10 Directors Who Love Movies You'd Never Expect

Bong Joon Ho received plenty of accolades this year with his 2019 horror film, Parasite. These awards include Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards. Bong achieved all this with a film that was filmed completely in the Korean lanaguage, making his success all that more impressive. So, what movies inspired Bong as a child? The answer may be surprising.

Bong recently told Vanity Fair that one of his favorite childhood films was the American WWII classic, The Great Escape. The Great Escape was released in 1963. It starred Steve McQueen and an ensemble cast as they portrayed POWs executing an ingenious escape from a German POW camp.

Here’s what Bong had to say about the film, “I remember having cold sweats all over my body while watching it. It’s a story about someone escaping the prison camps during World War II, but there’s a strange sense of romance in that film, and I would love to do something like that.”