Parasite Bong Joon-ho

Development

The idea for Parasite originated in 2013. While working on Snowpiercer, Bong was encouraged by a theater actor friend to write a play. He had been a tutor for the son of a wealthy family in Seoul in his early 20s and considered turning his experience into a stage production.[14] The film's title, Parasite, was selected by Bong as it served a double meaning, and he had to convince the film's marketing group to use it. He said: "Because the story is about the poor family infiltrating and creeping into the rich house, it seems very obvious that Parasite refers to the poor family, and I think that's why the marketing team was a little hesitant. But if you look at it the other way, you can say that rich family, they're also parasites in terms of labor. They can't even wash dishes, they can't drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family's labor. So both are parasites."[15]

Writing

After completing Snowpiercer, Bong wrote a 15-page film treatment for the first half of Parasite, which his production assistant on Snowpiercer, Han Jin-won, turned into three different drafts of the screenplay.[14] After finishing Okja, Bong returned to the project and finished the script. Han is credited as a co-writer.[14]

Bong said the film was influenced by the 1960 Korean "domestic Gothic" film The Housemaid, in which a middle-class family's stability is threatened by a disruptive interloper in the form of household help.[16] The incident of Christine and Léa Papin—two live-in maids who murdered their employers in 1930s France—also inspired him.[17] Bong had also tutored for a rich family himself. He said: "I got this feeling that I was infiltrating the private lives of complete strangers. 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."[18] Additionally, Moon-gwang's allergy to peaches was inspired by one of Bong's university friends having this allergy.[19]

Darcy Paquet, an American residing in South Korea, translated the English subtitles, writing directly with Bong.[20] Paquet rendered Jjapaguri or Chapaguri, a dish cooked by a character in the film, as ram-don, meaning ramen-udon. It is a mix of Chapagetti and Neoguri produced by Nongshim.[21] The English version of the film shows packages labeled in English "ramyeon" and "udon" to highlight to English speakers how the name was created. Paquet believed the word ram-don did not previously exist as he found no results on Google.[22] On one occasion, Paquet used Oxford University as a reference instead of Seoul National University, and in another, used WhatsApp as the messaging application instead of KakaoTalk.[20] Paquet chose Oxford over Harvard because of Bong's affinity for the United Kingdom, and because Paquet believed using Harvard would be "too obvious".[22] Paquet wrote, "In order for humor to work, people need to understand it immediately. With an unfamiliar word, the humor is lost."[22]

Filming

Principal photography for Parasite began on 18 May 2018[23][24] and ended on 19 September.[25] Filming took place around Seoul and in Jeonju.[26] The director of photography was Hong Kyung-pyo, a well-known South Korean cinematographer who had worked with other well-known directors.[27]

The Parks' house

The Parks' house was a specially constructed set. The ground floor and the garden were constructed on an empty outdoor lot, while the basement and first floor were constructed on set.[28] "We built the main floor of the house in a backlot and for the second floor it was all green screen outside", explained editor Yang Jin-mo. "When we shot toward the outside from inside, everything beyond the garden was all VFX."[29]

As part of the scripting, Bong also designed the home's basic layout. "It's like its own universe inside this film. Each character and each team has spaces that they take over, that they can infiltrate, and also secret spaces that they don't know."[30] A fictional architect, Namgoong Hyeonja, was created as the home's designer and previous owner, and production designer Lee Ha-jun considered the house's form and function based on how Namgoong would design it.[28] It was designed and constructed to be not only beautiful but "a stage that served the precise needs of his camera, compositions, and characters, while embodying his film's rich themes".[31]

Lee said, "Since Mr Park's house is built by an architect in the story, it wasn't easy finding the right approach to designing the house...I'm not an architect, and I think there's a difference in how an architect envisions a space and how a production designer does. We prioritize blocking and camera angles while architects build spaces for people to actually live in and thus design around people. So I think the approach is very different."[30] For example, Ha-jun established that Namgoong would have used the first floor's living room to appreciate the garden, so it was built with a single wide window and only spartan seating options for this function.[28] Some of the interior artwork in the house sets were by South Korean artist Seung-mo Park, including existing artwork of hers and some created for the film.[28] The team designed the home and interiors to make the set amenable for filming at the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, favoring wide and deep rooms rather than height.[30]

Lee said the sun was an important factor when building the outdoor set. "The sun's direction was a crucial point of consideration while we were searching for outdoor lots", he said. "We had to remember the sun's position during our desired time frame and determine the positions and sizes of the windows accordingly. In terms of practical lighting, the DP [Hong Kyung-pyo] had specific requests regarding the color. He wanted sophisticated indirect lighting and the warmth from tungsten light sources. Before building the set, the DP and I visited the lot several times to check the sun's movement each time, and we decided on the set's location together".[30]

The Kims' flat

The Kims' semi-basement flat and its street were also built on set, partially out of necessity for the flooding scenes.[30] Lee Ha-jun visited and photographed several abandoned villages and towns in South Korea scheduled to be torn down to help inform the set design. He also created stories for the Kims' neighbors and added details of those residents along the street to improve the authenticity of the street's appearance.[28]

Editing

According to editor Yang Jin-mo, Bong chose to shoot the film without traditional coverage. To give them more editing options with limited shots, they sometimes stitched together different takes of the same shot.[32] Yang edited the film using Final Cut Pro 7, a program not updated since 2011.[33]

The film was produced for release in colour. A black and white version was produced before the world premiere in Cannes, debuted on 26 January 2020 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and was re-screened from 29 to 31 January. It also received a limited release in some countries.[34][35]

Music

The score, by South Korean composer Jung Jae-il, consisted of "minimalist piano pieces, punctuated with light percussion", setting the film's "tense atmosphere".[36] It also had a baroque texture with excerpts from Handel's opera Rodelinda and the 1964 Italian song "In ginocchio da te" by Gianni Morandi.[36][37] It was recorded mostly through computer sounds.[38]

The soundtrack was published and released in Korea, in digital and physical formats, by Genie Music and Stone Music Entertainment on 30 May 2019.[39] Internationally, it was released on 11 October 2019 by Milan Records.[40] It was released in English titles,[41] but the names and nouns are different from the English subtitles as translated by Paquet.[42] On 14 February 2020, it was released in double-vinyl by Sacred Bones Records (a division of American film production company Neon) and Waxwork Records, in multicolour variants.[43]

An original song, "Soju han jan" (Korean: 소주 한 잔, lit. 'A glass of soju'), written by Bong and performed by Choi Woo-shik, who plays Ki-woo, is heard during the film's end credits.[44] For marketing the soundtrack's international digital releases, the song was displayed in English as "Soju One Glass" [sic]; it was later changed to a grammatically correct title to be shortlisted for the Best Original Song category at the 92nd Academy Awards.[44][45]