“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is now one that you can take at home.
The recent Colin Farrell/Margot Robbie romantic drama, which follows them as they take a drive home from a wedding and end up veering into magical detours from their life, is available wherever you rent or buy your movies. And you should. It is a movie unlike any other, both emotionally authentic but sometimes stylized and heightened to an insane degree, one where longing and sadness are nestled alongside joy and exuberance. It’s clear why the movie underperformed at the box office – it’s borderline indescribable; had more people gone on the journey, certainly word would have spread. Now you can watch it at home and still tell your friends.
Perhaps most surprising is that the movie was directed by Kogonada, who came from the world of video essays to make the visually arresting, deeply felt “Columbus” and “After Yang.” This is Kogonada’s first film released by a big studio and the first of his films that he didn’t write (the script is by Seth Reiss) and edit (Susan E. Kim and Jonathan Alberts handled those duties).
“I had done two films that were dealing with grief and a certain kind of loss and I was searching for maybe a different tone. I was working on a few things that I was writing and some things I was adapting, and then this script came to me,” Kogonada said. “I was really taken by it, because it was so creative and imaginative and original. Romance was something I was thinking about, loving, that genre of film. It wasn’t as if I was like, Oh, I want to make this film, and I’m going to find something that would lead me to it.”
Kogonada said that scripts do come his way but that often he’ll get 25 pages in and think, Oh, I don’t think I could do it. But the script for “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” was different. “There’s really something about re-engaging our past in a way, but in this delightful way.” There’s a sequence where Farrell and Robbie revisit his high school, and the girl he loved and who spurned him, during a production of the school play, that really sparked Kogonada’s imagination. “I thought, Oh, I would love to try and make this,” he said.
In between “After Yang” and “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” Kogonada had directed four episodes of Apple TV’s prestige drama “Pachinko” and Lucasfilm’s “The Acolyte” for Disney+, a “Star Wars” series set during a period of the continuity known as the High Republic. These experiences were crucial to Kogonada tackling something as large and complex as “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.”
On “The Acolyte” Kogonada was given the opportunity to “play with a certain toolkit that was not available to me in the smaller films that I’ve worked on,” including Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, which he then used on “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.”
“The other experiment was returning to a pop sensibility, which I had grown out of, and maybe even distant from a little bit,” Kogonada said. He grew up in a working-class family in the Midwest. His parents, he later would discover, were artistic and “helped me understand things,” but he didn’t have access to an art house cinema.
“They were working so hard as immigrant parents that I didn’t know anything about their own artistic sensibility. I was navigating the world like most people would in my community, just watching everything – films, TV shows, all of it, and embracing it. And then you suddenly discover something like ‘The Truman Show,’ which is for everyone and yet it feels like there’s something else going on. There’s a different kind of integrity to it and it starts awakening parts of your mind, and then eventually it led me to all kinds of films that I started loving more than all of it,” Kogonada explained.
With “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” he said, he wanted “to return to that boy/teenager who was watching everything and loving everything and kind of delighting in things that were for everyone but also felt a little bit different.”
The other big inspiration? Anime. He had started watching anime with his youngest son and soon incorporated elements from anime into “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” – he cites the “GPS that talks to you and takes you anywhere,” as an example. “There’s plenty of quirky independent films in America but if I’m honest, I was looking more to the anime world, where anything is possible. There’s a little bit of melodrama in there. All of those sensibilities was what I was trying to fuse into this story.”
At one point he and his son did a retrospective of the films of Hayao Miyazaki.
“Watching it with him, it really confirmed that he was a filmmaker just doing incredible work blending fantasy with such grounded everydayness, that he takes time to show a frog leaping to a puddle. That requires him to say this is valuable enough to spend this real estate and energy to draw this creature doing these few little jumps, because it’s important you know, and it doesn’t add to the plot,” Kogonada said. “It doesn’t do anything. It’s just like grounding. He always leaves time for us to feel the wind moving through the fields and all of it, you know, it’s really, yeah, I really love his sensibility.”
When talking to his cinematographer and his production designer, he wondered, Could we make anime a real influence?
“We had all this discussion. We’re all taking up the challenge of that,” Kogonada said. They were discussing this in preproduction, when he got word that Joe Hisaishi, a Japanese composer best known for his collaborations with Miyazaki, had heard about the film. His representative was wondering if Kogonada had any interest in meeting with him. Kogonada was blown away. “To me it was like, Mozart wants to score something. Are you open to it? I just could not believe it,” Kogonada said.
The director said that Hisaishi had an appetite to expand beyond anime films and his stateside rep put him up for the film.
“I was delighted by it. And I think it is an interesting fusion,” Kogonada said. “I do think there’s Asian flavor in there, even though it’s my least Asian film, because there’s not really any characters. But a lot of the musicians – from Laufey to Mitski to Joe, there’s that sensibility, and it’s a slightly different flavor of how to deal with fantasy and whimsy and even the choices in our film. It’s just a different approach to it. I was really excited about it.”
Kogonada said that the real challenge was “to blend all these influences, for better or for worse. It’s trying to understand the balance of it.” He knew that he was making it largely for a domestic audience. Hisaishi would write music to early versions of the movie. “He’s such a precise composer that he will literally write to the scene with incredible breaks and all of it. Once he did that, you almost didn’t want to change the cut, because it was so beautiful,” Kogonada said. But as the filmmaker was working on the edit of the movie, it required a different energy, which required new cues. (The soundtrack album has some of the pieces that didn’t make the final version of the movie.)
“I think its probably his most romantic score and had a lot of whimsy. He immediately felt the suspense of the story where anything is possible. And so that opening number, which almost feels like it could be a spy film. I didn’t want to give him any parameters outside of watch it and write what you feel like, how it’s speaking to you,” said Kogonada. “I was just mostly delighted by it all.”
It’s Hisaishi’s score that most directly links “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” to anime and it is yet another reason to give it a whirl. Maybe you’ll fall in love too.
