Snowpiercer‘s journey to the big screen has been long, torturous, controversial, complicated and long (it’s still not been released here in the UK).
Bong Joon-Ho’s superb sci-fi did finally enjoy a limited release in the US, and star Tilda Swinton has been talking about possible ideas for expanding the world of the film.
Speaking to HitFix, the star revealed that she and Bong Joon-Ho spoke about potential prequel ideas.
“We still talk about it. It’s a fantasy in our minds about a prequel and so there’s this very big ice day coming, who knows? You know lots of fancies in our mind. Who knows if it’ll ever happen but imagine such a thing. Imagine a prequel. Imagine — and you know what? I can imagine everything about Mason. Mason could be anybody and anything.
“Anybody or anything could actually turn into Mason and Mason’s like a sort of weird, morphed, mutant, free radical sickness. And who knows how he or she started out? A really mild-mannered man in a suit, which is the way it’s written in the script — it’s still written as a mild-mannered man in a suit.”
Swinton’s musings definitely fall into the “what-if” category of discussion as we find it hard to imagine another film getting made in the world of Snowpiercer. Still, her performance as Mason was outstanding and it’s fun to imagine watching her toothy, slimy villain take shape.
“I think that one of the things that really fascinated me about the whole Mason journey was this thing I wanted to look at, which is the way in which the monstrous death bots turn into clowns,” she said. “And it’s not just that they do it to themselves, you know, people like Idi Amin and Mussolini and Hitler, you know, just kind of outrageous, over-the-top behavior. Margaret Thatcher. Even George Bush, you know, that feeling of becoming a joke is not just something that is sort of part of their shtick, but it’s also something that we tend to relish. We just want someone who’s really shafting us badly, fiscally or in terms of their foreign policy. We end up saying, ‘Oh, but they’re kind of funny, aren’t they? They’re kind of funny or they’re kind of ridiculous or they’re ludicrous.’ And it’s almost like we’ve got this inbuilt defense mechanism that we feel so hard of mind we have to laugh at them.
“And it’s dangerous. I mean I think people constantly — if they have the opportunity to reelect them — constantly elect and reelect people who are sort of larger than life soap opera characters for the drama. I think very often people will vote somebody in because they think it will make good copy, you know? And I mean we have a politician now in the UK who’s, you know, I would lay money — in fact I’m considering going and laying money for his anointment at a certain point as a leader — he’s a big leader in the country because he’s kind of a major buffoon. And I think it’s a dangerous addiction. It’s like an addiction to drama somehow or an addiction to, you know, somehow ignoring how powerful they are by pretending they’re just ludicrous buffoons. It’s just empathy.”
Snowpiercer still does not have a UK release date. You can read our review here and keep up with the latest in dystopian futures with the new issue of SciFiNow.
