiences could not recognize the location when watching the movie. That’s because I focused on the characters.

“Mother” opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 12th before expanding into limited release on March 19th.

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