High and Low

So it's not "High and Low," it's "Highest 2 Lowest"... we were doing a reinterpretation and not a remake, and that's a big, big thing.

We looked at a lot of other films, even down to a Kurosawa film, ‘High and Low,’ that was an influence on how we were trying to stage certain things and the moral ambiguity of it.

The Dark Knight in turn shaped 2 films

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Bong Joon-ho has said Lee Chang-dong taught him that genre films could carry the weight of social critique without becoming lectures, that entertainment and political anger could share the same frame. Burning and Secret Sunshine are the films that built the tradition Parasite sits inside. But the deeper ancestor is Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), a Korean film about class resentment in a domestic space, which Bong has called the founding text of Korean cinema. It's on MUBI.

Parasite in turn shaped 1 film

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David Fincher consciously stripped away the sensationalized, blood-soaked tropes of the serial killer genre, looking instead to the meticulous, paper-chasing journalistic thrillers of the 1970s. Fincher demanded his crew study Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men, instructing them to obsess over the unglamorous drudgery of reporting, the harsh fluorescent lighting of newsrooms, and the terrifying weight of institutional silence. He also drew heavily upon the suffocating, analog paranoia established in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, perfectly capturing the madness of a man losing himself in audio tapes and ciphers. Through this New Hollywood lens, Fincher transformed a murder mystery into a haunting epic about the destructive nature of obsession.

Before shooting began, J.J. Abrams gathered his entire crew to watch High and Low. Not because it was Star Wars, but because it was Kurosawa, which is the same thing. Kurosawa's command of camera movement, of how a frame tells the audience exactly where to look and how to feel, became the operational manual. Abrams cited this film explicitly in a 2015 DGA interview, acknowledging that The Force Awakens was his education in visual storytelling happening in real time. High and Low remains available on Criterion Channel.