In 2019, IndieWire declared the home in “Parasite” the 12 months’s greatest set. It tells the story’s principal dynamic between the rich and unsuspecting Park household and the poorer Kim household, who infiltrate their lovely dwelling. Director Bong Joon Ho envisioned the interplay between the 2 households as a cat-and-mouse sport of spying, set in an open-plan home.
This structure allowed him to depict the spatial relationships between rooms utilizing fastidiously crafted large pictures with nice depth of area. Manufacturing designer Lee Ha Jun designed his set round Bong’s fastidiously storyboarded blocking and compositions.
When Bong returned to IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to speak about his long-awaited sci-fi area expedition movie “Mickey 17,” he defined that he adopted a very completely different method to spatial storytelling.
“With the wealthy home in ‘Parasite,’ it was necessary to create an phantasm for the viewers,” mentioned Bong via translator Sharon Choi. “The primary 20 minutes of the movie begins with introducing all of the areas in that wealthy home, in order that by the tip, the viewers appears like they’ve seen everything of that home.” After which, the twist of a secret household dwelling within the basement.
“After creating that phantasm, the movie fully shatters it by revealing the hidden man within the bunker, the housemaid’s husband,” mentioned Bong. “That needed to be extremely surprising, which meant that the primary half of the movie actually goes into element about this area and introduces it admidst the drama and the story taking place. And with ‘Mickey 17,’ it was form of the other method.”
Whereas “Parasite” explored class politics via the upstairs-downstairs dynamic between the three households within the Park home, “Mickey 17” examines the dehumanization of staff aboard a spacecraft from a very completely different perspective.
The company/church-funded area expedition (a working gag is how the expedition’s chief (Mark Ruffalo) refers to “the church” as “the corporate”) preys the working class’ desperation to flee an more and more inhospitable Earth. None extra so than our hero, Mickey (Robert Pattinson), the colony’s “expendable.” He’s primarily a lab rat, repeatedly killed and reprinted by the scientists of their quest to know how human life can survive on the planet Niflheim.
“You will have this ginormous spaceship that’s virtually like a cargo ship, and it’s not fancy. It doesn’t appear like a sci-fi spaceship, it’s very gritty and dirty,” mentioned Bong. “The entire level of that this ginormous area is that you just by no means get a way of how many individuals are literally there. Everybody feels fairly nameless.”
In contrast to the “Parasite” home, “Mickey 17” manufacturing designer Fiona Crombie and Bong created an inside through which the digicam and character’s area of view is extraordinarily restricted. For a director who worships on the altar of George Miller, Bong intentionally denies each the viewer and the digicam a transparent sense of spatial orientation. For his characters, trapped in a flying tin can hurtling via area, life is much from communal — even if they’re anticipated to construct a brand new colony collectively.
“Even till the tip of the film, we nonetheless don’t have any concept the place these corridors finish and the outer boundaries of this area,” mentioned Bong. “It form of needed to really feel like these characters had been simply thrown in the midst of an enormous ocean with no sense of route.”
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