‘Mickey 17’ Director Bong Joon-Ho Explains How Robert Pattinson Helped Navigate the Language Barrier

alongside Toni Collette, Steven Yeun and Mark Ruffalo. Although it isn’t his first English-language film, English is not his native language. Bong uses a translator during his movie productions, but the director admits that Pattinson played a big role in breaking the language barrier.

You might remember Bong Joon-ho’s trustworthy translator from the Academy Awards ceremony in which Parasite became the big winner. Sharon Choi was also beside the director for the production of Mickey 17. In a conversation with Collider, the director revealed that Choi was involved on set, but he said that Pattinson helped in terms of the difficult language barrier. Mickey 17 represented a change, and he didn’t have the resources he had when making his Korean-language movies:

“I had a co-writer or dialogue-polishing writer for those projects. Mostly I relied heavily on the actors in regards to the language of the film. With Mickey 17, it was Rob. I relied heavily on Rob. He has such a unique and amazing linguistic sensibility. Especially with Mickey 18, he improvised a lot of really fun dialogue, a lot of which was not really scripted.

It was another great lesson in realizing that you need to work with amazing actors to overcome, I guess, what you can call a “linguistic handicap” I have, where it’s not my native language. It’s working with very trusty actors and also a great translator like her. Actually, she was on the set of Mickey 17. She was always in between me and Rob Pattinson and me and Mark Ruffalo. She’s such a creative translator.”

Mickey 17 was released in theaters on March 7, 2025. The film has had a good critical reception, with many highlighting Pattinson’s performance and his ability to play his clones of diverse personalities. By the time of writing, it holds a 79% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has earned over $16 million from a $118 million production budget. This is the film’s official plot synopsis:

Adapted from the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, this stars Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” – a disposable crew member on a space mission, selected for dangerous tasks because he can be renewed if his body dies, with his memories largely intact. With one regeneration, though, things go very wrong.

What’s Next for the Korean Visionary Behind ‘Parasite’ and ‘Mickey 17’?

Mickey 17 is Bong’s first big studio project. Although it’s still early and the film still has a long way to prove its success, Bong is already planning his next feature film. There aren’t any details as to where he will make it, but he was kind enough to share with Collider that he’s developing an animated film:

“So, I have been working on this animation film since 2019, and now we have more than 100 artists working on the film, and the pipeline is fully going. It’s a really unique story about deep sea creatures that features very adorable creature protagonists. We also have human characters. It’s a very unique CGI animated film, and it’s really going. It’s under work now. 2027, maybe.”

Source: Collider