![]() Sims: The design of the two houses is everything for the story-it sets up how these families exist so differently. The semi-basement home of the Kim family reflects their tenuous economic state. We don’t have any villains in Parasite, but in the end, with all these misunderstandings, they end up hurting each other. As a filmmaker, I always try to shoot with sympathy. ![]() I think sadness and comedy all come from that misunderstanding, so as an audience member, you feel bad-you want to step up and reconcile them. That’s going on in Parasite as well there’s a gulf these two families can’t breach.īong: I haven’t heard this comment in a while! If you think about it, my films are always based on misunderstanding-the audience is the one who knows more, and the characters have a difficult time communicating with each other. Sims: So many of your films are about people contending with monsters they don’t understand. I think in my films, it’s always difficult to separate the two. In this story, the characters treat a normal person like a ghost, so you can say that’s social commentary a genre element. Sims: But Parasite still has the quality of a haunted-house story.īong: Yes, it’s still a genre movie, and there is some kind of ghost story. The movie has symbols, but I wanted to focus more on the mundane atmosphere, on the stories of our neighbors. Like, in Snowpiercer, that scene where Ed Harris has a long monologue in the engine car. Did you consciously want to move away from harder genre films while keeping up the allegory?īong: Sci-fi gives you the advantage of being able to say what you want pretty directly. Sims: You’ve worked in the world of allegorical sci-fi and fantasy in recent years. Every week I would go into their house, and I thought how fun it would be if I could get all my friends to infiltrate the house one by one. When I was in college, I tutored for a rich family, and I got this feeling that I was infiltrating the private lives of complete strangers. So I was thinking, What story could I tell with just two houses? I came up with the idea of a poor house and a rich house, because at the time I was working on the post-production of Snowpiercer, so I was really enveloped in this story about the gap between the rich and the poor.Īside from Snowpiercer and theater, I was fascinated with this idea of infiltration. Of course, with theater, the space is limited, but for all my previous films we had a lot of locations-like, Okja starts in the deep mountainside and ends in Manhattan. What was the genesis of that idea?īong Joon Ho: I have a close friend who’s a stage actor, and he suggested that I try directing a play. This interview has been edited.ĭavid Sims: I know Parasite initially started out as a play. The Atlantic spoke with the director about the development of the film, the way Parasite is playing to international audiences, and his approach to allegory and genre-bending. It examines what happens when the Kims, one by one, start working for the Parks-after which the story develops in some shocking ways, a Bong specialty. But his new film, Parasite, one of the best of the year, is a thrillingly restrained work, largely confined to two locations: the homes of the wealthy Park family and the poor Kim family. Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), two English-language sci-fi allegories, are as funny as they are terrifying.Īs Korean cinema has produced some of the most exciting filmmaking of the century, Bong has been at the forefront, taking wild swings with outlandish stories. The Host (2006), a huge crossover hit, breaks every rule in the monster-movie rule book and is all the better for it. Memories of Murder (2003), the true-crime detective story that made him a star in his country, is notable for how it mixes melancholia with biting satire. ![]() ![]() For almost 20 years, the South Korean director has been making movies that span every category. īong Joon Ho never met a genre he couldn’t subvert. This story contains mild spoilers for the film Parasite.
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