Is Na Hong-jin’s Hope the Craziest Action Movie of the Year?

The South Korean director takes us inside his latest film, a sci-fi epic featuring some of the most improbable action sequences in recent history.GQ; Getty ImagesContrary to its snobbish reputation, the Cannes Film Festival has welcomed an eclectic selection of premieres over the years, from Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith to 2001 Palme d’Or hopeful Shrek. But perhaps one of the wildest movies to hit the Croisette in recent memory is Hope, Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi epic about a humble village facing an alien invasion. One of the most expensive Korean movies ever made, it’s also one of the strangest and most exhilarating blockbusters in recent years.To call Hope unpredictable doesn’t even begin to describe the sheer audacity of the latest genre offering from Na, the director of The Wailing and The Chaser. Na takes all of the rules of conventional storytelling and sets them alight, jumping from police procedural to monster disaster movie to propulsive action thriller, infusing the film throughout with his twisted sense of humor.Ask anyone what Hope’s best sequence is and you will probably get a different answer every time: the horseback chase through dense forests, a certain scatalogical anecdote, that ending. (Who says stories need to be tied off in a neat bow?) But even in a film this full of breathless moments, the highlight is the riotous first hour, a police mystery that dials up the tension by concealing its central extraterrestrials (a group of uncanny monstrosities that defy the laws of physics) until the 50-minute mark.Director Na’s first film in almost a decade shares thematic DNA with his previous acclaimed work—the anxieties of small communities, powerful non-human forces—but Hope succeeds on account of its simpler pleasures: aliens tossing vehicles like they’re toys, scared-shitless villagers fleeing for their lives, Hoyeon (as Bum-seok’s hardened deputy Sung-ae) pulling off 180-degree drifts in a cop car. Beneath it all, Hope is simply an immensely entertaining action movie. Its first hour is proof-positive, packed with meticulously choreographed car chases and shootouts that would put most Hollywood blockbusters to shame.Speaking to GQ, Na breaks down everything that went into assembling the film’s heart-pumping first act, from production design easter eggs to Hoyeon’s driving training.I'd love to ask first about your approach to the structure of that first hour. It almost felt like watching a disaster film but in the aftermath, where Bum-seok is chasing after the action.The first hour of the movie was the difficult part, but I think that's very much needed in the movie. In the past, I think films had a longer introduction where you set up the lore, but nowadays, films spend less time talking about what has happened and what the characters are going to do in the aftermath. I wanted to take this longer approach and really densely and meticulously knit what has been going on and what these people are up to. I really wanted to expand on the introduction of everything, so the movie starts off with people realizing that something has attacked the cow, and the village. We follow through the scars in the village—not only the characters themselves, but also the viewers together start to guess and imagine what it is that's wreaked havoc on this beautiful village. We think about how big the creature is, what it looks like. And that was my intention: to keep the audience guessing about what it is, what it looks like. And then 50 minutes into the film, we see the first alien. I wanted a monster that looks like something nobody has guessed.When I began writing the scenario for this movie, there were rumours in Korea about U.S. forces attacking Pyongyang, North Korea, and that there could be a possible war in Europe and in the Middle East as well. It was very tumultuous, and there was also the issue with refugees. So I wanted to talk about all those issues between groups in a movie, so it ended up being a movie about aliens and creatures. But I really wanted to talk about violence and war between different groups and different countries.To that last point, is that where the location of Hope Harbour itself and the size of the town plays into it? You could have easily set the film in a city like Seoul, but instead what we're seeing is this small village in close proximity to North Korea.The next question on my mind was, “What perspective should I approach this film with, and what genre should I take on?” In my previous work [The Wailing], it was more of a religious, supernatural take on what humans are like. So this time around, I wanted to expand further and go deeper. I wanted this movie to be from the perspective of this big cosmos, more like an extraterrestrial type of vantage point. And then I thought about how I should start this story. Where should it begin? Just like you said, it could be starting from a big bustling city. I thought about that as well, but I actually thought it was better to go with a smaller, humble, isolated