🇰🇷 Bong Joon-ho

He was born on September 14, 1969, in Daegu, the youngest of four children. His father, Bong Sang-gyun, was a graphic designer and university professor; his maternal grandfather, the novelist Park Tae-won, had been an important figure in 1930s Korean modernism before defecting to the North during the Korean War — a family history that would seep, in oblique form, into nearly all of Bong's later work. He read manga voraciously, drew comics in middle-school notebooks, and discovered, on his family's small black-and-white television, the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot and Shohei Imamura.

He studied sociology at Yonsei University, where he co-founded a film club, then enrolled at the Korean Academy of Film Arts, where he made the short Incoherence (1994), already a small showcase of the slippery moral world he would later perfect. His feature debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), failed commercially but found a cult audience overseas. The film that followed, Memories of Murder (2003), based on the real, then-unsolved 1986–1991 Hwaseong serial murders, is now widely cited — including by Quentin Tarantino — as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

The Host (2006), a creature feature about a CGI monster pulled from the Han River, became, on release, the highest-grossing Korean film in history (a record it held for years) and an unmistakable allegory about American military negligence on the peninsula. Mother (2009) was darker and stranger still: a small-town drama about a woman who will do anything for her possibly murderous son. Snowpiercer (2013), Bong's first English-language film — set on a perpetual train circling a frozen earth — became famously the test case for Korean-Hollywood friction when Harvey Weinstein tried, and failed, to make Bong cut twenty minutes from the film.

Okja (2017), produced by Netflix and shown at Cannes, was the announcement: Bong had outgrown both the conventional studio system and the festival circuit's discomfort with streaming. By the time Parasite premiered in May 2019 — winning the Palme d'Or unanimously — he had become the rare director whose every film, regardless of language or genre, was now reviewed as a Bong film first and a particular thing second.

Parasite's Oscar sweep, in February 2020, made him, briefly, the most famous filmmaker in the world. The film grossed over $260 million worldwide on a $11 million budget, prompted a wave of analysis about Korean class dynamics that had nothing to do with cinema, and earned its director — by his own joking telling — 'enough Korean civic honors to fill a small museum.' He has since been notably resistant to repeating himself.

His follow-up, Mickey 17 (2025), a sci-fi adaptation of Edward Ashton's novel starring Robert Pattinson and shot at Warner Bros., released to mixed reviews but solid box-office and confirmed his determination to stay weird, big, and tonally indefinable. He has talked, also, of returning to a small Korean-language project next.

He lives in Seoul with his wife, the screenwriter Jung Sun-young, and their son Hyo-min, who is now an aspiring filmmaker. The director who once said, in an interview I have always loved, that he 'cannot direct a love scene without making it slightly upsetting' is fifty-six. He plans, by every indication, to keep going for at least another twenty years.