Cannes Crowd-Pleaser ‘Hope’ Drew Inspiration From Jaws & Lethal Weapon

Hope, the mega, non-stop action, alien thriller from filmmaker Na Hong-jin, had its premiere at the Grand Théâtre Auditorium Sunday night and it had the audience bursting into spontaneous rounds of ecstatic applause during certain high-octane moments.

It was shot primarily on locations and sound stages in South Korea, thousands of miles away from Los Angeles — but Hollywood lingers in the movie’s DNA.

Director Na says he watched scores of Hollywood movies as he was writing his script. The film starts out with a lone sheriff [Hwang Jung-min] who knows there’s something dangerous out there in the shadows causing death and destruction.

For inspiration, director Na watched some early Steven Spielberg. “Duel for the terror,” the filmmaker says referring to Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie starring Dennis Weaver who’s being pursued on a highway by a seemingly demonic Peterbilt truck.

Duel itself was inspired in part by Ishirō Honda’s 1954 Godzilla.

Director Na also viewed Jaws to help him understand how a cop copes – or not – when they’re in a situation out of their depth. Roy Schneider’s Police Chief Martin Brody is new in town — and hates the water…

We chatted as best we could until Na’s interpreter came and joined us on the beachfront at Lucia where the after-party for Hope was being held.

“For the actors performance as far as that is concerned I wanted to reference from the  eighties and nineties for that sort of lone hero cop style to be reflected in my movie,” director Na explains. 

He rewatched Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Die Harder but the kicker for him was Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. “I loved that film, I enjoyed that film thoroughly,” he says with a wide grin. 

Plus he liked the idea of “how these heroes never die in those films.”

Also, for the “creatures,” he wanted what he describes as “a human-being touch.”

Director Na explains that “there are things that I wanted to do with this film where  although we now live in an era where it’s possible to render these creatures 100 percent with CGI, I wanted to go back  to the way they used to make things when this technology wasn’t available.”

Director Na went back to the 1950s and sixties and screened movies like The Creature From the Black Lagoon and many other similar pictures in that range and he liked checking out the colossal creatures in Fantastic Voyage, again to get a feel for how to design the monsters for his film.

He says that Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander were vital in helping to interpret his vision. “They showed me such utter trust,” he says of the actors.

Fassbender says that he and Vikander gave themselves over to director Na for their scenes that were captured on a sound stage in South Korea.

I ask him if he was buoyed by the roars of approval that greeted some fabulous set pieces in the movie. Laughing, director Na says “I was thinking I should have more applauses…I need to work on it harder. To be honest with you I didn’t have enough time to finish this film for Cannes. There’s still work to do. I was working on the sound just the day before traveling here.”

So, there’s more for him to do on the movie ahead of its fall release in the United States through Neon.

Once upon a time, I used to love and enjoy the summer blockbusters from Marvel and the Batman movies, but Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,I have sat bored senseless through recent efforts, as have my son and his pals.

But Hope gives me hope. It was downright audacious of Thierry Fremaux and his colleagues to pursue director Na and say that they believe in a movie called Hope.

Also, it’s important for the Cannes Film Festival to move with the times and have some fun with authored genre movies. Not everything has to be worthy. Although, I must say that movies that are socially aware and probe how we live will usually get my vote.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden with Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto hooked me for all of its three hour and 16 minutes running time. Many of us are going to go through the experience, if we haven’t already, of having a loved one suffering from dementia illnesses. It’s about more than that, by the way. It’s about love and friendship and how, as one character says, “some things we desire eludes us.”  

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, with a raw high-wattage powerhouse performance from Javier Bardem, is sublime.

I’m also liking the sort of patrician nobility that underpins Gilles Lellouche’s performances in two films — opening night’s The Electric Kiss and Lászlo Nemes’ Moulin, where he portrays Jean Moulin. Give Léa Drucker a watch in A Woman’s Life, and then go check her out in last year’s Case 137.   

That’s all. For now.