Yeon Sang-ho sleeps soundly at night – no bad dreams, no night terrors, thank you very much. “When I get to bed, I’m just completely exhausted,” the 47-year-old South Korean director says with a grin. “When I sleep, the next step is just I wake up. So I never dream or have nightmares.”
This must have come as a relief given he has spent a decade contemplating zombies on and off following his 2016 mega-hit Train to Busan.
It is late afternoon when we meet on the windswept sixth-floor terrace of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palais. In just over six hours, Yeon’s new zombie film Colony will receive its world premiere in a Midnight Screenings slot, echoing the unveiling of Train to Busan a decade ago.
Yet any thought that he is simply retreading old ground should be dismissed; Colony injects the genre with something fresh and frightening.
