“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is now a journey you can take home.
The recent Colin Farrell/Margot Robbie romantic drama, which follows them as they drive home from a wedding and end up taking magical detours in their lives, is available wherever you rent or buy your movies. And you should. It’s a film like no other, both emotionally authentic but sometimes stylized and heightened to an insane degree, where longing and sadness nestle alongside joy and exuberance. It’s clear why the film underperformed at the box office – it’s borderline indescribable; If more people had made the trip, word would have certainly spread. Now you can watch it at home while telling your friends.
Perhaps most surprising is that the film was directed by Kogonada, who came from the world of video essays to make the visually arresting and deeply felt “Columbus” and “After Yang.” This is Kogonada’s first film released by a major studio and the first of his films that he neither wrote (the screenplay was by Seth Reiss) nor edited (Susan E. Kim and Jonathan Alberts handled these duties).
“I had made two films that dealt with grief and a certain type of loss and I was maybe looking for a different tone. I was working on a few things that I was writing and some things that I was adapting, and then this script came to me,” Kogonada said. “I was really captivated by this movie, because it was so creative and imaginative and original. Romance was something I thought about and loved, that kind of movie. It wasn’t like I was like, Oh, I want to make this movie, and I’m going to find something that will take me there.”
Kogonada said the scripts would come to him but often he would put in 25 pages and think: Oh, I don’t think I could do it. But the storyline of “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” was different. “There’s really something about re-engaging our past in a way, but in this delicious way.” There’s a sequence where Farrell and Robbie revisit his high school and the girl he loved who rejected him, during a production of the school play, that really sparked Kogonada’s imagination. “I thought, Oh, I’d love to try doing that“, he said.
Between “After Yang” and “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” Kogonada had directed four episodes of the prestige drama series “Pachinko” for Apple TV and Lucasfilm’s “The Acolyte” for Disney+, a “Star Wars” series set during a period of continuity known as the High Republic. These experiences were crucial for Kogonada to tackle something as large and complex as “A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey.”
On “The Acolyte,” Kogonada had the opportunity to “play with a certain toolkit that wasn’t available in the smaller films I worked on,” including Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, which he later used on “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.”
“The other experience was going back to a pop sensibility, which I had grown out of, and maybe even a little distanced from,” Kogonada said. He grew up in a working-class family in the Midwest. His parents, he would later discover, were artists and “helped me figure things out,” but he didn’t have access to arthouse cinema.
“They worked so hard as immigrant parents that I knew nothing about their own artistic sensibilities. I was traveling the world like most people in my community, watching everything – movies, TV shows, everything, 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 and it starts to awaken certain parts of your mind, and then eventually it led me to all kinds of films that I started to love more than anything,” Kogonada explained.
With “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” he said, he wanted “to go back to that boy/teenager who looked at everything, loved everything, and sort of took delight in things that were for everyone but also felt a little different.”
The other big inspiration? Anime. He had started watching cartoons with his youngest son and quickly incorporated cartoon elements into “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” – he cites as an example the “GPS that talks to you and takes you anywhere.” “There are a lot of original independent films in America, but to be honest, I was leaning more towards the world of anime, where anything is possible. There’s a bit of melodrama in there. All those sensibilities, that’s what I was trying to merge into this story.”
At one point, he and his son did a retrospective of Hayao Miyazaki’s films.
“Watching it with him, it really confirmed that he was a filmmaker doing incredible work blending fantasy and the everyday so grounded, that he takes the time to show a frog jumping towards a puddle. It forces him to say that it’s valuable enough to spend this space and this energy to draw this creature making these few little jumps, because it’s important, you know, and it doesn’t add anything to the plot,” said Kogonada. “It doesn’t matter. It’s like running aground. He always gives us time to feel the wind moving through the fields and all that, you know, it’s really, yeah, I really like his sensitivity.”
In talking with his cinematographer and production designer, he asked himself: Could we make anime a real influence?
“We’ve had this whole discussion. We’re all taking on the challenge,” Kogonada said. They were discussing it in pre-production, when he learned that Joe Hisaishi, a Japanese composer best known for his collaborations with Miyazaki, had heard of the film. His representative wondered if Kogonada had any interest in meeting him. Kogonada was blown away. “For me it was like: Mozart wants to compose something. Are you open to this? I just couldn’t believe it,” Kogonada said.
The director said that Hisaishi had a desire to expand beyond animated films and his representative in the United States nominated him for the film.
“I was delighted with it. And I think it’s an interesting merger,” Kogonada said. “I think there’s an Asian flavor to it, even though it’s my least Asian movie, because there aren’t really any characters. But a lot of the musicians – from Laufey to Mitski to Joe, there’s this sensibility, and it’s a slightly different flavor in how to handle fantasy and whimsy and even choices in our movie. It’s just a different approach. I was really excited about that.”
Kogonada said the real challenge was “mixing all these influences, for better or for worse. It’s about trying to understand the balance of them.” He knew he was doing it largely for a national audience. Hisaishi wrote the music for early versions of the film. “He’s such a precise composer that he will literally write on stage with incredible breaks and everything. Once he did that, we almost didn’t want to change the edit, because it was so beautiful,” Kogonada said. But as the filmmaker worked on editing the film, it required a different energy, which necessitated new cues. (The soundtrack album contains some of the tracks that did not make it into the final version of the film.)
“I think it’s probably his most romantic music and it had a lot of fantasy in it. 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 movie. I didn’t want to give him any parameters other than watching it and writing down how you feel, how it speaks to you,” Kogonada said. “I was especially happy about it all.”
It’s Hisaishi’s score that most directly connects “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” to the anime and that’s yet another reason to give it a try. Maybe you too will fall in love.
