The stakes were impossibly high, but the long-awaited results appear to have delivered.
Nearly four years after K-pop supergroup BTS stepped away from the public eye to fulfill South Korea’s mandatory military service, the world’s biggest band reconvened in Los Angeles last summer to begin the high-pressure task of crafting a comeback album. The resulting fifth BTS studio LP, Arirang — a blend of bold new pop experiments and assertive Korean national pride (the album samples and takes its name from a century-old folk song that functions as an unofficial national anthem in the country) — arrived on March 20 and promptly became the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify this year, as well as the most-streamed K-pop album in the platform’s history. The following night, BTS performed together for the first time in nearly four years before tens of thousands of fans in Seoul’s historic Gwanghwamun Square, in a concert that Netflix livestreamed to 18.4 million viewers worldwide.
Behind-the-scenes documentary BTS: The Return, which arrives on Netflix today, chronicles the creation of Arirang with a degree of access that even ARMY — the official name given to the group’s many dedicated fans around the world — may find occasionally surprising. Directed by Bao Nguyen — the Vietnamese-American filmmaker behind Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop — the film marks one of the rare occasions that HYBE, parent company of BTS’ label BigHit, entrusted an outsider, and a non-Korean filmmaker at that, to tell a vital chapter of the group’s story.
Produced by Jane Cha of Sony’s This Machine Filmworks, whose recent credits include the Sofia Coppola-directed Marc by Sofia and Netflix’s Martha Stewart doc, the 91-minute film follows the seven members as they live, work and reconnect in a rented house in Los Angeles, before returning to Seoul to finish the record and prepare for their global tour. Shot with an observational intimacy and bathed in the hazy Southern California light that Nguyen treats as an eighth character, the L.A. sequences find the band members at their most unguarded — cooking together, debating lyrics over soju, swimming in their pool and at the beach. There are also moments of frank reflection, in the back of a car or alone in Seoul, where the members take stock of the weight of their fame and the pressure of returning to a newly uncertain place in the global pop landscape.
The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Nguyen and Cha in Seoul shortly before BTS took over Gwanghwamun Square to discuss the documentary’s most revealing moments and their reflections on spending several months with the band members during one of the most high-pressure periods of their careers.
Tell me about the expectations and storytelling framework you had in mind going into the project, and how these things evolved as you got underway.
NGUYEN Yeah, I came into it with some form in mind, but it was more like a compass — and then it was just about seeing what we would discover in the process. Before we started the project, I had gone to see BTS at SoFi Stadium back in 2021, and I remember the whole show having this mythical feeling — about the story of their departure, and in the emotional way they spoke to and interacted with ARMY. I like to think about mythology and how it relates to how we live our lives today. So I started to think of their departure and return like the Homeric myth of the Odyssey, with BTS as Odysseus, and ARMY as Penelope waiting for them to return from the military. So that was my framework going in, but you know, it’s also the story of making a comeback album. They each have come back to their bandmates and their families, and to their identities as artists and members of this globally beloved group. So there was an urgent question in the air for them: Do you return as the person you were before and not change, or do you come back as something new? Transition points are challenging for anyone in life, but imagine the pressure of confronting this stuff when you’re the biggest band in the world. So, originally, I thought this was going to be about that creative process, and the world waiting and reacting. But then, in the editing process, it also became a story of brotherhood and what it means to be able to carry the weight of a country on your shoulders — and realizing that, as individuals, that’s just too heavy a crown to bear, but as a team of seven, it’s something they know they can do together.
What were you given in terms of access? Were there any boundaries set? And how did this shape the way you told this chapter of their story?
CHA It was very much a fast and furious process. We were told that they’re coming to L.A., and they’re going to be working and living together for a month, which is not at all their normal situation anymore. So we were actually really thrilled to be given access to their house. And once we got there, we were given way more access than we expected. Sometimes we were allowed to shoot in their bedrooms during moments of real downtime. So it was all just a very collaborative conversation, like, “Hey, can we shoot this?” And most of the time, the answer was yes. So in L.A. we got access to the house and the recording studio and points in between. Once they were back in Seoul, we followed them to the recording studio, and for each member, we asked them to choose one meaningful activity to serve as their personal shoot day.
