Eyebrows were raised when BONG Joon-ho wrote the script for his 2006 zany monster flick The Host, after he enjoyed a fair success with a crime drama Memories of Murder. The CG monster jumping out from Han River indeed brought a sensation to the Korean box office that year. With his name which has by that time already become one of the bywords for Korean cinema, BONG has continued taking his unique career path, both as a director and as a producer, trying diverse genres and styles in his more recent films such as Cannes title Mother, global giant project Snowpiercer that brought BONG’s fame and career to a whole new level. BONG has not stood behind the camera for two years since Snowpiercer, if SHIM Sung-bo’s Hae-moo which BONG co-wrote and produced does not count.

 

After the two-year long hiatus, BONG earlier revealed his plan to come back to the director’s chair with a new project named Okja, for which he had recently completed a first-draft script. Though Ok-ja is a typical Korean name that has been more widely given to girls in the old days, BONG revealed that he gave that name to the monster in the movie, instead of a girl. The story is known to center on a rural girl from Korea’s Gang-won Province who travels between Korea and the US. According to BONG, the creature film will cast a teenage Korean female lead, which reminds of KO A-sung in The Host. Almost 40% of the film will be set in the US and the other 60% back in Korea.

BONG has mentioned that Okja would be made with a total budget that falls between that of The Host ($11 million) and Snowpiercer ($40 million). Okja is currently in pre-production.