Fourteen years ago, a behemoth invaded Cannes. A Korean movie called The Host was premiering at the festival sidebar known as the Director's Fortnight. Predictably, the old Cannes hands were aghast that a film about a man trying to save his daughter from the clutches of a carnivorous sea monster had been invited, yet the line was enormous and snaked out onto the Croisette. I'd been a fan of the director's previous, non-monster movies and joined it. There was something different about this crowd. Excitable local hausfraus were in line, not just the usual film nerds. And in 10 years of attending the festival as a critic and as a viewer, I'd never witnessed such spontaneous cheering during a film, nor such an unforced ovation. Even the director himself seemed like an entirely new sort of person on the scene—a tall, diffident-looking man who boldly admitted to making horror movies, and who was already becoming known to anglophone fans as simply "Bong."



Fast-forward 14 years. In 2019, Bong's new film, a genre-fluid thriller about a poor family that insinuates itself into the domestic life of a wealthy family, premiered at Cannes. I wasn't at the festival this time, but as soon as the film ended, I got an emoji-laden text from a friend, the actor Tilda Swinton: "Parasite is a masterpiece!" Swinton's words were borne out quickly. Parasite took home the Palme d'Or and is arguably the most popular winner of the festival's top prize since 1994's Pulp Fiction.

Things have changed for Bong Joon Ho. Or perhaps it's the other way around: Bong Joon Ho changed things.

'They made my clothes too small."

Bong's at the Smashbox studios in Culver City, and it seems his sizes did not translate perfectly from Korean, which amuses him. He totters around in a comical stiff-armed, stiff-legged walk, the back of his velvet suit jacket unstitched down the middle and split open. I'm not sure if anyone has attempted to tame the signature bird's nest atop his head, which might best be called a Bongfro. Between setups, the director sips his black coffee. Finally he's asked to lie back in a deck chair before a faux blue sky.

"We'll have to be careful about this," whispers his publicist, Mara Buxbaum. "it makes him look very Hollywood, and he's so not about that."

She needn't worry. Recumbent and with his shades on, Bong resembles a man who's dozed off on a chaise while waiting for his wife at Ikea. There's nothing outwardly "showbiz " about him. And this, really, has been his superpower.

Bong is a disrupter. That's a tired word now, co-opted by the tech and streaming worlds, but he's the real walking, talking deal. He's written his own rules, disproved the conventional wisdom that Americans won't embrace subtitled movies, and turned a Seoul-set class warfare comedy-thriller into a staggering hit: Parasite has already earned $25 million in the U.S., making it by far the highest-grossing foreign-language film of last year, and more than $132 million worldwide. A limited series is even in the works at HBO. Bong has inspired all this by staying true to his idiosyncratic self.

This is the year the Academy Award formerly known as "best foreign language film" has been renamed "best international feature film." Parasite has helped the Oscars evolve even further (as Roma did last year) by snagging six nominations, including not just best international film but best picture, best director, best original screenplay, best production design, and best editing. No feature film from South Korea has ever been nominated in any of these categories. Asked about the pressure—our interview takes place before the nominations are announced—Bong says, "I don't create movies for the country. I barely think about the concept of countries and borders. I just really pursue my own personal pursuits." Korean American actor Steven Yeun, a star in Bong's Okja (2017), agrees that the director's strength is his singularity: "I think this moment transcends any cultural boundaries. For Bong to see the fruits of his labor here in the States speaks more to me about the world and how we're all changing."

Yet, surely Bong feels the enormous force of South Korea's hopes behind him? I remember the rock star's greeting he got when he returned with the Palme, as well as his country's over-the-top rooting for figure skater Kim Yuna to bring home gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics (which she did). "I definitely do feel the pressure to have good results from the Oscars," Bong says, carefully. But there are more immediate things on his mind. His clothes are too tight.

The moment the photo shoot is over, Bong does his mummy walk to the changing room and returns in a smart but comfy gray suit. "Much better," he smiles, bending his arms. "Let's go."

We'd planned on checking out some of the Jazz Age movie palaces in downtown Los Angeles, but the winter drizzle has turned into a deluge and, as in the climax of Parasite, storms have a way of dissolving even the best-laid plans. Instead, we chat over lunch at Simonette in Culver City, which turns out to be just as fun because, while it pours outside, this master of terror is leaning in to confess his own fears: He is "very, very scared" of going on Jimmy Fallon. I try not to laugh—he knows it's silly too—because in person, the 50-year-old auteur has the vibe of a zen panda.

"I don't think people around me can feel it, but I do have a lot of anxiety," he elaborates through his interpreter, Sharon Choi. (Bong's English is very good, but he prefers her precision for about half of his answers.) At times, he says, "I feel like a baseball player who's forced to go up on the mound."



Even in Korea, where he is a household name, Bong has declined to appear on talk shows, preferring radio. But this is The Tonight Show, conduit to mainstream America, so he's catching the red-eye to New York to record the segment. And, on top of nerves, I can hear the exhaustion talking. Bong says he hasn't taken a vacation since his feature-film debut, the dark comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000, and he's made six feature-length movies since. He's been on the road promoting Parasite for months now, and despite his attempts at re-creating "daily family life" by having his wife of 24 years accompany him at times, he's missing the other lady in his life.

