When it comes to plotting their aprés-Cannes journeys, films like Fjord, La Bola Negra, and Paper Tiger are sticking to the script, following up their splashy premieres with stops on the prestige festival circuit. Na Hong-Jin‘s Hope, however, is charting a radically different post-Croisette course. The unhinged creature feature is avoiding the slates of Toronto, Telluride, and New York, instead opting to touch down in Comic-Con this week.
The movie begins with a riff on Jaws: a beleaguered police officer (Hwang Jung-min) struggles to save his town from a monstrous threat, helped along the way by his resourceful deputy (Squid Game breakout Hoyeon Jung). Meanwhile, a group of testosterone-fueled hunters (led by the steely Zo In-sung) set off to capture the creature. They quickly discover that the beast laying waste to the town is not of this world. Na shot most of the film using practical effects and intense stunt work.
Acquired by the kingmakers at Neon, the film faces an uphill battle in a crowded Best International Feature field, but the distributor is hoping for some traction in craft categories, along the lines of Godzilla Minus One‘s run in 2024, and the San Diego fan-fest provided a receptive audience ahead of its Sept. 9 release. Hoyeon appeared with Na, who screened one of the film’s many jaw-dropping set pieces: the heroic hunter-tracker Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) is on horseback fleeing a seemingly indestructible monster while his allies in a police car try to encourage him to jump over to them.
Before his Comic-Con session, Na sat down with Gold Derby to discuss why he wanted to do this monster movie, explain how he recruited an Oscar winner to the cast, respond to some criticism of the CG creatures out of Cannes, offer a fact-check to Wikipedia, and share how he hopes to continue the story.
Gold Derby: This is your first movie in 10 years. What inspired you to do a monster movie as your return to filmmaking after The Wailing?
Na Hong-Jin: I thought hard about what I wanted to do next, and my trail of thoughts ended up in space. I thought that space was really fun, which led me to decide, “Let’s just do an alien movie.” But a typical alien movie is not going to be very interesting, which is why the movie ended up this way.
Is it true that at one point you were planning on collaborating with Alfonso Cuarón?
That’s false news, so I don’t know why everyone keeps mentioning that.
It’s in Wikipedia, which goes to show you can’t trust everything you read! You pay tribute to classic monster movies like Jaws and Alien throughout this film. Were those some of your influences?
Certainly, I was very much influenced by those classical monster movies in terms of the design, but I did want to try something new and different. In the end, it was impossible not to be influenced by those classical movies.
So when I was executing the scenes or writing the screenplays, I did reference a lot of those classical movies, but the scenes ended up still being very much different from what was done before.
I love the alien designs in this film, which are a departure from the typical Hollywood depiction. How did you come up with those designs? What inspired the look of your aliens?
The aliens that we see in the movie have crash-landed on Earth around six months or one year before the point that we see in the film. That’s why their appearance is so bad. They’ve been starving, they’ve been injured, and they’re unable to adapt to this new environment. So rather than the design, I think it’s this premise, or the circumstances behind these aliens, that greatly influenced their final look in the film.
The film makes a point about keeping out unwanted visitors. The town is surrounded by minefields and there are signs asking citizens to report spies and suspicious activities. There’s definitely a fear of the other that comes through in this film, but you play with that idea.
Na Hong-jin: What you just mentioned is actually a quite clichéd premise, but it was very important for this particular film. That premise is used in many other films of a similar sort, but in this film, as the story progresses — and even for the story that comes after this movie — isolation has always been such an important element of the narrative. Isolation, first of all, strengthens the feeling of intrusion, that somebody’s intruding on our space. It also helps show us that the people in this space don’t like external influences; they’re a very tight-knit community, and they like to turn against what we call the other. It’s almost as if the world here is a completely different world from the outside world. So the ultimate message of this film, and something that I truly wanted to emphasize, is the idea of understanding the other. I also wanted to show the not-so-good parts of mankind and their instincts. That’s why I really focus on the theme of isolation.
This film was quite a sensation when it debuted at Cannes, but one critic had concerns about some of the effects. Has it changed at all between then and now, or is it the same film? Did you change anything?
Na Hong-jin: I think if you were to see the two versions — the one shown in Cannes and our final version — you wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. It would almost just be like the post-production progress has gone from 80% to 100%.
You have some actors in here who are familiar to Western audiences — Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Cameron Britton, Taylor Russell — in very unconventional and rather small roles. How did you convince them to join?
The original plot for this film was initially three times longer than what you see on the screen today, and I wrote the script for that entire plot. Initially, I did think about making this into one movie, but I realized that it might be too long. In that complete version of the story, after where this current version of the movie ends, this is where [their] stories really start. … I think that’s why the actors were generally positive about saying yes to the role. As for Alicia, she was the first actor we cast, and this was during a conversation while we were prepping for another film together. I brought up this film and asked, “Oh, how does this movie sound?” And she immediately said yes. So the casting process was fun, and it was really fast, too.
As you note, the movie ends before the story is finished. Do you envision one more film? Two more films?
After the story of this movie ends, that’s when night falls, and the complete story will end before that night ends. But we will also have to show a little bit of backstory, which might take place in space as well. I think that about covers the remaining story left for this movie.
