Korean films influenced US monster movie
American director Jordan Vogt-Roberts talks during the press conference for his new film "Kong: Skull Island" at Lotte World Mall in Seoul, Wednesday. / Yonhap
US director unveils fantasy King Kong film
By Kim Jae-heun
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said two Korean films ― Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host” (2006) and Kim Jee-woon’s “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” (2008) _ inspired him to work on the upcoming monster film “Kong: Skull Island.”
“The amazing thing about Warner Brothers and Legendary was I pitched them a very crazy idea about setting the movie in the ‘70s and making a sort of Vietnam War film with monsters,” Vogt-Roberts said during a press conference at Lotte World Mall in southern Seoul, Wednesday. “And for me it was inspired more by things like Bong Joon-ho’s The Host or Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which sort of take traditional ideas and Western ideas and twist them and make them new.
“So looking at movies like The Host and The Good, the Bad, The Weird, that was a jumping-off point for me of how to potentially make a new King Kong movie feel fresh.”
The American director said the 30-meter-tall King Kong that appears very early in the film is an example of the Korean movies’ influence on his film. He said he took the idea from “The Host” as Bong shows his monster at the beginning of the film, and that he hates monsters appearing at the end of the movie.
The influence of Kim’s film on the King Kong movie is also found in the movie. He said the tone and genre of the film switches from one to another frequently to express serious and violent scenes while inserting comic relief in between.
“The first clip on the beach, one thing for me that was very inspired by Korean cinema is the way that you guys are able to take tone and different genres to jump between them very quickly. American filmmakers and a lot of Americans audiences are uncomfortable with big shifts in tone and big shifts in genre,” the director said.
“I am so in love with what Korean directors are able to do by jumping between two different genres and jumping between different tones very seamlessly, and together making something that becomes sort of poignant because of that.
“That was a bit of a jumping-off point for me in how to approach a scene like that: you can have these funny goofy moments that are absurd and have these moments that are very serious, very dark and very violent.”
Vogt-Roberts also referred to the monstrous creature in “The Host” as an inspiration behind his Skull Crawler. He explained that his monster and that of Bong’s walk in a similar manner in that they both walk very uncomfortably as if they have evolved wrong and keep stumbling.
The director hinted that King Kong will not go to New York City and he will not end the film with another “Beauty and the Beast” moment, because there are already enough of those.
Instead, he said he wants to emphasize that people have become arrogant that they can control the world, but there is always a more powerful force than humanity. In that sense, King Kong is somewhere between a man and a god, and Vogt-Roberts wants to show how small humans can look in front of the monstrous creatures of the isolated island.
“Kong: Skull Island” hits theaters March 9.