But Bong Joon-Ho remained calm, he explains. Age and experience helped him.
I wasn't 29 years old, like Steven Soderbergh was when he won the Palme d'Or. I was 50, I had been through a lot in life.
The calmness allowed him to sift through the proposals he received regarding his next film. The choice fell on "Mickey 17", an adaptation of the novel "Mickey7" with Robert Pattinson in the lead role.
It was more important for me to find an actor who felt like Mickey than to find someone who could draw an audience. A human being, someone who you feel can have holes in their socks. That was Robert.
The film takes place in a dystopian future where the earth has become uninhabitable. The dictatorial Marshall and his wife Ylfa have led an expedition to another planet where they hope to settle.
Pattinson as a consumable item
On the spaceship is Mickey, who is an "expendable", a kind of consumable item. He is sent on life-threatening missions, such as checking if the air is breathable. If he dies, his data is saved and a new Mickey can be 3D-printed.
One day, things go wrong. Version number 17 is believed to be dead, and a new Mickey with number 18 is printed out – but Mickey 17 is alive. The two are the same person but have different character traits – conflicts arise, while they are both threatened with extinction.
The black comedy is present in everything he does, whether the film is about serial killers, monsters, or, as in "Parasite", how the upper and lower classes exploit each other. In "Mickey 17", the exploitation of the working class and the rise of fascism are portrayed.
"Entirely new light"
Bong Joon-Ho thinks that the science fiction genre gives him a lot of freedom. He himself feels that the symbolism in the film has changed over time. When he and Mark Ruffalo, who plays Marshall in the film, sat and watched the finished film, they were surprised.
We saw it in an entirely new light. Suddenly, it felt like we had made a film that predicted how the future would look.
How does Bong Joon-Ho hope that the tech moguls who back Trump will react to "Mickey 17"?
By saying that we're now collecting money to save the earth. It's not wrong to dream about space, but there's so much that's going wrong right now on earth before our eyes.
And if Trump sees it?
I hope he has fun when he sees it, says Bong Joon-Ho and laughs.
Age: 55 years.
Family: Wife Jung Sun-Young, one child.
Lives: In Seoul, South Korea.
Occupation: Screenwriter and director.
Films: "Memories of murder", "The host", "Snowpiercer", "Okta", "Parasite".
Current: With "Mickey 17", which has its cinema premiere on March 7.
