‘Mickey 17’: How Bong Joon Ho’s team designed the human printer that made multiple Robert Pattinsons (exclusive)
Mickey 17 director Bong Joon Ho’s long-awaited follow-up to his Academy Award-winning film, Parasite, opens in theaters on Friday. Shortly after that, Insight Editions will release The Art and Making of Mickey 17, an in-depth exploration of the filmmaking craft that went into creating the Robert Pattinson-led sci-fi dark comedy. Gold Derby has an exclusive first look at the book.
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The Art and Making of Mickey 17 is written by Simon Ward, who previously wrote Art and Making of books for Bong’s films Snowpiercer and Okja. In it, Ward takes readers deep inside the filmmaking process through expert commentary and extensive on-set interviews.
The movie's origins date back to Bong's historic awards run with Parasite. The filmmaker told Ward he was initially working on a fact-based story set in 2016 London. However, the acclaimed filmmaker felt he wasn't necessarily the right person to tell that story.
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Courtesy of Insight Editions
“We were really attracted to this color that we kept calling IBM cream,” Crombie said of the color the team chose for the printer. “It’s kind of a slightly dated color. We have a lot of gray in the film, but when it comes to certain technology, like the human-printer-related technology, that’s an IBM color. It’s made of textured plastic with this old-computer cream color.”
Once the art department developed the printer's design, Tuohy’s team was enlisted to build it. It started with a tube, and then they built their own conveyor belt inside of it. The conveyor belt is made out of fiberglass with a chemiwood bezel wrapped in vinyl to make it look like stainless steel. “And that is how we do things; it’s smoke and mirrors,” Tuohy says.
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Tuohy says that Bong embraced something other directors usually see as a problem. “Normally, the biggest problem we have as a special-effects department is everything we do is noisy,” he says. “A motor is making a humming noise, there’s a hydraulic pack or there’s something, and we’re always trying to make it silent. When we showed Director Bong the human printer, we explained that it was a bit noisy, and he was like, ‘I love that noise.’ He said, ‘That’s the life of the machine. The machine should sound like that. The sound in my head for the machine is that noise. So, I think we spent three hours running the machine, and the sound department recorded every little motor twist in the stopping and variations. That’s gonna make the soundtrack for the printer when it’s working.”
The book is loaded with fascinating behind-the-scenes details like that. Take a look at some images from the book, and also some fun snaps of Bong and Pattinson posing with the finished product.
The Art and Making of Mickey 17 is available from your preferred bookseller on Tuesday. It’s available for preorder on Amazon now.
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