Bong Joon Ho’s first film in space is a specific take on sci-fi, where, as you’d expect from the “Parasite” director, every detail is carefully thought out as he put his unique stamp on the genre. The film is based on Ashton Edward’s 2022 novel “Mickey 7,” but as the “Mickey 17” writer/director told IndieWire on the Toolkit podcast, there were certain things he was drawn to before even reading the book, having first received a 10-page summary of the novel.
“When I first read the treatment, I was just instantly captivated by the concept of human printing and also that they go on this colony expedition to another planet and encounter creatures there,” said Bong, via translator Sharon Choi, while on the podcast.
Those key ingredients sparked images, ideas, and concepts that sent Bong’s mind racing, supplying the visual metaphors he could build off.
Human Printing
From the start there was one visual that spoke to the director: Human Printing. Bong has never been drawn to the concept of cloning — so much so, Warner Brothers has asked press to refrain from using the “c” word — but the idea that a fictional technology, combining the recycling of organic material and 3D printing to generate a new version of the same person, was something different. For a filmmaker whose stories often gravitate toward the politics of class, human printing carried a very specific meaning while also appealing to Bong’s sense of humor.
“What was important for me was the emotions that come out of the fact that humanity’s so devalued through his job,” said Bong. “If you think about the inkjet printers we had back in the day, you would always get paper jams and the paper would come out all crumpled. And I started thinking, ‘Well, what if that’s a human being not a piece of paper?’ And I thought that’s just the way people view human worth, how that has hit rock bottom in this world, was what I was focusing on.”
A Gritty, Utilitarian, and Anonymous Spacecraft
The medical lab housing the human printer is the only clean, high-tech, and traditionally space-age sci-fi area aboard the spacecraft. Bong told IndieWire he wanted the “very futuristic and advanced” lab to stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the ship, where the crew worked and lived. Production designer Fiona Crombie drew inspiration from present-day vessels like submarines, oil tankers, cargo ships, machine rooms, and the crew quarters in each. Director Bong wanted a gritty, functional, but also flawed design, which spoke to a certain lack of care that went into creating spaces for the workers. Their quarters are tight, and the enormous spaceship never feels expansive to the crew.
“You have this ginormous spaceship that’s almost like a cargo ship, and it’s not fancy. It doesn’t look like a sci-fi spaceship, it’s very gritty and grimy,” said Bong. “The whole point of that this ginormous space is that you never get a sense of how many people are actually there. Everyone feels quite anonymous.”
Crombie and Bong created an interior in which the camera and the character’s field of view is limited. There is no spatial orientation, there are no long corridors to look down, nor a sense of how different areas of the ship connect. On an expedition, in which the crew is expected to start a new colony and population together — a “great sex-pedition” promises leader/dictator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) — the environment is isolating.
A Very Recognizable Future
Director Bong would often reject any designs or costumes that were too futuristic. The world needed to be relatable. Rather than reinvent the trays, cups, pens, and furniture of 2025, “Mickey 17” is filled with a modular and minimalist version of our daily lives.
“We wanted to actually focus the futuristic elements to the smaller items in the film, like you see that external hard drive that stores Mickey’s memories, it looks like a red brick, so it’s a mix of past and future,” said Bong.
Those smaller futuristic props are often surrounded by a world that is very familiar to the audience. A good example of this is when Mickey and Timo (Steven Yeun) are running from the loan sharks’ back on Earth — in a flashback showing what motivated them to sign up for the colony expedition.
“The city sequence where you see Timo and Mickey get chased by gangsters, the location looks like a backstreet that we know, even their costumes look very contemporary, and I guess you can say that the costumes and the locations sometimes look even quite nostalgic,” said Bong. “But the only thing that seems futuristic is that metal orb that beeps and goes after Timo and Mickey and electrocutes them. We tried to use those smaller props to make it seem like a society of the future and bring these more disparate elements.”
A Not So Post-Apocalyptic Earth
While the majority of “Mickey 17” takes place aboard the spacecraft and the planet of Niflheim, the film does touch upon the motivations for workers — beyond Timo and Mickey, who are running from the gangsters they owe money to — to leave Earth and sign up for the expedition. The Earth’s environment has deteriorated beyond the higher temperatures and more powerful storms of present-day global warming, but Bong does not go full post-apocalyptic. Life is still relatively recognizable on Earth, it just seems to be harsher — we see wind storms, followed by extreme rain in the backdrop of the large glass dome building where hundreds of people are signing up for the expedition.
As Bong said in the press notes interview, “It’s not a mass migration or exodus. The film’s tone and mood make it feel quite matter-of-fact. Leaving Earth and migrating to another planet seems like quite a common choice.”
Niflheim: How They Created the Icy Planet
When the colonists arrive on their new planet, Niflheim, they discover an Arctic winter. The winds, snow, and freezing temperatures — to say nothing of the deadly airborne virus the Earthlings’ immune system can’t handle pre-vaccine — are inhospitable at first.
To create the Niflheim exterior, the “Mickey 17” production did move north of their London studios as winter started to set in, but only by 60 miles to Cardington, where they built their wintry planet from scratch. The environment of Niflheim was pure movie-magic, combining special and visual effects. The SFX team used hundreds of tons of salt, soap, and enormous rocks, and created actual sub-freezing temperatures on set, along with huge wind machines for the blizzard conditions. The VFX team hung a quarter mile of both soundproof cloth and white screens around the 172 x 433-foot set — deciding on white over traditional blue screen, to help with the effect of how light bounces off snow — and then added the far off landscape in post-production.
The Creepers
To create Niflheim’s native population, which Marshall degradingly dubs “The Creepers,” Bong turned once again to his long-time collaborator, conceptual artist Heechul Jang, who helped the director on the eponymous creatures in “The Host” and “Okja.”
“This might be a bit irresponsible, but what I tell Heechul, the creature designer, is just what I want to see on screen, the final result,” said Bong. As an example, in “The Host,” the director described to the designer the key scene where the monster hangs from the bridge and performs an acrobatic move. Continued Bong, “ So once I list all the things that I want, then Heechul starts imbuing the [creatures] with their biological background and comes up with a basic anatomy of these creatures that would justify the actions, or the things that I want see at the end. He has great knowledge, [including] animal anatomy and biology.”
With “Mickey 17,” Bong shared with Heechul how he envisioned the younger creepers would curl up into a ball and roll, but Heechul then not only created the animals’ anatomy, but the evolutionary backstory for the creature.
“He really thinks about the relationship between these creatures and their environment,” said Bong. To survive the icy planet, the creature designer considered, “How they restore heat in their bodies, and the fur coat that Mama Creeper has on her shell or skin, and how the caves that they live in withstand the cold. Just all these elements in their environment that would be reflected and how these creatures look and operate, that’s why he’s such a great animal specialist and creature designer.”
A huge part of the creature design stemmed from Bong’s vision of the climactic battle, which he said on the podcast was a direct reference to the “Battle of Algiers,” and the noise the Algerians make as a sign of rebellion against the imperialist French Army. Bong cast actress Anna Mouglalis as the voice of Mama Creeper (after first encountering the actress when he was Head Jurist at the 2021 Venice Film Festival) but it was his creature designer who worked directly with the “Mickey 17” sound and VFX team to make sure each creature’s anatomy matched up with the action and sounds Bong envisioned for the finale.
“He had to think about the structure of their mouths and how their tongues worked, so he was actually working with our sound team and the VFX team,” said Bong. “They were all working together to make that sequence possible.”
To hear Bong Joon Ho’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview on IndieWire’s YouTube page.
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