Tell us about developing the film’s aesthetic. I was struck by the way the movie functions as a love letter to Los Angeles as much as the band. The sun-drenched aesthetic and the handheld cameras both felt like a brilliant touch — the way they infuse the film with old Hollywood glamour, but also intimacy and a palpable sense of nostalgia, even though you’re filming in the present tense.
NGUYEN I mean, I’m an East Coaster, originally. I moved to L.A. during the pandemic, and I’ve really come to love what L.A. represents in the history of cinema and in the global popular imagination — as a place of being free and what 300 days of sunshine will do to you. I wanted the audience to feel — whether they’ve spent time in L.A. or not — what the idea of L.A. creativity means. Like V says sometime early in the film, L.A. is like an amusement park to them. Why did they decide to come to L.A. for this moment in their careers? It’s that sense of freedom and Manifest Destiny.
In terms of the aesthetic of the film, there are a few things we can talk about. I didn’t want it to feel like we were just running around trying to follow them at all times with handheld cameras. In the studio, we really went for a sense of stillness and an observational quality, like a fly on the wall. That was an aesthetic choice but also a practical one — of not wanting to interfere in their creative process. I’m fully aware of how precious it can be when you get into a good creative flow and having a camera around you that’s constantly moving could obviously be really distracting. But if you’re on a tripod and you’re against a wall in the corner, you can use a zoom lens and find your angle. You’re being generous to the creators, and they respect that. And then, over time, once they’re more comfortable being vulnerable around you — or they just start to forget you’re there — you can move in a little closer with your camera.
For the VHS look, the idea to give each of them a mini-DV camcorder came when I was thinking about how I really wanted the film to feel like it was being told from within their perspective. We knew we weren’t going to have 24/7 access to the band members, so I thought, what if I get them to film each other when we’re not around? But if they did it with their phones, that’s a very specific visual language, which we’re all very used to, and maybe a little sick of by now. But camcorder footage brings a very different feeling, right? It’s automatically nostalgic, because it feels like you’re on a family vacation with your dad — it just feels raw, innocent and intimate. So, my bet was that if we could get them to shoot each other with this kind of camera, we’d get both that rawness and their personal perspectives at the same time. Luckily, it worked really well. Because when I was watching through all of the footage, there was a steep learning curve for some of them as they figured out how to use these cameras (Laughs). But they were very open to it, and they stuck with it and had fun with it. I think it offered us a somewhat different perspective than some of the other BTS documentaries that have been done.
The moment when they go back to Seoul makes for a dramatic, stylistic break. Everything gets a bit darker and flashier, and the vibe becomes more serious — you can immediately feel that they’ve left their creative escape and it’s back to reality for them, back in Korea.
CHA Yeah, that’s one of my favorite transitions in the movie. From Los Angeles to Seoul, you go from the hazy sunshine of California to seeing the members visiting the Korean palace. L.A. is a very young city, in a young country, and when you come to Seoul, there’s striking modernity juxtaposed against the ancient. I just thought it makes for a really beautiful transition.
NGUYEN Just speaking of aesthetics, one of the films that was really inspiring for me, and sort of set the palette and the cinematography of the L.A. sequences, was Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Incidentally, Jane had just done a film with Sofia — the documentary Marc by Sofia — so coming together with her sort of felt like kismet in many ways. Somewhere, for me, showed the everyday reality of being a celebrity with great subtlety. And the way she captures L.A. was an inspiration. So Sofia gets a thank you.
One of the movie’s most effective sequences has got to be the moment where you have the members watch videos together from when they were young and just getting started as BTS. Their reactions to that footage are really touching. But I thought it was especially brilliant for how it might land with many fans. Because BTS has been gone for four years, and K-pop has continued to evolve in their absence. How’d that scene come together?
NGUYEN In their rental home in L.A., they had a screening room. And I was just like, it would be fun for y’all to just sit and watch videos — and why don’t we put on some stuff from the very early days of BTS. It serves a function in the documentary of showing how they’ve evolved and grown up over time. I mean, they’ve got such baby faces back then. They’re still young guys, but in the span of a K-pop band, they’re sort of the elder statesmen now. Again, it worked with the handheld footage aesthetic we used elsewhere, of giving that sense of nostalgia and the ache you get from watching home videos. It’s one of my favorite scenes, observing them reacting to the arc of their whole career, and this incredible journey they’ve been on together. You see them go from playing for a tiny crowd at the Troubadour to rocking a sold-out SoFi Stadium. The scale of it all is just incredible.
