Inside of all of us are two beasts. For newcomer Jerome Yoo, these beasts take on different forms – whether that is about his Canadian upbringing or his Korean heritage, his background in STEM or his future career in film, and his serendipitous journey to make “Mongrels” possible. We had the privilege of speaking to this promising emerging director – already nominated for eight awards and winner of two at major international film festivals, and with a screening planned on May 11 for CAAMFest. Over Zoom, we spoke about working with translation, dog wrangling, and the good fortune required to be an independent filmmaker.
This interview has been edited and redacted for clarity.
I’ll start with the question on top of my list: Why dogs?
Jerome Yoo: I started with the ending, and worked my way backwards to build a story around that. The seed of the movie started with an image of a family at a lake. Though there were no dogs in the final picture, they could be heard in the background, howling.
I also found dogs to be a part of my upbringing in Canada. There’s a memorable point in my early childhood, during the emergence of YouTube, where there were videos of animal cruelty – specifically depicting South Korean dog eating. Suddenly I got called out for being a dog eater, because of this viral YouTube video depicting Korean people eating dog meat. I didn’t tell my parents this, but I first got a pet dog because I was being made fun of at school.
I also wanted to add this layer of, “It’s not because [Sonny] enjoys killing animals. In fact, it’s done in this specific way; there’s a spirituality underneath it, and a lot of respect for what Sonny does. He has to deal with cruel things to support his family.”
In Korean, there’s a different term for the dogs we (used to) eat, versus the dogs that we take care of at home. Were you thinking about that delineation when you named the film?
Yes, same thing. [“Mongrels”] gave me this image of, a mixed-breed dog – kind of like a Korean family that’s abroad and assimilating into a new lifestyle. I moved to Canada [from South Korea] when I was one, so oftentimes, when just thinking about my identity, I felt I was always at this point of conflict.
I’ve read elsewhere that English is your first language, but your actors speak so much Korean.
For “Mongrels,” I got the script translated by my friend Sharon Choi, who translated for Bong Joon-ho. I am afraid of Korean audiences most. I want to be in dialog with fluency; I want this Korean family from Korea to feel Korean. Most of the time though, I was able to discuss and communicate with my actors in Korean, and my on-set translator would help me with more complicated topics.
The interesting thing about language in your film is defamiliarization. The phrase, “Mom’s hand is a medicine hand” appears as something Koreans often hear when we’re children, but then it haunts Hana later. The defamiliarization feels like the Korean diaspora experience – you hear all these phrases, but it’s always out of context.
[This phrase is] something that lingered for me – was very real, very personal, to me, as a way to add to the mother’s presence even though she’s not physically there in the film. Like a whisper or a ghost, reminding them that she’s around, helping them.
The other defamiliarizing part is the conversations that we hear at home – particularly when Sonny tells Hajoon to leave. Were you thinking about conversations with your parents at all with this translation?
I know a lot of my Korean friends and their parents, who do the quick 180 degree switch. If there’s just a little bit of conflict between the two, the intensity goes from 0 to 100.
Does your dad know?
Sonny is very extreme, unlike my dad. [My dad’s] first comment after the first screening was, “All the actors are great, but the dad is overreacting a bit.” (laughs)
One more note about language: in Korean, we have an implicit hierarchy that is not present in English, and that is reflected in Hajoon’s deferential attitude towards Sonny versus his friends.
For me, it was more casual with my mom and dad, but I thought Sonny would be more strict because of who he is – his backstory and kind of lifestyle he had coming out of his generation. I wanted to make the simple permissions, such as watching television, or having allowance, to be something that the kids have to think twice about.
There’s a distance even in how the children address their parents – like, their mother is just umma (“mom”), whereas Sonny has to be addressed as abeoji (“father”).
Absolutely. The relationship with their mother was closer, tender, softer. Versus with Sonny – I wanted it to feel like a jail cell for everyone. It’s claustrophobic, an atmosphere of stress.
Shifting gears: I’ve read that you like both Hirokazu Koreeda and Barry Jenkins, who feel like total opposites. Koreeda has all these pillow shots and long-shot depictions of isolation, versus Jenkins in Moonlight depicts intimacy, warmth, intense lighting. How do you make sense of the two?
For me, “Moonlight” explores a single character through three different phases of their life, which inspired the three different character structure in “Mongrels.” With Koreeda, some of his films, like “Nobody Knows” (2004), impacted me the most. It is within desolation that there are moments of tenderness. With “Mongrels,” too, Sonny wants to connect, but he is just unable to, and Hajoon has to fill the gap for Hana lest they get consumed by [Sonny’s] toxic masculinity. They look for tender moments.
The house is a really intimate place – like the armchair in the window, the rocking chair, the bathroom.
I can’t say too much about the rocking chair, to be honest. But the washroom – was shown in different lighting conditions depending on the character. It was intended to show a different world that each character sees differently. It’s doubled-down by the aspect-ratio, the color, the movement of the camera. It’s different for each individual character, and cater to their perception of the world around them.
What about the sets outside the home? There’s this stream where Hana and Sonny go fishing in, and it looks like Korea.
I thought the same thing [when I found the location]. I thought that it was interesting that I am able to frame this Canadian stream to look like a Korean one. I wanted Hajoon and Hana to fish with their hands, ad frame it as if they could have done this in Korea, in the countryside there.
How did you find your sets?
