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Unlike His Peers, the Director Bong Joon-Ho Likes Ideas and Metaphors

Credit...Chungeorahm Film

SEOUL

THE South Korean director Bong Joon-ho has monsters on the brain: ready to snack on your loved ones, provoke screams and provide the kind of cinematic fun you might expect from a Hollywood picture. But in a very studied way, as with all of Mr. Bong's movies, which are laden with metaphors and ideas.

"There are a whole lot of prejudices about creature movies, that they are just childish or just sci-fi," Mr. Bong said, speaking of his film "The Host," which was screened on May 21 at the Cannes Film Festival. "Those prejudices poked me and intrigued me. I took it as a challenge."

Mr. Bong has never been interested in the "Asian extreme" label that is so popular these days. Unlike peers, he has avoided hammer sprees, fishhook fun and demented sex. His previous film, "Memories of Murder" — a dark comedy about police in a country town on the trail of a serial killer — was one of South Korea's biggest critical and commercial successes, winning awards from San Sebastián, Spain, to Tokyo. "Barking Dogs Never Bite" — the story of a university lecturer tormented by the barking of a neighbor's dog — similarly won acclaim all over the world for its wry observations on modern life. The "extreme" label, he said, speaking in a production office here, has been useful as a marketing tool; but "before long that tendency will die out."

"The Host," easily Mr. Bong's most ambitious work, is the story of a monster that emerges from the Han River in Seoul to wreak havoc and eat a few people, and of an ordinary man who gets pulled into the fray.

With a budget of just over $10 million, the film pales in size next to the average Hollywood blockbuster. (It's not even that large for a Korean movie anymore; the biggest films push toward the $20 million mark.) But careful planning meant Mr. Bong could afford hundreds of effects shots that bring the monster to life.

It was his first time dealing with international effects houses, like the Orphanage in the United States and Weta Workshop in New Zealand, and his first experience with American actors. (The United States military figures heavily in the story, which can be seen in part as an allegory for American power in the post-9/11 world.)

During an afternoon interview, Mr. Bong was dressed in a black T-shirt that read "Mise-en-scènes: Genres film festival," his hair a wiry tangle of jet black. While talking, he moved, squirmed and gesticulated continually, checking his cellphone's constant flow of messages. He had been working 14 hours or more a day for months, struggling against deadlines to finish his creature feature in time. "The Host" will not be released until July in South Korea, but he ramped up the pace even more to get it done in time for Cannes.

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Credit...Chungeorahm Film

Born in 1969 in Daegu (when he calls it "Korea's most conservative city," he leaves no doubt it is not a compliment), Mr. Bong soon moved to Seoul. He watched movies more on television than in the theaters, often on the United States armed forces channel AFKN. On the small screen he liked a diverse range, from "The Bicycle Thief" to Sam Peckinpah films.

"The Peckinpah movies had a lot of cuts," he said. "I used to notice the cuts and imagine what was missing." But even though his father was an artist and a professor of graphic design, Mr. Bong hesitated to study film. "I was afraid to freak out my parents. That generation did not think movies were art."

Instead he attended Yonsei University's department of sociology, which in the 1980's was a famous hotbed for the democracy movement. Another highly regarded and provocative director, Im Sang-soo ("The President's Last Bang"), graduated from the same department at the same time, although Mr. Bong said the two never knew each other in those days. Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") attended Sogang University, just down the street, around the same time.

While still in school Mr. Bong made a short film, then, after gathering the courage to freak out his parents, he spent a year in film school. Entering the movie business in the mid-1990's, he worked as an assistant director on "Seven Reasons Beer Is Better Than a Girl" (which he calls "the worst movie ever in Korea"), then a couple more movies, before getting the chance to make his own film, "Barking Dogs Never Bite."

"In the mid 1990's the Korean film industry was really open-minded," Mr. Bong said. "Hong Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk made their debut then. Kang Je-gyu was editing his movie right next door to where I was working."

Since then Mr. Hong and Mr. Kim have grown into art-house favorites abroad, but their followings at home have all but dried up. Mr. Kang has revolutionized the film industry in Korea with his overt commercialism, smashing box office records twice now, but outside of Korea his films do not travel so well. Mr. Bong, however, continues to walk the line, balancing between the two sides without falling into either. "The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories," he explained.

This layering is also what draws some of Korea's top actors to Mr. Bong. "What I like about director Bong's work is that his films are not the kind you just watch once and then leave behind," said Song Gang-ho, the star of "The Host" and "Memories of Murder." "You find a different attraction every time you watch them. Whenever I work with director Bong, it's always delightful to share his way of looking at the world. It's quite extraordinary."

For Mr. Bong, the film world in South Korea has completely changed since he started more than a decade ago. "I think over the past five or six years I've felt a radical change from foreigners about Korean films," he said. "In 2000, when I was promoting 'Barking Dogs,' all the questions were really general. But nowadays the questions are more individualized, personal."

Next up, he said, will be a small film, about a "very destructive story between a mother and a son," followed by a return to the special effects in a story based of a French comic book, but probably nothing more extreme than that.