Bong Joon-Ho's 3 Must-Watch Films for Aspiring Filmmakers
These are films about making films.
Parasite
When the Academy asked director Bong Joon-Ho to recommend films for aspiring filmmakers to watch, he got a bit overwhelmed and didn't want to attempt to list five favorites. Instead, he narrowed his focus to three movies about moviemaking itself.
Director Bong, a Korean filmmaker known for genre-spanning hits like Mickey 17, Memories of a Murder, and Okja, made history as the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture with Parasite.
Watch the video from Director Bong, then learn about the films he recommended.
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His three picks were Federico Fellini's 8½, François Truffaut's Day for Night, and Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion. Together, they form a chaotic but loving picture of the reality behind the camera.
Let's dive into each.
8½
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Fellini said in I, Fellini, "In the case of 8½, something happened to me which I had feared could happen, but when it did, it was more terrible than I could ever have imagined. I suffered director’s block, like writer’s block" (via Cinematic Scribblings). He became a film director who didn't know what he wanted to direct.
The 1963 film follows Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a director suffering creative paralysis while trying to make his next film. The film Guido struggles to make is essentially 8½ itself. Fellini channels his own crisis into the film's surrealist sequences.
The resulting movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and remains what many consider the definitive film about director's block.
Day for Night (La nuit américaine)
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Truffaut took a lighter approach with 1973's Day for Night, though his motivations were equally personal.
He said he wanted the picture to do for film what Fahrenheit 451 did for books, "to show why it is good to love the cinema," and said the film was made in "the spirit of friendship for all the people in the movie business."
The film follows director Ferrand (played by Truffaut himself) as he directs a melodrama while managing neurotic actors, divas, and technical mishaps. It celebrates the collaborative madness of filmmaking rather than a solitary crisis.
The title refers to the technique of shooting "night" scenes in daylight. It's movie magic.
Living in Oblivion
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Tom DiCillo's 1995 film, Living in Oblivion, completes the recs with a darker satirical edge.
DiCillo described filmmaking like this: "Making a movie is one of the most tedious, boring, painful experiences, and that's just when something goes right. An actress could be in the middle of the most emotional scene and suddenly the microphone comes into the shot, and you lose it" (via Salon).
The film emerged from his desperation after his debut, Johnny Suede, screened for only one week despite four years of work.
Steve Buscemi plays Nick Reve (the surname pronounced like the French word for "dream"), a low-budget director battling incompetent crew members, prima donnas, and a smoke machine that won't cooperate. We've all been there.
Have you seen these movies?
