Bong Joon-ho is a South Korean film director, producer and screenwriter.
37 Facts About Bong Joon-ho
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Parasite became the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award nominations, with Bong Joon-ho winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, making Parasite the first film in the award's history not in English to win Best Picture.
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In 2017, Bong Joon-ho was included on Metacritic's list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century.
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In 2020, Bong Joon-ho was included in Times annual list of 100 Most Influential People and Bloomberg 50.
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Bong Joon-ho Joon Ho was born in Daegu, South Korea and is the youngest of four children.
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Bong Joon-ho's father, Bong Sang-gyun, was a first-generation graphic designer, industrial designer, and professor of art at Yeungnam University and the head of the art department at the National Film Institute; his mother, Park So-young, was a full-time housewife.
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Bong Joon-ho's father retired from Seoul Institute of Technology as a professor of design in 2007 and died in 2017.
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Bong Joon-ho's maternal grandfather, Park Taewon, was an esteemed author during the Japanese colonial period, best known for his work A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist and his defection to North Korea in 1950.
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Bong Joon-ho's older brother, Bong Joon-soo, is an English professor at the Seoul National University; his older sister, Bong Ji-hee, teaches fashion styling at Anyang University.
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In 1988, Bong Joon-ho enrolled in Yonsei University, majoring in sociology.
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College campuses such as Yonsei's were then hotbeds for the South Korean democracy movement; Bong Joon-ho was an active participant of student demonstrations, frequently subjected to tear gas early in his college years.
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Bong Joon-ho served a two-year term in the military in accordance with South Korea's compulsory military service before returning to college in 1992.
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Bong Joon-ho later co-founded a film club named "Yellow Door" with students from neighboring universities.
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Bong Joon-ho collaborated on several works with his classmates, which included working as cinematographer on the highly acclaimed short 2001 Imagine, directed by his friend Jang Joon-hwan.
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Bong Joon-ho received a partial screenplay credit on the anthology film Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better Than a Lover ; both screenplay and assistant director credits on Park Ki-yong's debut Motel Cactus ; and is one of four writers credited for the screenplay of Phantom: The Submarine.
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Shortly afterwards, Bong Joon-ho began shooting his first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite under producer Cha Seung-jae, who had overseen the production of both Motel Cactus and Phantom: The Submarine.
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The film, about a low-ranking university lecturer who abducts a neighbor's dog, was shot in the same apartment complex where Bong Joon-ho lived after his marriage.
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In 2011, Bong Joon-ho contributed to 3.11 A Sense of Home, another anthology film, each segment being 3 minutes and 11 seconds in duration, addressing the theme of home.
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That same year, Bong Joon-ho served as a jury member for the 27th Sundance Film Festival.
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Bong Joon-ho was the head of the jury for the Camera d'Or section of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
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In 2019, Bong Joon-ho directed the South Korean film Parasite, a black comedy thriller about a poor family that infiltrates a wealthy household by gaining employment as staff.
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Bong Joon-ho wanted to express the anxiety, sadness, and deep fear that came from reality of life via his film.
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Bong Joon-ho received the Hollywood Filmmaker Award at the 23rd Hollywood Film Awards and Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Director at the 25th Critics' Choice Awards.
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Bong Joon-ho was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 77th Golden Globe Awards, with the film itself winning Best Foreign Language Film.
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Bong Joon-ho has stated that the series, titled Parasite, will explore stories "that happen in between the sequences in the film".
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In September 2021, Bong Joon-ho served as jury president of the 78th Venice International Film Festival.
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In February 2021, Bong Joon-ho said that he had been working on two scripts after completing Parasite, one in English and one in Korean, and that he had finished one of the two.
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Bong Joon-ho is preparing for a Korean animation as one of his next films.
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Bong Joon-ho was given an advance manuscript of the novel in late 2021.
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The film, which was written, co-produced and directed by Bong Joon-ho, will be distributed by Warner Bros.
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Bong Joon-ho studied the films of Martin Scorsese and cited him as one of his major influences during his acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Director when he won for Parasite.
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Bong Joon-ho has commented that he doesn't like the term 'Directing Actors' as he feels that "acting is the actor's job and it's something I don't feel like I can direct".
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The most defining trademark of Bong Joon-ho's films are their sudden tone shifts between drama, darkness, and black or slapstick humor.
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Bong Joon-ho was a member of the now-defunct New Progressive Party.
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Bong Joon-ho has voiced support for its predecessor, the Democratic Labor Party.
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Bong Joon-ho has been married to screenwriter Jung Sun-young since 1995.
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Bong Joon-ho was named No 1 Favorite Film Director among the most respected figures of college students nationwide from 2009 to 2019 in Korea.