February 9, 2025

FILMHOUNDS Magazine

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“He was afraid of the role” — Mongrels Director Jerome Yoo On The Immigrant Journey And Having 14 Dogs On Set

Game Theory Films

After creating a live-action sequel to Disney’s Recess, the sky was the limit for Korean-Canadian director Jerome Yoo. His debut feature, Mongrels, is a multi-layered character study of a grief-stricken Korean family as they adjust to life in 1990s rural Canada.

As the film plays at VIFF 2024, Jerome spoke to FILMHOUNDS about getting in touch with Korean culture, going off grid to find his lead actor, and managing a pack of well-trained dogs.

Mongrels is your debut feature. How did you get into filmmaking?

I didn’t start with filmmaking, I started out as an actor in the theatre. Of course, with how big the industry is in Vancouver, there was a natural transition for me into film and TV. I did that for a while, starring in small roles in a couple of Netflix shows, Amazon, things like that. When 2018 rolled around, there was an opportunity for me to do a short film that I had written as an experiment. My friends were pitching for StoryHive and I had no technical skills or knowledge of how to direct, so I thought the best thing I could do was write, because as an actor I had read many scripts and filling up 10 pages didn’t seem daunting to begin with. I came up with an idea called Gong Ju and it made it through and got funded, but my director friends didn’t want to take it on and instead convinced me to direct it. They said all I really needed to know was how to work with actors, which I did! That got me behind the camera for the first time and I’ve never looked back. After that I kept writing and the first short led me to Crazy 8s, where I made Idols Never Die. That was really well received and it led to Mongrels, which was daunting at first, but I rode a wave of fear and spontaneity and that brought me here. It’s crazy to reflect on!

The film is a dissection of grief from the perspective of a Korean immigrant family living in 1990s rural Canada. What inspired that combination?

I don’t know exactly where the spark came from. As I became a filmmaker and a storyteller, I realised a lot of my work was influenced by Korea and its culture, identity, and immigration. I had a deep yearning to reconnect with my motherland, having grown up in Canada since I was one. Deep down there was a detachment to all these stories that I’ve heard until this point, and with Mongrels I felt as though I had this little thing inside my soul that I needed to put out there before I could move on to anything else. It was to do with the journey that my family went through to immigrate here and then the 24 or 25 years they have spent in Canada. The film is not a perfect reflection of that, but there’s so many little memories that are imbued within it. I remember a single image that’s reflected in the last scene of the movie, where there is these lost characters looking out into this new world and trying to face it. They’re a fractured family and for them to look into the future they have to come together. It’s a bit a of a tribute to my family and our collective experience.

You produce three effective character studies across three chapters. Was that always the intended structure or did it evolve over time?

It was always the intended structure. I wanted to create three distinct character explorations and that I think there’s so many layers to a character’s experience when migration, uprooting, and adapting are involved. My journey through Canada was not the same as my mother and father’s. They were raised in Korea and were there for 30 years of their lives and were then thrown into Canada, this new world, with language barriers and things that were so unfamiliar, whereas I was a little baby growing up here, in this diverse country with English as my first language. Compared to my parents, life here was quite easy for me and I wanted to portray those different layers in Mongrels. In films about immigration, we find it so easy to show the struggle of it, the racism, or just being oppressed, which is all true and a sincere part of the experience. I wanted to show all the colourful layers and the joy that’s involved too, the acceptance. I tried to take my own experiences and separate it all into three different generations of one family, almost like Moonlight did with a single character’s journey through three different phases of their life, but with that focus on the whole family.

Sonny in particular is a boldly written character who exists in part beyond the real world, but remains tethered to it by his kids. Was it tough to write, cast, and ultimately bring that character to life?

Sonny was the hardest to cast out of everyone. Originally I thought that would be the Hana character, because we needed a child actor, but for Sonny and Hajoon, I actually had to go to Korea to cast Jae-Hyun Kim [Sonny] and Da-Nu Nam [Hajoon]. Sein Jin, who plays Hana, was really the only local actor we were able to find. For Sonny, we did a nationwide search in Canada and I saw so many actors in Korea. I think at one point we had about 70 actors in the room, really great theatre actors and notable film and TV actors, but the image I wanted from Sonny was someone who was just broken inside. I wanted to see that from his physicality and behaviour and no-one was able to capture that essence.

