Bong Joon-ho initially came up with the idea for Parasite after a friend of his told him he ought to try writing a play. Inspired by a number of different stories, such as the 1960s Korean thriller The Housemaid, as well as the story of Christine and Léa Papin, the real-life French maids who inspired Jean Genet's famous play, The Maids, Bong collaborated with his production assistant on Snowpiercer, Han Jin-won, on the script.
Filming began in May of 2018, and the house in which most of the action takes place, as well as the Kims' basement apartment, were both built sets rather than rented locations. This allowed Bong to have complete control over his settings, and stage a number of impressive and over-the-top sequences, such as the flooding of the Kims' street. In an interview about the film, Bong stated, "There are people who are fighting hard to change society. I like those people, and I’m always rooting for them, but making the audience feel something naked and raw is one of the greatest powers of cinema...I’m not making a documentary or propaganda here. It’s not about telling you how to change the world or how you should act because something is bad, but rather showing you the terrible, explosive weight of reality. That’s what I believe is the beauty of cinema.”
Bong Joon-ho had long been a highly respected auteur in South Korea, and was known to a percentage of American audiences for his work on films such as Snowpiercer and Okja. Parasite catapulted him to a different level of fame, earning him not only the first Academy Award for Best Picture to go to an international film, but also a unanimously-decided-upon Palme d'Or at Cannes. In his review of the film for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers writes, "Let's just say it: the South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is some kind of genius and he tops himself with Parasite—it's explosive filmmaking on every level and one of the cinema high points of 2019. You won't know what hit you."
