Every top-ranked movie made by Bong Joon-Ho has blown away audiences and critics due to the filmmaker’s visionary sense of style and knack for blending a variety of genres. After experiencing multiple release delays due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA Strike, audiences will finally see Joon-Ho’s latest masterpiece Mickey 17 about an “expendable” who dies and gets revived after every space mission only to be cloned when he’s presumed missing or dead. If you want to know just how much of a detailed filmmaker the South Korean native is, I just found out how Boong films his movies thanks to his star, Robert Pattinson, and the whole process sounds so wild.
Based on what I’m seeing in the first Mickey 17 trailer, it looks like Bong Joon-Ho created a whole new futuristic world that allows the audience to travel with Robert Pattinson’s darkly comic hero to space and the ice planet of Niflheim. It’s clear the Oscar-winning filmmaker pays close attention to detail to transport audiences to a visually stunning place that stays with them. At Seoul’s Yongsan CGV cinema (via Deadline), I just found out because of Pattinson how exactly his Mickey 17 director films his movies with the process completely mind-blowing:
I think all the actors had the same experience in that we’d turn up, and then ask, ‘What’s happening? We shoot one line and then move on?’. After one week, everyone is like, ‘This is the best, we want to do every movie like this’… also you [Bong] are so open with showing the edit on set. It’s fascinating to see that you have the entire movie in your head before we have already started shooting it.
That truly is an excellent quality for a filmmaker to be able to visualize an entire movie in your head before shooting starts. Compared to filming an entire scene and then having to do it all over again if the director isn’t satisfied, Bong Joon-Ho prefers to film small segments at a time. The Mother director says the process of shooting and editing films in real-time is actually very common in Korea.
Bong Joon-Ho used the same simultaneous filming-editing method for Snowpiercer with a cool BTS fact of the action-thriller being that the team set up an editing station below the massive set. Small pieces of each scene would be shot only to be edited shortly after to avoid filming material that wouldn’t be used. This means that every precise moment you see in Bong's movies is precise and there for a reason.
There are a bunch of other reasons why Bong Joon-Ho is an exemplary filmmaker many should look up to. A BTS Parasite fact you may not have known about is the Palme d'Or winner had 480 “invisible” special effects where the first floor and the front yard of the Park family’s luxurious house were filmed on an empty outdoor lot with a green screen placed on top to add the second floor. Bong knew that if the house didn’t look perfect, the story wouldn’t work.
Other than Bong Joon-Ho's visual style, the high-grossing director also does a great job introducing social commentary into his movies without being preachy whether it's class inequality in Parasite or capitalism in Okja. With so many genres blended into one film, you never know where the story is going to go which can easily pique an audience’s interest.
Thanks to Robert Pattinson, now I know that Bong Joon-Ho shoots a few lines at a time only for that scene to be edited simultaneously. It’s a cool, innovative process you'd wish many other directors could incorporate in their movies to capture the raw emotion of each performance. As Bong continues to push the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, it’s no wonder he’s so widely received on a global scale. The 2025 movie release of Mickey 17 will make its way into theaters on March 7th.
