The tension between genre and reality is an important axis that forms a movie. Such an idea comes only after we complete the production, and we are not conscious of it during the process. In <The Host>, there are many direct references to real politics.
     Recent political actions by the United States come with a little bit of metaphor in the story. "Yellow Agent," which drives the monster to its death, was borrowed from "Agent Orange," the defoliant that the U.S. forces used in the Vietnam War,  and "No Virus" that an American doctor concludes about the unfounded public scare of the possible infection from the monster twisted the way the United States acknowledged the outcome of its war on Iraq.
     The 2000 case of Albert McFarland, a U.S. Forces Korea employee who ordered the dumping of formaldehyde into the Han River, also takes place at the beginning.
     Because of these references and satire, some read <The Host> as an explicitly political movie.
     It may not escape such an interpretation, but in a broad sense, genre movies have used political satire as their basic and traditional approach. For the Hollywood movies in the 1950s, metaphor and symbolization were common ways to reflect McCarthyism  or the Cold War system.
     To use a genre was a common way of making genre movies like SF, and many have understood that monster movies are not irrelevant to their era. Genre is not something remote from reality. A good genre movie makes its audience think of the reality it deals with and makes a travesty of the issues in it.
     It won't be easy for me, however, to answer if someone asks me what principles I have in combining genre and reality. Such a combination is not subject to a particular principle, but achieved through the tension and balance between diverse factors during movie making.
     In a SF movie, reality is the source of its genre, while genre provides a base to control reality. The tension that occurs between the two sides is a kind of  chemistry. Basically, a genre movie is attractive because of its power to draw the audience and make them approachable.
     I tend to start with a genre movie, but soon get an impulse to derail from it. All three of my movies eventually became the one that borrows the rules of a genre movie but eventually break away. The desire to borrow conventions and also to break away -- did it make <The Host> a monster-like movie? Did the tension make the movie a little strange, a little different? Wouldn't that be the factor that makes small differences among the movies of our era? Maybe.
     People I meet in international film festivals treat my movies almost like Korean society, and I think that's because of the genres they take. Such an approach is universal even though there are small differences over regions and cultures. Supposedly that comes from the fact that, whatever metropolitan cities they are in, they have similar customs and personal experiences about cultural products.
     Someday we may have to see such experiences of urban culture as a kind of genre. A genre does not belong to those who make the cultural products, but to those who consume them, and a genre is the way society digests it.
     The monster in <The Host> is not actually portrayed an extraordinary being. In the latter part of the movie, the monster gets tangled with demonstrators and killed by the Yellow Agent. And vice versa with the demonstrators. Here, the monster is pictured as an ordinary and normal being rather than an extraordinary one. The last part declares its death, but also can be the moment of its revival that shows it can be a normal being, not an abnormal one as we have first thought.

4. The Han River

     The focus of this movie, after all, is not the monster but the Han River.
     The monster Nessie that was the object of my childhood imagination has grown up to become the Han River monster in 2006, even though this relation of the two may be hard for people to understand. But such personal experience is the seed that makes a story, a culture.
     In every corner of its story, <The Host> presents the aspect of life revolving around the Han River. Seoul citizens pass by the river bridges every day but do not pay attention to them. Many get surprised when they see Bae Doo-na walk the Seongsu Bridge. That is where everyone can go but do not dare to. Such strange places move into the boundary of our personal experience when a movie camera turns to them.
     In that sense, moviemaking is an attractive job. Exploring the river bridges, the director transforms an isolated space that is within ordinary life into a cinematic space.
     My concerns are about how to avoid conventions of a genre movie, but when I enter into production reality becomes my primal issue. Working on <Memories of Murder> I had to completely dismantle a scenario that I wrote before studying the case. Each time I rewrite, I dream a dream that a seed of hope will be planted there.
     <The Host>, like <Memories of Murder>, keeps a tragic tone to the end. But because of that, it was important to put hope there. The youngest boy, saved by Song Gang-ho's daughter and later brought up by him, is portrayed as a frail being that needs perpetual protection. It may not be a powerful way of saying it, but I see hope through this child. It is time we will spend for our future that we should not give up even though the tragic reality and horrible monsters are around.
     <The Host> ends with a scene where Song Gang-ho and the child eat their meal in the kiosk at the side of the Han River, wrapped with bedcloths on a cold winter day. To be alive and to live on is this ordinary life. That was why I put this scene at the end.
     <The Host> quickly drives the audience into a monster fantasy but gets them out of it at the last moment. Or, from the beginning, I might have been dreaming of this ordinary scene where people sit side by side and have a meal together at the corner of the kiosk on a cold winter day. That is the conclusion that my movies have so far reached.


[Translated into English by Kim Hyun]