The Safdie brothers explain the brilliance of Bong Joon-ho film ‘Parasite’
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Bong Joon ho names the most original filmmaker of all time
There’s a lot more to Bong Joon-ho than his sensational Palme d’Or and Best Picture-winning movie Parasite, with the release of the modern classic in 2019 merely opening the door to his glittering filmography. Capturing the imaginations of critics and audiences alike thanks to its powerful social commentary, the intricate drama, spiked with deep-rooted moral concern, did a significant amount of good for South Korean culture in general.
Experimenting with genre, humour and surreal opinions on social issues, Joon-ho is a wonderful creative with a meticulous eye for detail and an innate love for the art form, having created seven different films that each challenge the art form. Whilst Parasite is certainly his most famous flick, his previous movies including Memories of Murder, The Host and Okja are worthy of a similar level of praise, with the director never making the same film twice.
A purveyor of the craft as well as a seasoned filmmaker, Joon-ho has previously citing the likes of Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Nicolas Roeg, John Carpenter and Mike Leigh as some of his favourite filmmakers of all time. Besides these cinematic greats, there is one other that Joon-ho considers so great that he goes so far as to call him “the most original filmmaker in history”.
In conversation with W Magazine, Joon-ho excitedly exclaimed Alfred Hitchcock as the director who has made the most cinematic innovations. “He invented a genre of his own while creating works closest to pure cinema in which the images speak for themselves,” the South Korean filmmaker stated, with evidence of the director’s appeal coming through in Parasite, a film infused with the influence of a Hitchcockian thriller.
Working with some of the finest actors of all time, including Cary Grant, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman, Hitchcock created some of the finest movies of the 20th century, earning a reputation of being the finest director of the era.
Known as ‘the master of suspense’, Hitchcock was a multi-faceted director capable of creating romantic dramas, stylish thrillers and much more, though it was his foray into horror-thriller tales that would make him such an enduring name. Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name, Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho is his most well-known movie, a project that toyed with the structure of the horror genre and subverted audience expectations until its shocking, now infamous, final sequence.
Hitchcock’s iconic movie also happens to be one of Joon-ho’s all-time favourites, telling Vanity Fair in 2019, that the British director “always gives me very strange inspiration,” before adding, “I rewatched ‘Psycho’ because the Bates house, not the motel, it had a very interesting structure”.
To relive the drama and intensity of Parasite, even if just for two minutes, check out the trailer for the 2019 thriller, below.
