The seed of Parasite was a memory: Bong Joon-ho in his early twenties, tutoring the son of a wealthy family in Seoul and feeling like a spy inside a different world. This episode traces how that memory, first explored as a stage play idea in 2013 while he was making Snowpiercer, grew into a 2019 film that won the Palme d'Or by unanimous vote and became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. We look at the influences he layered in, from Kim Ki-young's 1960 film The Housemaid to the 1933 Papin sisters murder case in France.

We then go inside the production: why the marketing team feared the title, how Bong argued that both families are parasites, and how the Park mansion and the Kim family's semi-basement neighborhood were built entirely as sets, one designed around a 2.35:1 widescreen frame and the oth ...