area. I wanted the story to kick off from that very humble moment and expand into this infinite cosmos. What I could do with starting from a small town was that it could become a very symbolic story, and I could do it more easily and in a more entertaining way. Because if this [town] looks simple, then the contrast is even more stark. I wanted to start off the story as a conflict between a small group of people and a small group of aliens, and then as it expands into a bigger conflict.Let’s talk about Hope Harbour itself. Was that an existing town that you had found? On a production design level, one of the things that also fascinated me was just how detailed all of these sets were. It felt like every single prop had been intentionally placed.We actually had two villages that we used as sets for Hope Harbour. There's this place called Haenam, which is the most southern part of Korea, and we shot at two villages there. There were actually people living there, but we just asked for their permission if we could work with the facade of the buildings that they live in and work in, and they would just carry on with their lives inside the buildings. The reason why we had to film in two different places in Haenam is because there was the main street of Hope Harbour, there were the small alleyways, and then there were also the small roads for cars. So we had to use two villages to film all those. I think our production design team did an amazing job creating all the props. I think they were very innovative, very cute, and very fun. I remember I had a shoot in Romania, and then I came back and I visited the set, and I was very happy to see all those props because they were just so well-crafted.Do you have any favorite details in the production design?There’s a real estate office. It's the one that has a big hole in the middle, and if you look inside it, there’s a big map there. I liked how, in the map, there are markings by the alien. There's blood on the map, and I think they were pointing at places where the people kept their jangdokdae. Jangdokdae is a Korean china pot where we store kimchi and soy sauce. It also shows the alphabet of the language that the alien speaks. They were trying to scribble something on the map.Something that struck me about that real estate office with the hole in it was that the destruction feels almost intentional. It’s not as if Godzilla is trampling on this town. You can see the journey that the alien takes. I was curious if you had a vision for that.I wanted to give enough clues so that the characters and the audience could follow the alien’s lead, and for me, the sense of distance was very important for this film. There's a lot of shots that are pretty far from what we're trying to see, so I wanted to be close enough for people to see, but as far as they could get. Using those wide lenses, and having that sense of scale and sense of distance, was very important to me.That sense of distance stood out to me as well. I think the first thing we see in terms of direct action is when the bicycle gets thrown at Bum-seok. What was the process behind that encroaching action?I wanted to give the feeling that we are getting closer and closer to the alien. So it's like, a few minutes later, it's getting a little bit closer. You're almost there. He's just around the corner—that type of suspense building for the first 50 minutes. In order to convey that feeling of getting one step closer to this alien, I used everything except for the imagery of the alien. For example, the bicycle that you cited and the gunshots from the villagers. Also, you can also see by the level of destruction of the buildings that we're getting actually closer to the culprit behind everything.There are three vehicle chases in this first hour of the film: the first one where Bum-seok crashes his police car, the truck with the villagers, and then the final chase with Sung-ae. What was your approach to creating those three sequences and making them feel distinct from one another?The important thing for me to make the distinction between the three sequences was definitely the sound. The concept of the sounds that I used for the three different sequences were very different. [For the] first one, Bum-seok with the police car, that was more of the traditional type of car scenes. I used the traditional type of sound that usually accompanies those scenes.The second one with the truck full of ahjumma and ahjussi [Korean term for older women and men], that one has a lot of creaking sounds, and I wanted those creaking sounds to be so much bigger than you would see in traditional films. There's also a lot of sounds of explosions and gunshots and the sound of the monster as well. I wanted people to feel as if they're inside a war zone.The third one, I think that’s the real car chase scene, so I wanted to use a lot of engine sounds and tire-screeching sounds to give that kind of vibe. And I wanted this one to be very powerful, pushing the sound to the limits. I think when Sung-ae gets in the car to go after the alien, it's an inflection point, because before then, the