Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell are currently shooting a new film called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. (Every report I’ve seen on this project does not use commas in the title. This is making me crazy.) This has been a Black List script for a few years now, written by Seth Reiss who also wrote the film The Menu which came out in 2022 which Sarah was quite high on.
So we’re coming in with high expectations with the source material and then on top of that Kogonada is directing. You know his work from Pachinko or maybe before that Columbus and After Yang, two films that Sarah also reviewed very positively. Kogonada’s work is always disarming and quietly ferocious. I am so excited to see what he’ll do with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.
The plot is being kept under wraps but the original script was about two people at a wedding, both attended solo. Afterwards the man gets into his older model car and the older model GPS installed in the vehicle asks him if he wants to go on a “big, bold, beautiful journey”. He’s like sure. At the first stop on the journey he sees the woman from the wedding. So he asks her, you wanna come? A fantasy romance unfolds.
Not sure what changes they’ve made to the screenplay but it’s Margot and Colin in the lead roles, with Colin teaming up for the second time with Kogonada after After Yang. I am all in on this creative pairing, I am ready for this chemistry – I want it to be weird and charged and horny but also, since this is Kogonada, probably a slow burn.
Comparisons have been made to La La Land and 500 Days of Summer but the first movie that popped into my mind was Elizabethtown, a film starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst that’s almost 20 years old and probably nobody saw because, frankly, it wasn’t great and there’s a whole “manic pixie dream girl” thing happening that hasn’t aged well. See also 500 Days of Summer, though. But it’s the road trip thing that jumped out. Because, presumably, that’s what Margot and Colin will be doing – a road trip determined by this magical GPS taking them to various surprise destinations in California and along the way they’ll discover what they need to discover about themselves and each other, Kogonada style. So, you know, don’t expect a conventionally happy ending? How will TikTok handle that?
