My main job is not promoting a film, it’s writing scripts, and, of course, I’m doing that right now, in hotel rooms and on flights, but it hasn’t bee… - Bong Joon-ho

I don’t think I’m pessimistic at every point, but I want to be honest in the face of the reality that stands in front of us. With Parasite, my thinking was that mankind’s achieved such great development — like the mobile devices we see in front of us but if we think about the past 30 years, has the gap between rich and poor dissipated? Not really. I have a son myself, do I think things are going to improve in his generation? I don’t really think that either. That is the source of a lot of fear, actually. So I wanted to be honest with that fear and sadness and really deliver that.

In this film, it’s very difficult to separate the good ones from the bad ones. Even the rich characters are not your conventional, typical, greedy villains that you see onscreen. I was sympathetic to everyone. I identified with every character, to some degree, but at the same time I also maintained a sense of distance from all of them as well.

Sci-fi gives you the advantage of being able to say what you want pretty directly. Like, in Snowpiercer, that scene where Ed Harris has a long monologue in the engine car. Parasite has the landscape stone. The movie has symbols, but I wanted to focus more on the mundane atmosphere, on the stories of our neighbors.