Rather than me coming back to Korea, it was more important that I come back to films of this size—like Mother and Memories of Murder—because Okja and Snowpiercer were relatively bigger budget films.

At what point in your life did you feel like you became class conscious? And when did you realize you wanted to start incorporating those themes into your work?

I think all creators, all artists, and even just everyone, we are always interested in class, 24/7. I think it would actually be strange if we're not. You know, when we're seeing people on the subway, on the streets, complete strangers, we wonder, how rich are they? Or you know, people we encounter in the airports, did they ride economy class, business class? We always wonder about this, because we live in the era of capitalism. I think we all have a very sensitive antennae to class, in general.

There was Us by Jordan Peele, Shoplifters by Hirokazu [Kore-eda], Burning by Lee Chang-dong, which all talk about class. These films sort of exploded out in the past couple of years. It's not as if we all gathered together for a big meeting on how we should talk about class, it just happened very naturally.

There are so many different ways for wealthy people to signal that they have money. How did you settle on the aesthetics for this particular family?

This family, they want to show that “We do have money, but we're also sophisticated. We're not ostentatious, we're not cheesy about it." That’s why they're living in this house designed by a famous architect. They want to be like, "I know art. I have artistic taste." They want to confirm it every moment, that they're not like cheap rich people.

But what they really want, and this is something Mr. Park says in the film, is they [draw] a line over their sophisticated world and they don't let anyone cross it. They're not interested in the outside world, the subway and people who might perhaps smell. They want to push everyone outside of that line and they want to remain safe behind it.

Smell is a pivotal force in the film. I know it’s the most evocative sense, but are there any other reasons why you wanted to use it to push the narrative forward?

The jobs that these characters take—tutoring, housekeeping, and driving—feature a rare moment where the rich and poor are together in a very private space and so close to one another that they can smell each other. It was kind of the perfect device in the story.

In The Host, you had a character who was a nationally ranked archer, and in this one, the mom is a former champion shot put player. What interests you about those athletes’ stories, especially those coming from working class backgrounds?

In The Host, she won the bronze, and the mom in Parasite, she won the silver medal that's hanging on the walls. I put in that setup to give the sense that if the husband and the mom fight, he might actually be the one getting hit by her. The father, he is the head of the household, but socially, economically, he's pretty incompetent. He's a loser, but physically, he's also weaker. I wanted to give that sense of just overall incompetence with this character.

What do you think makes the rich family such easy marks?

More than anyone else, it's the rich mom who's the really gullible character. But I never thought of her as someone who's dumb or idiotic. She's smart. She probably did well in school. It's just that she trusts people too easily because she's never experienced anything bad happen to her. You know, that character, she probably married into a rich family very young, led a very sheltered life under her parents, and never really struggled.