CHA It’s a favorite scene for all of us. They start by kind of joking around in the screening room, like laughing at how cute they all looked, but then it does get really emotional, you know? I think it’s like that for anyone who has a chance to look back on their past — but for them, they go from these kids trying to impress each other by doing flips on the dance floor, to the very biggest band in the world. It’s a singular story.
What were some of the other moments during filming where you were like, “I’m getting good shit right now”?
NGUYEN (Laughs.) Honestly, every scene had a little something I would get surprised by. I previously made a film called The Greatest Night in Pop, about the recording of “We Are the World.” There you literally had over 40 of the greatest singers in the world, so there was real tension surrounding that recording, naturally. With this documentary, we were coming into it fairly late in the process of creating the album, and I thought, this is a really tight, professional pop group — these guys are going to know exactly what they need, and they’re just going to kill it when they get into the recording booth. But the amount of pressure, tension and unease they had around not yet really knowing what the songs and the album were going to be — that totally surprised me. But, of course, it’s totally human and the essence of being an artist. They’re the biggest band in the world, but they still had a tremendous amount of nervousness and anxiety around this return album. Their genuine modesty and humility was really exciting to show.
Another moment I loved was when we got them out on the beach in Santa Monica. They had been doing this intense ritual of going to the studio all day, every day, so to see them break out of that and be free and have some fun as a group of friends — to play soccer in the sand and swim in the ocean — that was a beautiful moment.
It’s kind of amazing they weren’t recognized. Did you lock the beach down somehow?
CHA No, it’s Santa Monica. It’s a public beach. No production can do that. We had people on the beach, of course, and we went in with really small cameras. But there were a few people who approached and were like, “Who is that? Is that who I think it is?” And we were like, “Oh no, it’s just a bachelor party. We’re filming a wedding video.” And they were just like, “Oh, OK.”
NGUYEN Obviously, we wanted to protect their privacy and make sure they were safe, but I was honestly hoping for the full Beatles mania moment where they would get swarmed. (Laughs.)
How involved were HYBE and BigHit in shaping the story and how you told it?
NGUYEN Well, to the label’s credit, this was one of the very few times they’ve let someone outside the company — and from outside of Korea — tell a story in a film about the group. There was some hesitation, but by the end of it, we were very clear-eyed about how we were going to tell the story. They gave some basic framework — like, you’re going to tell the story about their return and the making of the album — and I was fine with that, because I like having some guidelines as a director, as long as I know that I can play relatively freely within that sandbox. So, it was a constant conversation with the label, where I would just explain to them, thematically, why this or that was important. Somewhat surprisingly, I found it to be a really great collaboration.
CHA There were a lot of things we wouldn’t have even known about without their openness. For example, they gave us access to that meeting with Chairman Bang (Si-Hyuk) — founder of BigHit Music and the chairman of HYBE, known as the richest man in the Korean entertainment industry — where they were deciding which version of “Body to Body” they were going to go with. Certainly they would have been free not to invite us to that meeting. They were great partners in that sense when it came to knowing what is actually an important development in the formation of the album and trying to get it into the film.
So there weren’t moments in the edit where they asked for specific changes?
NGUYEN Well, I never try to make films about people. I prefer to do it with people. I really approached this as a collaboration, and there were moments when a member might say, “I look a little weird in this shot.” But then, you tell them the artistic intent, and why that scene seemed thematically meaningful, and then they would understand it. But I can honestly say there was nothing major that they were like, “Get it out of there.”
One of the moments I found really telling and moving — and a touch haunting but very real — was the sequence with Jimin near the end, where he’s home alone, just cooking, doing the dishes and playing video games. And he starts talking about the isolation that comes with fame and how he’s found himself spending more and more time alone. He insists that he’s nonetheless living his dream as a global performer. But he acknowledges that some might find his growing solitude a little strange, and there’s a whiff of sadness to the scene.
