Two decades ago, in a 2006 interview with a Korean newspaper, Bong Joon-ho made a surprising statement about his then-new horror movie, The Host. The director, who would go on to make Parasite, Snowpiercer, and Mickey 17, revealed that the mutated monster from The Host was based on an actual creature he'd spotted in Seoul’s Han River, 19 years earlier. "I don't know exactly what it was," Bong said at the time.
"What is clear is that it was a living creature, and it wasn't human. Its size was probably similar to a monster from a movie." I came across this bizarre detail while doing research on The Host for an interview with Bong himself. (The film turns 20 this year and is celebrating with a 4K remaster and a return to theaters.) So when I get on a Zoom call with the director, it's one of the first things I ask about. "Attending high school comes with a lot of pressure," Bong tells Polygon.
"So that's maybe what led to that kind of a delusion." OK, mystery solved. Bong Joon-ho didn't actually see a mutated river monster when he was in high school, but he did imagine one under the pressure of college-placement exams. (His youthful obsession with another famous monster might have contributed, too, but we'll get to that in a minute.) Read on as Bong answers six of our most pressing questions about The Host, while also teasing his upcoming animated feature, Ally, which shares a surprising connection with the 20-year-old monster movie. Ahead of the interview, I received a digital copy of the remaster and watched a few of my favorite scenes.
This new version of The Host looks amazing, especially the CGI used to create the film's iconic monster. I wondered if perhaps Bong and his team had done some touch-ups on the creature, especially since the original film had a famously small budget. But according to the director, no specific changes were made to the film.
"Our overall goal in the restoration was to recreate that feeling of watching a 35-millimeter print, the highest quality print on the first day of release," Bong says. "Of course, it was a digital restoration, but that was our goal to use the digital restoration to create that film look of watching the film on a high quality print for the first time. There wasn't anything that we changed digitally." Again, the answer is no, but Bong's full response reveals even more about the early inspirations for what would eventually become The Host.
"Attending a Korean high school comes with a lot of pressure," he says. So I must have been in a pretty fragile mental state back then, where I was having some sort of delusion." That said, Bong points to two other factors that might explain why he thought he saw a monster back then — and how we wound up with a movie like The Host in the first place. "What was not a delusion were two facts," he says.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
