Perilous journey

SCI-FI black comedy film Mickey 17 is out now in theatres.

Based on the science fiction novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, the movie follows Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a man who joins a space colony as an ‘expandable’, a disposable worker selected for dangerous tasks, who gets cloned every time he dies for research purposes, with his memories remaining intact. However, things go wrong with one regeneration!

This is South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s third English language production. He is best known for his 2019 black comedy thriller Parasite, which was the first foreign film to win the Best Picture honour at the 2020 Academy Awards.

Speaking about working on films that aren’t in his native language, Bong said in an interview, “I had a co-writer or dialogue-polishing writer for those projects. Mostly I relied heavily on the actors in regards to the language of the film. With Mickey 17, it was Rob.”

“I relied heavily on Rob. He has such a unique and amazing linguistic sensibility. Especially with Mickey 18 (a character in the film), he improvised a lot of really fun dialogue, a lot of which was not scripted.

“It was another great lesson in realising that you need to work with amazing actors to overcome, I guess, what you can call a ‘linguistic handicap’ I have, where it’s not my native language. It’s working with very trusted actors and also a great translator,” he added.

The director also revealed that he has been working on an animation film since 2019 that includes a crew of more than 100 artists.

“It’s a really unique story about deep sea creatures that features very adorable creature protagonists,” he said. “We also have human characters. It’s a very unique CGI animated film, and it’s really going. It’s under works now. 2027, maybe,” he revealed.