Built from Scratch – Details of the Parasite House Revealed
The house actually played a great supporting role in the film
Parasite is one of the most talked-about non-English language films of the year. It left a mark on the minds of the entertainment buffs when it won four awards at Oscars 2020. It won the Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. One of the highlights of the iconic film was the minimalist Parasite house that gained a lot of attention. Here’s how it was built.
The Parasite house was built by a fictional architect and was owned by the wealthy Park family. The director of the film, Bong Joon-Ho, went to considerable pain to using the house in order to examine class warfare. Believe it or not, the director had the whole structure built from scratch. It is perhaps why the house became so popular and why the film was so successful that even plans for a Parasite limited series are in the works.
Talking about the experience, Bong said “The production designer was having a nervous breakdown every day. The props, furniture, and paintings [in the Park house] were really expensive, so they would always tell the cast and crew, Be careful!” For those who are unaware, the mid-century Scandinavian style furniture was custom-made by Bahk Jong Sun, a renowned South Korean artist and carpenter.
Sharing his thoughts on the creation of the Parasite house, Lee Ha-jun, the production designer said ‘In most Korean films, less than half of filming takes place on-set; but over the few years, the amount of on-set filming has been increasing. [On Parasite] it began with having lots of conversations with the director. I then gradually developed the production design through constant designing and running 3D simulations. Through modelling before building the set, we could take into consideration the movement of the cast and the positions of the cameras.”
Explaining further about the Parasite house, he said “The general concept that penetrates the film is verticality; it descends endlessly from top to bottom. The Park house has the same structure. As you can see from the semi-basement, which is a room you enter when you descend from the ground floor, all the layers in the film exist vertically. The numerous stairs and the density of the space shifts as you descend. There are a lot of layers in Parasite.”
He also said this about the Parasite house “I have a lot of friends who’re architects, so I met and talk[ed] with them to get inspiration. Because the set accounts for 80 per cent of the whole film, I had a strong belief that it should not look like a set when designing it. So I tried very hard to not miss any details. Early on, we decided not to let the audience know that the house was in fact a set – that way, they would be able to focus and immerse themselves in the film. We finally let the truth out after Cannes. I was very nervous that someone would find out that all these spaces were actually a set, that they would actually look like a set onscreen. In the end, no one figured it out.”
