Somewhere near the border between the two Koreas, between the sea and the dense woods, someone finds a dying ox in the middle of the road. The wounds on the creature’s body suggest an attack by a ferocious beast, perhaps a tiger, but the reality is different and far more unsettling. Before anyone has time to realize what is happening, a chase begins — that between a police officer in a car and the mysterious creature that sows panic and destruction in a fishing town— which intrudes and earns a rightful place in the history of cinema, for its staging and its duration: a hour of pure, unadulterated action. Thus begins Hope, the new film by Na Hong-jin, a highly gifted Korean director who has little to envy from the more famous Park and Bong. A disorienting and ambitiously bold film, which, alongside the frantic action of that opening, and of later scenes, mixes horror, a demenziale demencial comedy, epic science fiction and even the western when the action shifts to the woods and the chases are no longer conducted behind the wheel of cars, but on horseback, galloping at full speed.
“I thought about how you could run very quickly through the woods, and I immediately thought of horses,” the director explains, whom we met on Zoom. “Perhaps while preparing I was also working on two scripts that had been sent to me from the United States, both of them westerns: the first very classic, the second contemporary, but in which the role of horses was central. I love westerns; Sergio Leone is one of my favorite directors.” Speaking of Hope, Na Hong-jin cites John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg as filmmakers who, through their films, have had a great influence on this work. “And there are certainly many others, it’s inevitable,” he says. “I believe Hope pays homage in some way to the structure of classic Hollywood action films: for me, for instance, it was important that at the beginning, even when a creature rendered in digital form appears, the film would have an artisanal, analog feel: I wanted it to be a film very strange from this perspective.”
Hope: the Trailer
Strange or not, it is clear that Hope represents for Na another successful attempt to raise the bar of his cinema, which since the debut of The Chaser, via The Yellow Sea and Goksung, has grown increasingly complex and layered. If this has happened, it is because Na has always wanted to test himself: “About twenty years have passed since I was given the opportunity to direct a film for the first time,” he explains, “and it was then that I promised myself I would never waste this opportunity to learn. Because every time you make a film you learn something, indeed a lot. It would be a waste for me to repeat the same process in every film, playing it safe, without giving myself the chance to learn something new. The moment hasn’t arrived for me yet. I want to try new paths, learn new things, make films that take me into new territories, always within the broad perimeter of the genre. Perhaps the moment will come when I content myself with repeating myself, or perhaps the moment will come when, having exhausted my explorations in the genre, I devote myself to deeper films.”
One of the things Na, as he tells us, has learned over time is that every film must be approached in a different way: “When I shot The Chaser and The Yellow Sea I drew very precise storyboards, which I considered sacred as a Bible. I followed them meticulously and thought that was the right way to make a film, a method that also made me feel safe. But when I shot Goksung I abandoned storyboards and planning: I went on set with the actors and the director of photography and I shot instinctively and spontaneously.” With Hope, Na explains, he returned to a phase of pre-production carried out in an extremely meticulous and precise manner: “all the elements of a scene had been prepared in detail before going on set. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to shoot; I think every film requires a different preparation style that fits what the film itself needs. What I know is that my next film, which I’m writing at the moment, will be much freer and with less obsessive preparation: I want to go on set with my staff and with the actors and work with them and be more free.” And who knows, perhaps Na’s next film could be the sequel, or a sequel, to this Hope, which ends in an unexpected and open manner: “This is the beginning of a series, the setup of a story. The next film, or next films, will have a different style, different atmospheres, a story told from a different perspective.”
With an estimated budget of around $50 million (which in Hollywood is considered a mid-range budget), Hope is the most expensive film ever in the history of Korean cinema, and so far has earned a similar amount in the countries where it was released (36.2 million dollars from South Korea alone, while just over 8 from North America). Na however does not think budget and box office are a relevant issue, and that they bear on the future of a director in relation to an industry that, he says, almost has no memory: “It doesn’t matter how your films have performed: every time you want to make a new one you have to find money from scratch, new capital, new financing. And if someone comes to a producer with a project for a big film, the film will find its financiers regardless of how this one fares, while a bad film will not be made. What I can say after the Hope experience is that I had the sense that the world is getting much smaller, and the competition much fiercer. And that the Korean film industry is moving very quickly in a precise direction.”
As far as we are concerned, if the direction is that of Hope, there is nothing left but to be happy about it.
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