"She has a very human face," Bong says, switching to English. He scrolls through hundreds of cell phone photos of his adorable Norwich terrier, Zzuni. Once awards season is over, Bong hopes to take a month off—"or hopefully a year''—and go "maybe to the South Pole. I love cold climates, so I would love to go somewhere cold. Just me and Zzuni."

Growing up near a U.S. military base in Daegu, South Korea, Bong moved to Seoul at age nine. The youngest of four children, he was reared on Hollywood Westerns and genre films he caught on TV. He began drawing his own comics as a child and dreamed of being a comic artist, later becoming influenced by Taiyo Matsumoto's manga Tekkonkinkreet and the wordless horror stories of graphic artist Thomas Ott.

It's easy now to forget that South Korea was under a military dictatorship until the late '80s, with foreign travel and exchange restricted. As a student at Seoul's Yonsei University, a hotbed of the democracy movement, Bong joined a film club called the Yellow Door, which soon consumed him more than his sociology degree. It was at this club in 1992 that he met his "film geek" wife. "She's my first reader," he says. "I'm so scared whenever I finish a script and show it to her." And it was also at the club where his passion turned away from comics.

Bong and his fellow cinephiles sought out VHS tapes of foreign films like those of Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, filmmakers who showed them there was a path, even in Asia, to make artistic movies that weren't purely escapist pap. To this day, his personal tastes skew toward art: His "all-time favorite film" is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's atmospheric art-horror Cure, and his favorite Criterion box set is Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. He calls the slowtracking shot of Michelle Williams and a dog at the start of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy "one of the most beautiful opening scenes in the history of the movies."

I'd first heard about Bong as a young film critic covering Korea's Pusan International Film Festival for a fledgling news site in 2000. The late Cannes scout Pierre Rissient had been touting Barking Dogs Never Bite as one to watch, but I had no idea what a watershed year that would turn out to be for Korean cinema. I'd never been to that southern port city and figured it was normal to see thousands of excitable high schoolers crowding screenings and clogging theater lobbies, a younger demographic of fandom than I'd expected. But oh, these kids knew something was happening.

Besides Bong's, that year saw first (or early) films by a who's who of Korean film: Park Chan-wook (later known for Oldboy), Hong Sang-soo (the Cannes darling who's since made two films with Isabelle Huppert), Kim Jee-woon (later known for A Tale of Two Sisters), and Lee Chang-dong (the master behind last year's awards contender Burning), among others. The closest analogue to this flowering of highly original Korean filmmakers would be the 1970s generation of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Ashby, Friedkin, et al.

Just 31 then, Bong was the youngest of this cohort. "I think there was something in the water," he says, half-joking. We were a very lucky generation. At that time, the studios were a little innocent. There were many aggressive producers who protected filmmakers."

He speaks fondly about his cohort of cinephile directors and how they'd gather to devour DVD special features at Kim Jee-woon's home because "he had a great home theater system." This type of camaraderie still means the world to him. "I'm actually very anxious 24 hours a day," he says, after I've seen him drink three cups of black coffee. "A psychiatrist actually told me that I have severe anxiety, and I have severe compulsive tendencies to the point where it would be impossible for me to have a social life. But thanks to filmmaking, I've been able to survive."

When he's not watching or thinking about movies, Bong "obsessively" draws all the storyboards to his movies himself: "When I go on set without a storyboard, I feel like I'm in central station in only my underwear." After shooting, he is involved in every aspect of postproduction and most savors the very final task: "sound mixing." He speaks those words with the kind of sighing joy others might reserve for "Oahu" or "Bali."

This dedication to detail will not surprise anyone who's admired the elegant police-investigation tableaux in Memories of Murder (2003); the alert, protective POV of the middle-aged mother in Mother (2009), and the perfectly calibrated sequences in his most recent films, culminating in Parasite's spring-loaded, Rube Goldbergian comic set pieces. Parasite is a cat-and-mouse ballet in an architectural wonder of a house, all of it leading to a shocking, blood-soaked finale.

But what's singular about Bong's oeuvre is that he's managed to give us, in film after film, unvarnished portraits of workaday—often clumsy, even unwise—Koreans thrust into situations requiring ingenuity and risk. His heroes are, in fact, antiheroes; they get drunk, vomit, masturbate, ugly-cry, eat junk food, and make fatal mistakes. Even the beloved super-pig in his creature feature Okja (2017) farts and belches. Furthermore, Bong's moral universe is deliberately murky, with the struggling Kim family at the center of Parasite essentially fraudsters, a far cry from the unimpeachable protagonists in, say, some of Spielberg's best-loved movies. " I think Koreans have a different way of expressing themselves` and their emotions, and I think the word quirky is the best way to describe it," says Bong. "A lot of the families in my films are sort of in a big mess. They malfunction as a family. I feel the best when I write characters like that."

