“Mickey 17” is the first feature that Bong has made with a Hollywood studio, and his most expensive one yet, with a budget just under $120 million. On this last score, though, he was ambivalent. “I prefer small productions, and I dislike big productions,” he said.
I’d heard chatter that when Warner Bros. greenlighted “Mickey 17,” the studio hoped it might spawn a new franchise, centered on a hero conveniently defined by his own potential for infinite undead sequelization. But Bong’s sensibility has proved consistently idiosyncratic in ways that fly against the logic of the multiplex. Most of his endings are depressing, and his English-language features, all of them science fiction, can feel especially strange, with heightened performances and a tonal volatility that has become his signature — a “switchback energy,” as Tilda Swinton, who has acted in two of his films, put it to me.
This energy is an effect not of wild abandon on Bong’s part, however, but of an extreme degree of control. He creates highly detailed storyboards for all his films, and these serve as unbudging blueprints during production. The cinematographer Darius Khondji, who worked with Bong on “Mickey 17” and “Okja,” and who has shot films for David Fincher, Alejandro Iñarritu and the Safdie Brothers, said that Bong “functions on a different wavelength I never felt with anyone before.” He compared the storyboards to a musical score. “Everything is written, and you can change the rhythm and the way you play the notes, but if you try to pull out a note, or a group of notes, he’ll say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’”
Mark Ruffalo described this as a productive constraint. “It’s the most auteur-centric filmmaking style I’ve worked in,” Ruffalo said. “Every shot, every angle, every gesture is storyboarded, and he shoots the storyboard frame for frame. But that’s not to say he’s controlling. The exciting thing as an actor is that you’re free, in that frame, to reinvent the performance.”
For some actors, that feeling of freedom arrives only after a period of intense disorientation. “Normally you shoot a whole scene,” Pattinson explained, but with Bong’s approach, “he knows exactly which shot he wants for exactly which line, so sometimes we’re just shooting one line at a time. You show up on the first day and they say, ‘We’re gonna shoot the seventh line of this scene.’ You go: ‘What do you mean? I don’t know how I’m going to say the first line.’ Usually, I’d have to do the whole scene to get the line right.
“So, everyone has a nervous breakdown for a week,” Pattinson went on. “But then you say, ‘Oh, this is great.’ If you’re shooting an entire scene, there’s a more legato rhythm, a crest and a fall, some gradation. But you don’t really need it for the style of performance Bong wants, and that frees you up to do these very discordant turns: If you’re just doing one line, you can do maximum intensity out of nowhere. It has this feel of anime — it can go from completely placid to enraged in a split second.”
Pattinson told me that Bong “seems very pleasantly amused by everything.” They talked a lot about the movie in the months preceding the shoot, but when it came to filming, Pattinson said, the director gave him license to explore: “It got to the point where I was just trying to make him laugh, trying things in playful ways. And he’d say, ‘Yeah, do whatever you want.’”
