Robert Ewing chats with Colony director Yeon Sang-ho…
Yeon Sang-ho is an icon of the zombie genre thanks to Train to Busan, a film often proclaimed as one of the greatest zombie movies ever made. He began his career with the animated features The King of Pigs and The Fake before branching into a range of genres, from the superhero drama Psychokinesis to the thriller Revelations. With his latest film, he returns to the zombie genre after six years with Colony, an evolution of his earlier work that integrates hive-mind intelligence and pheromone-based behaviour.
Colony follows Professor Se-jeong (Gianna Jun) as she attends a biotech conference, hoping to secure a job. However, when a mutating virus is released, authorities place the building under lockdown to contain the outbreak. Se-jeong becomes trapped inside with a group of fellow survivors, and together they must find a way to endure the crisis and find a way to be rescued.
Answering through an interpreter, I had the amazing opportunity to sit down with director Yeon Sang-ho to discuss his latest film Colony ahead of its UK premiere at Tubi FrightFest. We discussed how the hive-mind concept came about, why zombies remain the perfect vehicle for his storytelling, and much more.
Just to kind of get started, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It’s an absolute honour, and Colony is a great film. I had such a fun time watching it. So, kind of to get straight into it, one of the things that stands out the most about this film and I think there are kind of two aspects, but kind of the first one is the hive-mind intelligence for the zombies. So, I wanted to ask, where did that idea originate from? Especially when you’re coming up with the script for the threat to constantly evolve throughout the film.
It originated from my co-writer, Choi Kyu-seok, with whom I wrote season one and season two of the show Hellbound. Hellbound dealt with the danger of collectiveness that you see on social media, but after writing co-writing season two, we thought that there would be more to say about the danger of collectiveness, especially in today’s world. So, we asked ourselves what would be the dangers of collectiveness today. So, we thought that it would be the high-speed exchange of communication that we all live in today, and pushed to the extreme, it’s actually AI, and together you also have the erosion of individuality, which is quite scary, and we wanted to know what kind of movie genre we could select in order to express all these themes. So, we thought that, in the end, that maybe the zombie genre movies would be the perfect one.
And to kind of bounce off that, you mentioned that zombies are the best genre to tell this story, and this is now your fourth zombie film over the span of your career. So, I wanted to know what appeals to you about zombies as a creature, and what is it about them that allows you to bring your visions to life?
What is great about zombie movies is that, for example, when you see Night of the Living Dead by George Romero, at that time, the zombie the word didn’t even exist. We didn’t really call them zombies at that time. But Romero succeeded in trying to depict the social fear of that time. So, zombies really embodied the social fear, and even if times change, I think zombies are the greatest way to depict the fear of collectiveness, and also to depict the social issues we are confronted with. So that’s why I chose this zombie genre for this film.
Something else that I think really stands out in the film is not just the zombies; it’s also the set design, because of the fungus that grows on the walls and the slime as the zombies peel off the walls. So, I wanted to know what it was like working with the set designers to ensure that this kind of viral infection was reflected not just within the zombies but also authentically within the environment.
Yes, you have the zombies that embody AI and all the socialness of our time, but on the other hand, you have the natural, biological aspects that are in the ants, because the ants, for us, were a model. Ants communicate through pheromones, and that was really interesting. So, in order to replace the pheromones in the zombies, we actually wondered what could replace the pheromones. So that’s why we tried to think about new communication networks with the zombies, and that’s why we resulted in thinking about this blob substance, because visually we just start with an environment that we are quite acquainted with in our daily life, and suddenly in a very short period of time, we just go into something that we never saw or knew.
Yeah, and my final question to kind of wrap this up is: I’ve been a fan of your work for a very long time, and something that I think a lot of people may forget about you is that you actually started in animation, and people might know you from The King of Pigs. That’s kind of the first thing that I saw of you when I was growing up. I probably saw that trailer when I was way too young. But I wanted to ask, like, what is something that you learned from that very first animated project, and I know you did that, like, a short beforehand as well, that you’re still able to apply in your more recent film, Colony?
When I made The King of Pigs, it was a very low-budget animated movie, and at that time I was working at home. I was drawing, and then the drawing pieces were put together in order to make this animated movie. So, I didn’t start in this big industry. I really started at home, so I really think of myself as being very lucky for that. So in the future, I will continue to make low-budget movies because I think that the making of the low-budget movies and the home experience is a kind of a home sweet home where I can go back to in the future, and it’s also partly why I made The Ugly last year and for me, it was a kind of a recharging time because it was a new market, new ideas that I could put into a movie. So, I really hope that in the future, I will keep on alternating between commercial big movies and low-budget independent movies.
That’s my time. Thank you so much for speaking to me. Like I said, an absolute honour. Thank you so much.
SEE ALSO: Read our ★★★★ review of Colony here
Robert Ewing
