I have a complex feeling about genre. I love it, but I hate it at the same time. I have the urge to make audiences thrill with the excitement of a genre, but I also try to betray and destroy the expectations placed on that genre.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a love-hate relationship with genre in filmmaking, highlighting the tension between following and subverting genre expectations.
Bong Joon-Ho articulates a duality in his approach to genre: he appreciates the thrill and excitement that genres can bring to audiences, yet he also feels compelled to challenge and redefine those very expectations. This creative tension allows him to innovate within his work, making it both familiar and surprising for viewers, thus deepening their engagement with the narrative.
In practice
In a film workshop, discussing how to balance genre conventions in storytelling.
I think when one becomes very close to another person, it can mean loving and intimacy, but on the other hand, there's also the danger of one destructing another under the name of love. I think that is the scariest thing for me in various relationships.
People have said, 'Why don't you make your own company like Chan-wook Park has his own company,' but my head is full of writing and directing and I don't feel like I want to run a company. That's not really within my personality as well.
There is a lot of extreme emotion in Korean film. It's because there are a lot of extremes in Korean society.
No matter where I am working, I cannot make a film without 100% creative control and final cut. If there is such a guarantee, I can work anywhere.
All great chefs have two things in common. First, they respect nature as the true artist, and they are just cooks. Second, everything that they do is an extension of them as a person.
Music is a defining element of character.
Pixar has been compared to fine furniture makers who polish the backs of drawers - even if you don't see everything in a particular scene, you still feel that every little detail has been met.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
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