A graduate of Korea National University of Arts’ department of stage design, Lee finds design inspiration everywhere. “For references, I look at the combinations of colours and textures in plants or the rusty steel and broken cement at a construction site. I don’t just look at great photographs and designs,” he says. “The biggest reason why we built the set for the rich family’s house was the garden,” adds Lee of where much of the film’s pivotal action takes place. The script describes the house as having been built by a famous architect for himself, with a large ground-floor living room focused on looking out a huge window onto the garden.

‘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.

‘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.’