I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a love-hate relationship with genre in filmmaking, highlighting the tension between following and subverting genre expectations.
Bong Joon-Ho articulates a duality in his approach to genre: he appreciates the thrill and excitement that genres can bring to audiences, yet he also feels compelled to challenge and redefine those very expectations. This creative tension allows him to innovate within his work, making it both familiar and surprising for viewers, thus deepening their engagement with the narrative.
In practice
In a film workshop, discussing how to balance genre conventions in storytelling.
I think when one becomes very close to another person, it can mean loving and intimacy, but on the other hand, there's also the danger of one destructing another under the name of love. I think that is the scariest thing for me in various relationships.
People have said, 'Why don't you make your own company like Chan-wook Park has his own company,' but my head is full of writing and directing and I don't feel like I want to run a company. That's not really within my personality as well.
There is a lot of extreme emotion in Korean film. It's because there are a lot of extremes in Korean society.
No matter where I am working, I cannot make a film without 100% creative control and final cut. If there is such a guarantee, I can work anywhere.
You can't improvise without a skeletal structure; you can't just go in and start talking. This is a very misunderstood craft because no one else makes movies like this.
Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
Architecture depends on facts, but its real field of activity lies in the realm of the significance.
It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
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