Bong Joon Ho
Director
Oscar-winning director of Parasite. He used AI in the visual effects of Mickey 17 (2025) while framing his screenwriting as a nightly contest to outwrite the machine — “one screenplay a year that AI could never replicate.”
In his words
I want to become a writer who writes one screenplay a year that AI could never replicate.
I ask myself every night, how can I write a screenplay that AI could not? I want to make a “move 78” in every other page of my screenplays.
Biography
Bong Joon Ho (born 1969) is a South Korean director and screenwriter whose Parasite (2019) became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Across Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer, and Okja, his signature is genre filmmaking with a sharp social edge.
Racing the machine, using the machine
At a Seoul press conference in January 2025 for Mickey 17 — itself a story about a disposable, endlessly reprinted human worker — Bong described his writing discipline as a nightly contest with AI. He invoked “move 78,” the play with which Go master Lee Sedol beat AlphaGo in 2016, as his model for the unpredictable human choice a machine cannot anticipate, and set himself the goal of one AI-proof screenplay a year.
Yet Bong is no abstainer. He has acknowledged that AI was used in Mickey 17’s visual effects — including work on scenes where two Robert Pattinsons share the frame. Speaking at the Marrakech International Film Festival in late 2025, he noted the irony himself: AI served as a tool even in a movie about humanity threatened by its own technology, while “the unique warmth and imperfection of humans remain.”
His position lands in a South Korean film industry that is adopting AI production tools faster than most, and it mirrors peers like James Cameron: yes to AI in the pipeline, defiance at the writing desk. Bong treats the technology less as an enemy than as a sparring partner that raises the bar for what human authorship must be.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/bong-joon-ho