NGUYEN For me, within the structure of the film, that moment was about showing the weight of fame. There’s also a moment shortly before that where Jung Kook says that he sometimes wishes he was just a singer, instead of this massive global pop star. We get glimpses of many of them talking about this individually, as the film progresses. RM says how the crown is too heavy for any one of them, and the only way they can really get through it is to come together as a group.
CHA As Bao mentioned, we told the members we wanted to do a shoot day with each of them in Seoul, and we asked them, what do you want to do? Jimin was the only one who said, just come visit me at my home. That was another moment where the level of access was unexpected. There are funny moments in the visit. I’ll never forget where he’s doing the dishes and he mentions how he got the dish cloth from his mom — it’s just so sweet. But I get what you’re saying. There is an air of melancholy when he’s talking about fame. But he talks about it very thoughtfully, and the documentary is also about them getting older — and that’s part of getting older, right? Seeing that there are tradeoffs behind everything.
I liked the complexity of that moment. And I can imagine for fans, it will only play well, like, “Oh my God, he’s so sweet — and he’s lonely!”
NGUYEN It also shows how distinct they are, you know? Outside of Army, I think many people just see them as this uniform group. But they’re each their own person, and they have very distinct opinions and perspectives on how their music should be made, how they relate to fame and celebrity. Like, in one scene, we have V having dinner in a skyscraper with some of the biggest celebrities in Korea and in another Jimin eating on his own and playing video games. But together, they’re still BTS, right? They’re unique individuals who belong to this monolith.
That’s the other facet of your portrait that’s really striking: how sweet they are to each other, pretty much all the time. Did you feel that they’re just total pros and know how to play for the camera? I mean, can it really be true that there is no conflict whatsoever among a superstar band of seven? Or are we going to get a re-edited behind-the-scenes version of this doc in 50 years, revealing that one of them actually tried to quit during the making of Arirang, like George Harrison?
NGUYEN (Laughs.) You know, honestly, from the months that we spent with them, I did not witness anything that rose above the level of, like, polite debating about some directions in the music. There was the scene where they’re discussing “Body to Body” and the use of the “Arirang” sample, and who likes it and who doesn’t. They have their points of view, and when they disagree, they’re mostly just really funny about it. I think they’ve been together for so long that conflict perhaps plays out in a different way. Because they really do have a lot of respect and admiration for each other, and this was a unique situation where they were living together again for the first time in many years. What I witnessed really made me think of them as being like brothers. You might get into it a little with your brother, but you never really hate your brother — you make fun of him. That was something that really came through during the shooting of the film. Living together again really was meaningful to them, and it was kind of beautiful. Jimin actually says at the end of their L.A. experience, “Maybe we should do this again sometime.”
There’s your sequel.
CHA It’s funny; that’s the first thing everyone in my life has asked me: Are they really as nice as they seem? And as far as I can tell, it’s true. They are as polite and as nice as they seem.
NGUYEN I mean, as a director, I sometimes wish there was a little more conflict or drama, because of course, that’s great on the screen. I think there were some outside forces they were dealing with — which is the label — but within them, there wasn’t any drama.
CHA They did almost warn us going into the project, saying, they don’t fight; they’re not dramatic in any way. They’re very polite young men.
NGUYEN I was like, hmm, uh oh, is this going to be boring? (Laughs.)
So, like many Korean men their age, they also come across in the film as very solid drinkers. Bao, did you ever join them for a soju session?
NGUYEN Oh man, one of the biggest challenges of this film was all of those amazing dinners they were always having together in the house. As an exercise in creating more intimacy, I acted as one of the cinematographers. So I would be behind the camera, watching them cook and eat all of this amazing Korean food and wash it down with soju. There were a couple of times where they actually heard my stomach growl, and they were like, “Bao, come on man, join us.” And I was like, “I really want to, but I gotta keep filming guys — I’m doing my thing here.” Finally, when they were winding down and we stopped shooting, I would cruise home and order some Korean barbecue delivered to my house immediately.
No chance to ever have a proper hang with them?
NGUYEN Well, they’re BTS! It was never going to be a low-key hang for me. But I mean, sometimes after we’d wrap, I’d do a soju shot or two with them. And there’s that scene where Jin is playing tennis. I’m pretty rusty at tennis, but I was like, OK, this is my chance to hit a ball around with a global superstar. We hit for a while — and he kicked my ass.
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