In 1987, an exhausted Seoul high school student studying for entrance exams looked out his window toward the Jamsil Bridge and saw a vision of a creature climbing the pillars and plunging into the Han River. He vowed to make a movie about it, and 19 years later The Host became South Korea's highest-grossing film at the time. This episode traces Bong Joon-ho's path from a design professor's son in Daegu to a sociology major at Yonsei University breathing tear gas at democratization protests.

The conversation follows his early films Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder, the manga-inspired storyboards and on-set editing that leave no coverage to spare, the secret government blacklist under two presidential administrations, the class architecture of Snowpiercer, the booing and projection glitch at the Cannes premiere of Okja, and Para ...