The Host

It's not surprising that 'The Host' had quickly become the highest grossing film in its home country of South Korea, far surpassing the previous record holder by selling over eight million ticket sales in just a matter of weeks. It's a masterful excursion that treads that fine line between a B-grade monster movie of the 50's and any of Stephen King's best works. It's also a bit John Carpenter with the omnipresent lurking creature...

I was lucky enough to be able to spend time with the film's director Bong Joon-ho during his recent visit to Adelaide, and despite having already answered countless other questions from around the world, I sensed that his own excitement concerning his creation has yet to be quelled. We began by discussing the film's initial environmental message.

"Yes, it can be still seen as an environmental movie because the incident happened because the Americans ordered the Korean mortician to tip the chemicals out into the river," he suggests, "and yes, there also a lot of political satire," he also readily concedes. "The Americans created this disaster because of lies, just like they did with the weapons of mass destruction and when [they try to kill the monster] with Agent Yellow, that straight away reminds you of what happened during the Vietnam War," he explains of the plot of 'The Host'. But like everything in the movie, you soon realise that Bong did not create it entirely as an opportunity to attack US foreign policy.

"I don't think that will create too much of a problem when I take this to the American market," he says confidently, "because an interesting thing happened last year when I attended the AFI film festival; there's was one reporter from the 'LA Times', and he kept asking questions about the political motives of this film and he took a completely political approach. You know? 'What was I trying to say about the relationship between North Korea and America?' But because Americans aren't all that familiar with either South Korean or North Korean films we're probably standing on equal ground. North Korea hasn't made that many feature films and I wonder if there's a well established film industry over there. And there's also some other South Korean directors who are gaining popularity in foreign countries, so that will help also."

All political considerations aside, on the aesthetic level the film is absolutely stunning. "There was only one designer," he tells me of the monster's development, "and his name was Jang Hee-chul and he works designing Korean video games. There's a lot of complexities and with the most important details shown with the close ups of the mouth, especially when the monster has to swallow or when they pull the little girl out, I just provided two or three basic requests; like, with Godzilla he's so large that there's no reality so I wanted my monster to be about the size of a real animal, like a small elephant. And another thing was she had to be able to move the way I wanted her to. Because she lived in the Han River she had to be able to do those acrobatic moves under the bridge."

And there's an Australian connection to be considered, with the animaltronics made by John Cox's Creature Workshop ('Babe', 'Scooby Doo', and those annoying Bundy Rum ads). "The conversion rate was more favourable toward the Australian dollar than the American," Bong laughs at this part of his decision making process, "but because the monster was made more believable the actor's had to be more believable. I think that's very important too, because let's say we created this wonderful monster using animaltronics or whatever, if when the actors are looking straight into the monster and they don't have a believable expression on their faces then it's not going to work, so their both of their crafts really helped the film.

"Another reason we could successfully finish this movie within the given budget was because we also didn't have a lot of location changes. If this was Hollywood, for the sewer scenes they would've created them in the studio. Except for the monster's lair, which we built in the studio, we actually had to really go into the sewers and put up with all the smells, so that was horrible for everyone." Maybe so, but the realistic final effect is just one other reason why I thought this is the best monster movie made for a long, long time.

Steve Jones

'The Host' is now screening