One of the defining features of Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s award-winning dark comedy about class struggle, was the Park family’s lavish house. However, the house does not exist in real life and was actually created by the film’s CG team. In a newly released interview, Joon-ho says that the team created a virtual version of the house that could be navigated like a video game to help Joon-ho storyboard the movie.
In February, Parasite became the first foreign language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The movie chronicles how the exploitative relationship between the destitute Kim family and the wealthy Park family results in a bloody struggle for dominance. Critics praised the film for its exploration of class conflict, symbolism, and dark humor. Now, a year after it initially released, Parasite is receiving a Criterion Collection release, which comes with several exclusive features, including interviews with Joon-ho about the film’s creation.
It is in one of these interviews that Joon-ho discusses the Park family’s house, which was where most of the film takes place. But the house was actually a set, and not a real home. The outside of the house that was seen in the movie was actually created by Parasite’s CG effects team. But Joon-ho still needed to envision a lived-in home in order to work out the storyboard for Parasite. To give Joon-Ho this space, the film’s CG team created a virtual, video game-like version of the house. The director then used this virtual model to create Parasite’s storyboard.
In the interview, Joon-Ho explains, “You need the shooting space ready to complete the storyboard. About 60% of Parasite takes place in the rich family’s house, but that house is a set… Those sets are always built just before shooting, so it’s hard to finish a storyboard ahead of time. So what we did this time is we came up with the design for the set that the art team and I agreed on and asked the visual effects people on the CG team to create a virtual set based on that, kind of like an RPG game.”
Joon-ho goes on to explain how he used the virtual set to story board the movie. He said that he could roam around the virtual house and adjust his camera settings to compose shots as if he were playing a video game. Before Parasite, Joon-ho was known for the Korean-Czech film Snowpiercer, which later spawned a TV show on TNT.
The CG house is a remarkable feat. The house looks so real that it received its own feature in Archetypal Digest. Joon-ho explains that the team needed to get the house right, as it was a defining feature that symbolized the Park family’s wealth compared to the Kim family’s squalid basement apartment.
One year after its initial release, Parasite is a critically acclaimed and audience-adored film with themes that reflect the world’s current problems and anxieties. Parasite is so popular among viewers that it broke Hulu records when it was stream able on the platform in April.
Source: Polygon