That he has succeeded in persuading the world to root for his flawed characters is a testament to his propulsive storytelling—and his magician's instinct for tone-shifting sleight of hand. Bong's films may start goofy, turn scary, even tragic, then triple-axel back to humor and warmth with balletic ease. His metier is high-wire suspense, and that relies, as magicians know, on meticulous attention to craft. Which brings us back to the anxiety that keeps him up at night.

"I have severe anxiety and compulsive tendencies, but thanks to filmmaking, I've been able to survive."

Wouldn't taking on a big studio movie or a superhero franchise with all the builtin machinery help allay worries? "No," Bong says, with an emphatic laugh, "it would make me much, much, much more anxious. If I do something like that, I think I will suffocate to death." He wants, however, to make clear that this is about personal preference rather than a statement about studio intervention: "For me to feel safe, I have to start the project, build everything up, one by one, and see it to the complete finish. I really admire directors who can easily do superhero movies and big-budget films."

Not that Bong doesn't fantasize about big productions. His dream American project is a moody noir in the vein of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, set along the U.S. border with Mexico, and he'd love to work with Jack Nicholson, an icon of his childhood ("no matter [what] film he's in, he manages to maintain this aura that he has"). Another dream, he says, would be a big actioner akin to The Great Escape, a childhood favorite: "I remember having cold sweats all over my body while watching it. It's a story about someone escaping the prison camps during World War II, but there's a strange sense of romance in that film, and I would love to do something like that."

Swinton has starred in two of Bong's films—so far. She may seem like an unlikely muse, but having spent time with both, the match seems perfect. They share a committed sense of play and a healthy disregard for categories. Bong says their families have become close—his son is around the age of her twins—and he's enjoyed visiting her home in the Scottish Highlands, with her "five puppies and 12 chickens," and being fed her "delicious" homemade haggis.

Bong first met Swinton over breakfast in Cannes in 2011 while he was heading the Camera d'Or jury (which judges first films) and she was in competition with We Need to Talk About Kevin. He'd been a fan of hers since her gender-bending role in 1992's Orlando, "It was like greeting an old friend, and we very quickly referred to each other as brothers," Swinton says in an email. She describes Bong as "turbocharged. Laser-witted. Fully heartfelt... politically radical.... And, above all, DEEP FUN." She adds, " I would say that he represents something supremely modern and classical at the same time: He's a one-man argument for big-screen cinema that neither talks down to its audience nor underestimates the power of thrill, suspense, and action."

The director had been cowriting the class-war-on-a-train movie Snowpiercer (2013) and realized his villainous minister Mason, written for a man, could be retooled for Swinton. "Working with Tilda is like ping-pong," he says. "We throw ideas at each other and send them back and forth." Swinton wore prosthetic teeth and oversized glasses as the overwrought Mason, and did something similar four years later as the twin antagonists in Okja, on which she and her partner, Sandro Kopp, served as coproducers.

Bong is currently writing the screenplays for his next two films—"very slowly" due to "all these campaign things." There's a Korean-set horror movie and, in his words, a "very human" English-language film that's based on true events that happened in Britain in 2016. Though he's tight-lipped about what either is about, we shouldn't be surprised if Swinton shows up again. Of the future, this much he will say: He'd love to work with Lucas Hedges ("I like his texture") and Toni Collette ("I love her so much!"). The latter had shone as the matriarch possessed in Hereditary, the 2018 horror hit by 33-year-old wunderkind Ari Aster, another name that makes Bong light up: "Oh, Ari—he is a genius! He is the epitome of obsessions!"

Upon this beaming declaration, I realize I've been granted a glimpse into an elite bromance. Aster had been tweeting his Bong love to his followers for some time, and hosted special Parasite screenings, even as his own Midsommar remains a favorite for many.

"Bong's one of my absolute heroes," says Aster, "it's rare that such an obsessive craftsman can achieve such fleetness and the consistent impression of total ease and even looseness, when in fact there's nothing remotely loose about what he's doing."

The sun is out again. I feel Bong steeling himself as he glances at the clock. Before we leave the cafe, we're interrupted by a pair of fans at an adjacent table—Rodney Rothman, of the directing trio behind last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Lost executive producer Bryan Burk. Both want to tell Bong that Parasite is a masterpiece.

He's been hearing that word a lot. He's clearly pleased—he loved the SpiderVerse film—but this does nothing to diminish his nerves. No amount of goodwill is going to ease his terror of...Jimmy Fallon. "I'm trying to enjoy all of this," he tells me, with a sweet, appreciative nod, and byway of a goodbye. The rain may have stopped, but the red-eye to New York awaits.

A few nights later, I turn on The Tonight Show and see that Bong, in a loose gray suit, is refreshingly demure for a talk show guest. When Fallon repeats his speech after Parasite's eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes—"Thank you, let's all go home!"—Bong explains that was because he knew everybody was starving and impatient. The audience laughs and applauds. In his quiet smile, I sense his vast relief.

Again, Bong has won just by being himself. Inevitably, his anxieties will flutter to something else—maybe the thought of standing at the podium on Oscar night? For that, Bong may have to heed some advice from Parasite. Remember what the struggling Mr. Kim tells his son as his own nerves begin to shatter?

"You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all."