alien was going after humans. But after Sung-ae gets in the car, it's the humans going after the aliens. So I wanted to use very violent sounds to show that sort of contrast. And I just want to say that everything was filmed in-camera. No CG was used for those scenes, so maybe that's why you found it to be very raw.I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about Sung-ae’s introduction to the film. When I saw the film at Cannes, everyone applauded and cheered when she appeared. It felt like a throwback, Hollywood-movie-star kind of entrance. I'd love to hear what it was like to stage that shot in particular.Yeah, I wanted to delay Sung-ae’s entrance as much as I could. I wanted it to be the most dramatic, and I wanted her to enter the scene when it's at the peak, when everyone is in danger. So I think Sung-ae enters the scene about 50 minutes into the film. About that shot: for me, it was a typical, powerful entrance of a character, so I think Hoyeon did such a good job, just portraying that amazing scene with the big rifle gun. It’s such a big gun, and she's such a small person, but it was just so cool. She was so adept at working with the guns. I could feel from the first take that she worked so hard to make sure that she looked that way, that she looks like she's been working with guns her whole life. It wasn't the perfect take the first time. We did go for many takes after that, but still, I think it was a very impressive scene and Sung-ae was just pure perfection.You mentioned earlier that car chase sequences were staged in camera. What was the process of planning and filming that final sequence in particular?They’re going after the alien who's fleeing from them, and this alien doesn't want to run in a straight line because he knows that they're going to shoot him. So he's going into these alleys, he's taking lefts, he's taking rights. I knew that this couldn't be a full speed race for the cars to just go straight because you have to follow the alien. So for that five minute sequence, Hoyeon actually had to go through six months of driving training, so that she could do 90-degree drifts by herself without decelerating. Only when she could do that, we could have Sung-ae and the car in the same shot and make it look like it's really dangerous.The sequence culminates in Bum-seok seeing the alien cry. At the beginning of the film, there’s a sign that reads “protect the nation from invasion,” and it’s as if the people of Hope Harbour have this animosity to outsiders almost sewn into them. You can see the relationship between this moment of empathy for Bum-seok and the initial lack of understanding between the humans and aliens.This is a movie that likens the conflict [between the humans and aliens to] two countries or two different societies. That's why I said I wanted to start off in this small isolated harbour—because it's a small village that's isolated, they must have a very closely knit society, which means they might be afraid of invasion. They might not. They might be a little bit xenophobic about outsiders. I think it was their way of survival, and I think this movie really sheds light on the bad sides of humans, but with a sense of humour. This movie is designed in a way that when you first look at it, the aliens are the violent monsters who are destroying this town. But later on, you put yourself in their shoes. I think the inflection point is when we meet the alien child who is dead: Bum-seok has some information and Sung-ae has some information, and the audience is the one who has the most knowledge about what's going on. We are the omniscient people here after 50 minutes of the movie.At that time, I think you get to decide which perspective you want to watch this movie in, whether it's from the human perspective or if it's from the extraterrestrial perspective. From when we meet the baby alien and until the warship crashes, actually, I filmed the movie from the human perspective. I think this movie lets you know what kind of person you are because you get to choose. While the story is told from the human perspective, even after you see the baby alien, you get to choose if you want to still side with the humans or if you want to look at the story from the alien perspective. I actually heard from viewers that some people actually chose the human perspective, some others chose the alien perspective, and there were also some people who put equal weight on both sides, and they were trying to understand both sides.I think this really talks about the intrinsic thing about problems and issues that we have is that we have misunderstandings and misperceptions. Nothing would be a problem if we understood ourselves and others. But there's always that misperception that leads to problems and issues. I think it's the same with wars and conflicts between countries: it all stems from this misperception. The reason why I try to put you in the shoes of the alien is because I want you to also feel the alien's perspective, and that's how I designed the whole film.Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, six days a week.