“Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho says he pulled from his real life when making the genre-bending movie, during the Variety Screening Series presented by Vudu. The South Korean film follows four lower-class family members as they pose as hired help for an unsuspecting, wealthy family.
“I had experience. I was a tutor when I was in university in a very rich family. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, introduced the job to me. She was teaching English for the student and he needed a math tutor, so she brought me in, which is quite similar to the first half of this film,” Bong said. “But I was horrible at math so I was fired after only two months and that’s something different from the film.”
“Parasite” picked up three Golden Globe nominations for foreign language film, director and screenplay on Monday. During the Q&A, Bong said he first came up with the idea while he was working on his 2013 film, “Snowpiercer.”
“I think already at that time I was very much thinking about class and the story of rich and poor. But to be honest, what really fascinated me was the sense of infiltration, infiltrating a rich family,” he said. “I think everyone sort of has this guilty pleasure of wanting to spy on private lives of strangers, particularly rich people.”
