Hope Director Confirms Sequel Already Written After Cannes Ovation

Na Hong-jin isn’t done with his aliens. One day after Hope landed at the Cannes Film Festival to a thunderous seven-minute standing ovation, the Korean director told a packed press conference Monday that a sequel is not only on his mind — the script is already written.

“I think you can readily imagine this sequel,” Na said. “And there’s a script that’s already been done that I’d like to shoot. So if I have the opportunity, I would indeed make a sequel if possible.”

That’s a pretty definitive “yes” dressed up in filmmaker humility.

What Hope Is Actually About

The big-budget sci-fi action film centers on an alien invasion from the planet Gh’ertu, whose inhabitants crash-land in a rural South Korean town called Hope Harbor. The creatures — representing different shapes and class divisions from their home world — descend on the locals, and all hell breaks loose. Korean stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Hoyeon Jung anchor the survival story on the ground, while Michael Fassbender, Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton play the English-speaking extraterrestrial family at the center of the chaos. All four are rendered as CGI aliens.

The film drew spontaneous bursts of applause during its high-octane set pieces at the Grand Théâtre Lumière premiere Sunday night — and Na, characteristically, wasn’t entirely satisfied. “I was thinking I should have more applauses,” he laughed. “I need to work on it harder. To be honest with you I didn’t have enough time to finish this film for Cannes. There’s still work to do. I was working on the sound just the day before traveling here.”

Why Fassbender and Vikander Said Yes to Playing Aliens

The real-life married couple came to the project through very different paths — sort of. Vikander explained that she fell in love with Korean cinema early in her career after attending the Busan Film Festival. She saw Na’s previous film The Whaling and was “utterly blown away.” When Na reached out years later, the pitch was simple. “He said, ‘I have some aliens.’ And I was intrigued,” she recalled. “I didn’t think, I said yes! I think director Na is incredible, such a visionary, and I felt very honored to be part of his film.”

Fassbender’s path was considerably shorter. “Alicia told me to do it,” he deadpanned.

“He listens to me!” Vikander shot back — and the room erupted.

Taylor Russell, who Vikander also brought into the fold, had been dreaming about working in foreign-language cinema for a while. “The dream is to be able to work in a different country on foreign, to me, language films and to work with an auteur. And director Na is an auteur who makes incredible cinema,” she said. “I wouldn’t even cast myself in any of his films because it feels inconceivable, so when the call came, you made me laugh the entire time I talked to you, so it made me think this would be a fun ride.” She added that she’d love to do more Korean films in the future — and maybe even speak Korean on screen.

Na, for his part, said Fassbender and Vikander were essential to realizing his vision for the creatures. “They showed me such utter trust,” he said of the two actors, who filmed their scenes on a sound stage in South Korea.

The Hollywood DNA Behind a Korean Sci-Fi Epic

For all its Korean roots — shot primarily on locations and stages in South Korea — Hope has Hollywood running through its veins. Na watched scores of American films while developing the script, reaching back through decades of genre cinema to find his touchstones.

For the terror of something unseen and pursuing, he turned to Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie Duel. For understanding how a lone cop handles a situation completely beyond his training, he studied Jaws. The lone-hero energy of Hwang Jung-min’s sheriff character was shaped by rewatching Bruce Willis in Die Hard — but the film that really clicked for Na was Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon. “I loved that film, I enjoyed that film thoroughly,” he said with a wide grin, particularly drawn to the idea of heroes who simply refuse to die.

For the creature design itself, Na deliberately avoided leaning entirely on modern CGI. He went back to 1950s and ’60s monster movies — The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Fantastic Voyage — because he wanted the aliens to have what he called “a human-being touch.” The goal was texture and physicality, not photorealistic polish.

When a journalist at Monday’s press conference asked whether real aliens might come to Earth and teach humanity something, Na wasn’t having it. “Why are you asking me this question!” he scoffed, before deflecting to his cast.

Fassbender took the question seriously. “I don’t know we can learn something. It depends,” he said. “In the last couple of years, the American government has been releasing stuff that pilots have captured — unidentifiable flying objects. Hopefully we’re learning something from them. In our case, what’s interesting about the aliens — we compare them to humans. They want the same thing, protecting their young, protecting the future of their young. The similarities between us and aliens is what we look at in the film.”

Hope opens in the US this fall through Neon. And if Na has his way, it won’t be the last trip to Hope Harbor.