Yeon Sang-ho

Yeon Sang-ho (born 1978 in Seoul) broke out with bleak adult animations The King of Pigs and The Fake before directing Train to Busan (2016), the zombie thriller that became a worldwide phenomenon. He has since built one of Korean genre cinema’s most distinctive careers with Peninsula, Netflix’s Hellbound and Parasyte: The Grey — repeatedly returning to stories about technology, faith and what makes humans human.

AI as subject, not tool

AI is a recurring character in Yeon’s work. His 2023 Netflix hit Jung_E imagined a dying Earth where a legendary mercenary’s brain is cloned into combat AI. And his zombie thriller Colony, which premiered at Cannes in May 2026, grew directly out of his reading on AI: researching the principles behind it, he landed on the idea of “universal thinking” — a drift toward a central, standardized way of thought — and built the film around its humanistic opposite, individuality.

Yet the fascination has not translated into advocacy on either side. Yeon told interviewers at Cannes that he used no AI technology in making Colony — relying on choreographers, dancers and stunt teams over CGI — while remaining open to seeing what the technology can do in the future. He predicts the visual-effects industry will change very quickly through AI.

Asked in June 2026 whether AI-made results can be art, he reached for history rather than a verdict: people once debated whether Marcel Duchamp’s works were art, and in the end such debates themselves make the arts richer — a philosopher’s answer from a director who keeps making films about the question without joining either camp.