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.
Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.
How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it
Music is one of the noblest callings I can think of. It's the highest of all the art forms to me. For example, if my kid said to me, 'I want to give it all up,' whatever it is that they're doing, 'and I want to take my saxophone and go out,' I would say, 'May God go with you. This is a great and noble thing that you're doing.'
And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.
The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
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