Director Bong Joon Ho, who won Academy Awards in 2020 for writing and directing “Parasite,” is back in the director’s chair with the hotly anticipated “Mickey 17,” starring Robert Pattinson.
Just from the summary of the original novel, “Mickey 7” by Edward Ashton, Bong says he was “instantly captivated” and got more engrossed in the story as he read page by page. “I thought that it had such a unique concept, which is human printing, and that’s very different from human cloning,” says the filmmaker. “It’s like you’re printing out humans as if human beings are just pieces of paper, documents to be printed out. And I thought that human printing – even in the expression itself – we could sense the tragedy of that condition and that profession. And so, I started thinking about what it would be like to actually be that person being printed out. All these thoughts came to me and I was completely in that world instantly.”
The character of the “captivating and appealing” Mickey also helped draw the director in. “Even in the original novel, Mickey is quite an average person… but I wanted to make him even more average, even lower class, even more of a loser,” says Bong. “And so, all these ideas for adapting the story came to me instantly. I was fascinated by the concept of human printing and just captivated by the character of Mickey, who is not a superhero, who is this everyman, normal, average man going through this crazy journey.”
The passion and talent of Bong Joon Ho are part of what attracted Robert Pattinson, who plays Mickey Barnes in the film, to the adaptation. At the film’s press conference in Seoul in January, Pattinson said that Bong is “a filmmaker every actor dreams of working with.”
Talking about Bong’s script, Pattinson says, “It’s one of those scripts where I haven’t read anything like it in a long time, and I don’t think I’ll ever read anything like it again. Then to know that it’s someone with his level of pedigree coming to this script which, in some ways, is also like a sci-fi farce.”
“Actually, I have no idea how to describe it to people at all. Even just the beginning: ‘So, it’s about a pastry chef in the future. He has a macaron shop. And he takes out a very risky loan with loan sharks and then he gets onto a mission to space, where he gets reprinted over and over again.’ [Laughs] You go off the rails almost immediately trying to describe it. At first, I thought it was a risk, but as soon as I started doing it, it didn’t feel like a risk at all. Bong just has such extreme certainty about what he wants to shoot and so much confidence that you get into his rhythms really quickly.”
From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho, comes his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, “Mickey 17.” Unlikely hero Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living.
Also starring Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, “Mickey 17” opens in cinemas March 5.