The reason Bong Joon-ho was so proud of ‘Parasite’
Even before Parasite was released in 2019, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho had established himself as one of the greatest East Asian directors of his generation with the likes of Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja. But it was his 2019 thriller that cemented Bong’s position, becoming the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’.
Parasite, starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong and Choi Woo-shik, tells of a poor South Korean family who come to work for their wealthy counterparts by pretending to be more qualified than they really are. There’s an undoubted majesty to Bong’s film in the way it examines the class divide in Korea and delivers the narrative in a truly intoxicated style.
But even with the widespread critical and commercial success of Parasite, there are a few details within the film that made its director truly proud of himself. In an interview with The Talks, Bong explained his approach to creating a different kind of narrative while employing a unique visual style.
“I wanted to create a very delicate and detailed film where you would feel like you could even smell every single character,” Bong said. He went on to explain that he’d considered himself to be a “genre director”, even though many of his films are capable of exploring both personal and political themes.
“I think there is a lot of possibility for genre films to become political, and there is that tradition within sci-fi,” the director noted. “Since both Snowpiercer and Okja had very strong sci-fi colours, you could say they were very political films.” Indeed, both Bong’s 2013 and 2017 efforts contained challenging political themes.
Snowpiercer tells of a lower-class uprising against the elite aboard a globe-navigating train containing the remnants of human civilisation after an environmental disaster, while Okja concerns the welfare of animals, telling of a genetically modified “super pig” who is mistreated by the meat industry.
However, with Parasite, Bong told a very human story outside the realms of science fiction. “With Parasite, the very basis of the story… It’s about the poor and rich, so you can say that from the beginning it is very political,” he said, “But I didn’t want this film to end up as just political commentary.”
Parasite does manage to make the political commentary that many of Bong’s films invariably do, but he also managed to deliver an engrossing narrative full of intrigue, drama, comedy and even horror, so it’s easy to see why the film drew such acclaim and also why the director himself is so proud of his work.