Most of the film was just shot around my production designer, Adriana Marchand’s, family home in the outskirts of Vancouver, in Maple Ridge. 80-90% of all the forest scenes are shot in the lot that Marchand’s parents own. They have three dogs, so they need open beautiful forest. For our budget, we were fortunate that there was just so much diversity in the landscape, just within our backyard.
Scenic.
Actually, the Lee family’s home is not Marchand’s, but it was just in the area. A lovely grandmother allowed us into her home to shoot. We were location scouting, and the production designer and I were stressing out. I wanted a home that’s bigger than an RV home that we see in say, “Minari” (2020), because I needed a home that’s on a plot of a very wealthy family’s land. We happened to see a couple [of houses] on our way and we randomly dropped in, when this lovely grandmother was landscaping her home. We introduced ourselves, and she was kind enough to invite us in.
So the rocking chairs were hers.
We didn’t add too much because her home already had such a wonderful, wooden vintage style to it already. I wanted to respect Americana in a Canadiana sort of a way. I thought it was perfect. It was all very serendipitous.
How long did production take?
In total, 20 days of shooting.
Were the three dogs in Marchand’s home part of the movie?
No. Out of the 15 dogs we had, 2 were real professionals, 8 had been on-set before, and 5 were just our friends’ pet dogs. The pet dogs had a single frame to themselves. For the ones with more training, we had two days where the trainers and the wrangler would try to create that scene where the dogs swallow Hana. It was difficult, because the dogs would be fine until we reached this beautiful open forest with squirrels, which made the dogs really happy. It’s really, really difficult to control 8-10 dogs in one shot at a time.
No CGI dogs?
We didn’t have the budget. It also would have looked poorly in the film. Every single dog is real. By the end of the film, we felt like dog whisperers – we had treats and we were able to make the dogs do anything.
Did you have a favorite?
Rony, the black barking dog that plays King Kong. He knows how to bark on command and to be consistent every single take. King Kong was actually the name of my first dog, the one my parents got because I had to prove to the kids in my class that my family love dogs. (laughs)
How did you find the actors?
Casting took a long, long time. We did a Canada-wide search, came up empty. So I cast in Korea, and it was so refreshing in Seoul; there are so many good actors. There are so many talented actors in theaters and TV, and a big appetite for even bigger-name stars to shoot abroad. I must have see more than 100 actors for each role. I found Hajoon in one of the casting sessions. Sonny was harder. I wanted to find someone who was like a cornered animal, but Korean men – even in their 50s – were super suave, very clean-cut, stylish. Their performance would be great. I was like, “You’re so aggressive, but you also have such nice hair.”
Sonny got offered to a bigger and better-known actor, but the schedule didn’t work out since we had to push the dates once. He dropped out, and told me about this one actor that the script reminded him of. When he showed me a photo of Jae-Hyun Kim, I knew he was perfect. The only issue was, [Jae-Hyun] retired as an actor and moved to the countryside, and didn’t have Internet or a computer. It was really difficult to reach him. By this time I was already back in Vancouver, so I had an associate producer drive two hours out into the countryside to pin him down and put him on a computer to have a video call with me. As soon as we hopped on, I knew he was Sonny.
We knew we had to look in Canada for Hana, because of the budget restrictions; it would be more difficult to fly out a whole family to supervise a child actress from Korea. In one of the audition calls for Sonny, this one person didn’t have a headshot, so he included a family shot. In the family shot, I saw this one little girl, so we sent an email, saying, “Sonny has already been cast, but who’s your daughter?” That’s how we found Sein Jin. She’s never acted in her life before. Her audition video was also drastically different – she was too [camera shy], so she sent in a taekwondo video instead. In this video was a girl with such fierce eyes, so we met up in-person to see if she could deliver some dialogue.
Any favorite moments on set?
Sein [the actress who plays Hana] would draw all these animal photos on her iPad, print them into glossy stickers, and gift an animal drawing to every crew member.
What were you?
A koala… in tears I don’t know where the tears came from. Maybe I was crying on the inside throughout the whole thing. (laughs)
I guess the movie is sad.
Yeah. And there are so many cut scenes in the film.
What’s one you wish you could have kept?
One was this magnificent scene where Sonny is in a hahoetal mask. It’s a dream sequence, where [he is] in Korean peasant clothing, which was handcrafted by one of the wardrobe makers on Pachinko (2022). Sonny is on a cliff, praying, and there’s this beautiful shot of him running into the ocean and submerging himself. The pacing [of the movie] didn’t quite fit.
There was also a character called han shin, a mountain spirit, that Sonny prays to. It was also a bold look where we can see the mountain spirit. But in one of the scenes, he is actually there in the background, but we color-graded it, so you can only somewhat see his figure in the background. There was another scene where Hana picks up ketchup chips in a convenience store. Have you ever had these before?
This is foreign to me.
You have Lay’s in the US, right? They make ketchup chips in Canada. I’ll bring you some.
(laughs) Okay. Finally, just one last question: what are you working on next?
I’m adapting a comic book of a cartoonist out of Vancouver. It’s about a high school girl that’s looking for her own suburbia. It’s coming-of-age. The girl’s character happens to be half-Korean, so it looks like I’m continuing on my pathway in portraying Korean characters.
“Mongrels” will screen in San Francisco at CAAMFest 2025 on May 11, 2025.