Eventually, one actor told me about this retired actor who now lives in the countryside. I was curious and wanted to connect with him, but he didn’t know how to do a video call. He was way out in the suburbs, basically off grid, and the first time I was able to get him on the phone I knew instantly that he was the one. I didn’t even audition him, just spoke to him for an hour about his perspective on life. He’d read the script by that point and his life was eerily similar to Sonny’s, living off the grid and just so hurt by humanity and his past. All he does is volunteer and he barely makes a living wage. He just wants to float through life and is tired of being hurt and he put all of that into the performance. He’s probably the best actor I’ve worked with as he’s such a maximalist and really puts his life on the line for anything he does. He said he was afraid of the role because it felt so close to him and he really challenged me. Directing him was so daunting at times because he wouldn’t want to go to certain places. To collaborate with such a strong actor like that was truly a blessing for me.  It really opened my eyes to how actor-director relationships can be and took my writing to another level.

The film looks fantastic. How did director of photography Jaryl Lim get involved with the project and what did he bring to the shoot?

Jaryl Lim is the only DP I’ve worked with twice, and that’s very much because I wanted every single short film I made to be an exploration of my relationship with the DP and how that should work. After Jaryl and I worked on a short together, I knew we had to do it again. The way he engages with the actors, the way he sees story, and the way that he was able to make ideas better… I think this was the first time I’ve had that sort of creative relationship with a DP, where we’re just honest with one another. Not in a damaging way, but strictly in a way that’s trying to serve the story, the character, and the moment. That’s what he captures and it definitely elevated the film to another level. By the time we got to set, we were so immaculately clear on what we wanted to achieve with every single scene and moment. Of course, there are adjustments made on the day when we discover something new, but I think it was really the preparation that we had in pre-production that allowed us to play around on set and deal with what the actors were giving us. He has a brilliant eye and through that cinematic language we are able to create those three distinct chapters and portray the characters in their own distinct ways.

There’s a surreal, almost dreamlike quality to Mongrels at times. Is that a commentary on what it’s like to live in a grief spiral?

It definitely comes from the grief of the characters. We see surrealism and magic with the dogs that live on the outskirts of this town as they’re as lost as the family at times. They are just as misunderstood, which is supposed to be the parallel. We see it predominantly with Sonny and then in Hana. Sonny is stricken with grief at times and that comes across as tantrums and outbursts that make him come across as a harsh father. His drunkenness is part of his grief and he spirals further and further into loneliness, which disconnects him from his children, despite how much he cares for them and loves them. The relationship between parents and children in Korea and Canada is quite different and sometimes grief can make the parents act the way that they do. With Hana, I think again she sees the world through a very naïve lens. She’s still young, and I think in the back of her mind she understands what’s happening in the world around her, but the way that she deals with grief is to ignore that and see the things that she’s comfortable with until she’s ready to break that and step back into reality. I find that drawing a surrealistic world serves as a coping mechanism for the characters to escape from reality when they delve too deep into their own grief and sorrow.

The idea of working with all those dogs sounds fantastic, but how was it on set?

It was really, really tough. Probably the hardest day on set was working with the dogs! There’s so many things going on. For Sein Jin, it was her most emotionally tense scenes and she doesn’t come from an acting background, so we had to not only get a performance from her, but had to sustain it and recover from it during repetitive takes while getting these dogs to listen and do the things they had been trained to do. They had four trainers and a bunch of wranglers for two days off set and I think the highest number of dogs we had on set was 14. On screen it ended up being less because they didn’t all listen, so we used the takes where around three quarters of them were doing the right thing. It was the most stressful day, but as soon as it was done the crew was all over the dogs, cuddling them and hanging out with them. The entire crew were real big dog lovers, including me, and we were just obsessed with these dogs because off set they’re super well trained and do everything that the trainer wants them to do. But as soon as the cameras started rolling, they never listened!

What are you making next?

I’m writing my next feature, which is an adaptation of a comic book that’s set on the west coast. I’m looking forward to it!

Are there any films you’re excited for or filmmakers you’d like to shoutout at VIFF ’24?

I’m really excited to see The Chef & the Daruma. Matt Dix is an incredible director and it’s a cool story because it’s about the inventor of the California roll and who knew that was invented here in BC? Tojo is a local celebrity and I know the screenings are already sold out, so it just seems very special and I’m excited to see it.

Mongrels is currently playing at VIFF 2024. Keep an eye out for a theatrical release in Spring 2025