By Travis Johnson
Okja as a film has been a long time in gestation – I understand you first showed some initial designs to Tilda Swinton back in 2011, when you were working on Snowpiercer.
When I initially discussed it with Tilda and when I showed her the pictures of Okja, it was during the very early development of Okja, it was during the production of Snowpiercer when I showed her the drawings. The drawings weren’t from the creature design, really, they were just initial concepts and drawings that I showed Tilda.
In the year 2014 when I was writing the script the creature designer of The Host [Chin Wei-chen] came on board and we developed the design for Okja together. That was a very long process and there were versions that never made it, obviously – over a hundred versions that never made it. The challenge was to portray this animal which had an enormous build with a childlike innocence, and making it seem somewhat shy and introverted.
In the summer of 2015 the creature was finalised. The scale was finalised. In my initial thoughts the size and scale of Okja was much bigger than what we see now. It was about a four storey high creature, but the smaller, the more realistic – and we had to show some close intimacy between the girl [Mija, played by Ahn Seo-hyun] and the animal. If the animal is too large, too big, it’s very difficult to show that close intimacy. So, as we worked more and more on the design the scale of Okja decreased. Only then would it be feasible that this animal lives with Mija in its small house, in its hut.
How did you portray Okja on set? The creature in the film is CGI, but what did you use as a stand-in, and how did it affect the human actors’ performances?
The cast can’t just act with thin air – they need something there. Especially Ahn Seo-hyun – she has to touch and actually feel the animal. I don’t think there’s an industry term but we just call it a “stuffy”. I don’t know what the material is made of – it could be latex – but it’s this spongy fiberglass material, and there’s a person who actually holds this stuffy and he is the performer of Okja. The performer on set is also the animation supervisor, so he does his own interaction with Seo-hyun, and then he does the digital animation.
Obviously the size and the shape has to match the animal – very similar to the final version of Okja. So however we touched the stuffy, whether we touched the ears or the nostrils, it translates right into the post-production process, where they’re actually touching the right shape and size of Okja.
We have stuffies for the head, the sides, for the body, for the rear end. We just use whatever part that fits with the scene. For the scenes where the Mirando Corporation employees try to push Okja into the truck, we utilised a special rear end stuffy for that. It looks ridiculous, all these grown up people pushing it! Onlookers are always puzzled as to what we were doing!
Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, is credited as co-writer. How did you come to be working with him, and what did he bring to the project?
Did you enjoy Frank [which Ronson wrote], with Michael Fassbender? I watched that film and decided to contact Jon. English not being my first language and having a film that has English as its main dialogue, and having the two key groups, the Mirando Corporation and the activists, being English speakers, I needed someone who could write English dialogue, but with a sense of black humour, dark humour, and a sense of sarcasm. Frank the movie, you remember the musicians, their character is slightly similar, slightly goofy. The two groups have a similar tone – they have big dreams and big ideals, but in reality it doesn’t really work out for them.
Not only had he written the film Frank, but he had written a renowned book called The Psychopath Test, which touched on multinational corporations, so he was already familiar with some of the themes. I had written the first draft in Korean – the basic characters and story structure were in place already, but then Jon Ronson came on board and fine-tuned the dialogue for the non-Korean characters, such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda.
It seems one of the key themes here is a mistrust of capitalist systems and how people are treated under them. You covered that in Snowpiercer, and now in Okja you’re looking at how animals are treated under the same systems. Can you expand on that?
It is very paradoxical and interesting, because I am a filmmaker, not a novel writer, and films require a lot of capital – Snowpiercer was $40 million and Okja was $60 million. Using capital to make a satire about capitalistic society is paradoxical but interesting at the same time. However, there are corporations, such as Netflix and the corporation who financed Snowpiercer, who have no issue with the film being a satire on corporations, so I was relieved about that fact.
But actually, I am not Noam Chomsky. I never wanted to make a propaganda film to just portray one message. Just by expressing or portraying what our everyday lives are like, because our everyday lives are lived under this capitalistic society, I have no choice but to give hints of the joys and excitements of capitalism as well as the pain and exhaustion that it causes. I’m merely expressing what life looks like, living in a capitalistic society, but this time I’m portraying what animals have to go through. Because of the capitalistic era they live a completely different life, and it’s very recent, especially cats and farm animals. Some very small wild animal in the middle of the Amazon forest, or in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, they live a quite similar life to a hundred years ago, but for farm animals it’s a different story. Even for animals living in the Amazon rainforest, their habitat is now continually being destroyed by this capitalistic force.
Okja is now streaming on Netflix. Read our review here.
