‘BTS: The Return’ director on how LA helped shape ‘Arirang’ and inspire the doc

When the biggest band in the world was getting back together to make a new album after a nearly four-year hiatus, what made them choose Los Angeles?

“In terms of having space to be creative,” BTS vocalist V says in the Netflix documentary BTS: The Return. “L.A.’s kind of like an amusement park.”

Rapper RM adds: “L.A. gives us space to experiment — different energy from what we’ve done before.”

“I think you can really settle into the creative process [here better] rather than maybe other cities like New York or London,” BTS: The Return director Bao Nguyen (The Greatest Night in Pop, Be Water) told LAist.

“There's a certain, for lack of a better term, ‘chill’ that helps allow you to be creative,” Nguyen added. “Walking outside and seeing the sun and just feeling that experience, I think you can really let ideas marinate, while in some other cities it feels like a pressure cooker at times.”

(L-R) Jimin, j-hope, Suga, and Jin in "BTS: The Return."

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The documentary chronicles the weeks the band members spent in L.A. in the summer of 2025, living together again for the first time in many years — after some members completed mandatory military service and others pursued solo projects — writing and recording their new album Arirang at Conway Studios (host to artists ranging from U2 to Kendrick Lamar).

They also made time to do some very L.A. things — like watching the sunset on the beach in Santa Monica, sitting in traffic (stars, they’re just like us!), eating In-N-Out and going to a Dodger game (or actually, the not-so-relatable experience of going to a game to throw the ceremonial first pitch).

Here are some highlights from Nguyen’s interview with LAist about the making of BTS: The Return, condensed and edited for clarity.

How a 2021 BTS concert at SoFi helped inspire the doc

Bao Nguyen:   I was supposed to go see them at their Rose Bowl show but, because of the pandemic, that was canceled. But they had a run of SoFi shows in 2021 [their first in person since 2019] before they left for the military. I was lucky enough to get tickets to one of those shows, and it was an experience that really changed my mind about BTS and sort of their cultural importance. 

I love going to live concerts, but to go to a BTS concert was definitely the loudest thing I've ever been to — in the best way possible. Just the connection that they had with the fans and how the fans knew every lyric, even in Korean, was so astonishing to me.

And they have these sort of long dialogues with their fans, and they're able to create such intimacy in this massive stadium. 

[Then at their 2022 farewell concert in Busan] they were talking about their upcoming military service, and you could tell that the crowd was getting very emotional as well as the band. And for me, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, I immediately thought of The Odyssey. Like, "Oh, BTS is sort of like Odysseus about to go into the military. And ARMY [the acronym for the band’s fandom, “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”] is like Penelope, longing for the return of their heroes, in many ways."

I pitched this idea to the label and they were somewhat interested at first. I think it was a bit too philosophical maybe for the type of documentaries that BTS has done in the past, but once the group came out of military service, the label contacted me again and said, "Would you be interested now in doing a film about them?" And I jumped at the opportunity.

The origins of ‘Arirang’

In the documentary, the executive creative director of Big Hit Music, BTS’s label, pitches the band the idea of taking inspiration from another group of young Korean men, 19th Century international students at Howard University, who sang what would become the first known recordings of Korean music in the world in 1896 — including the well-known Korean folk song “Arirang,” which dates back to the 13th Century.

What didn’t make it into the doc, Nguyen shared, is that the spark of the idea came to Big Hit by way of a friend of his, L.A.-based stylist Jeanne Yang.

Bao Nguyen:  Boyoung Lee, who's their creative director, had sort of developed that idea from a friend of mine, Jeanne Yang, a stylist who actually helped style the group for their photo shoot.

Jeanne approached James Shin at the label about this really fascinating story about the first Korean music recording in America through these seven young men — happened to be seven, coincidentally — going to Howard University.

So there were just natural connections, and I think that ignited the group’s creativity — like, "OK, ‘Arirang’ can be sort of this framework and anchor for the entire album."

And you can see through the film, how they sort of navigate and negotiate that. It's interesting because each of the seven members have different opinions on it. So it's not a monolith. But I think the spark came from the label, and then, as with any artistic collaboration, it's a conversation with a lot of different people to get the final piece of art.

Other ways that L.A. shaped the film (and how they pulled off that beach scene)

Nguyen said he knew he didn’t want to record formal sit-down interviews with the band members for the documentary in an effort to have the film to “live in the present moment as much as possible,” but found that he naturally ended up finding quiet moments with each of them during their chauffeured commutes to the studio each day.

Bao Nguyen:  I love being in my car because I love the quiet time and reflection I can get sitting in traffic, or hopefully in motion.

So at first I was thinking these car rides would just be these pensive and reflective moments, not even capturing them talking at all. 

But it was when the members were in the car that they just started talking and they just wanted to get things off their chest. It was a really unique perspective into what they were thinking because, for the most part, they're surrounded by people all day, but in the car, they're by themselves and they can really think and talk about what they want to achieve that day, or coming back home, they can talk about what happened.

So I used the routine habit of driving in L.A. and tried to make it as cinematic and meaningful to the story as possible.

\(L-R) j-hope, Suga, Jin, RM, Jung Kook, and Jimin in 'BTS: THE RETURN.'

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The technique of giving the band members their own camcorders to capture footage themselves, Nguyen said, partially came about because of a desire to capture their experiences of life outside of the studio without drawing too much attention with a camera crew.

The one scene where the band was recorded by the documentary crew out in public in L.A. (that wasn’t a controlled public-facing event like at the Dodgers), was a day they spent at a house on the beach in Santa Monica, and ventured out with chairs to watch the sunset and play soccer.

Bao Nguyen:  The beach scene was interesting because I wasn't sure if we were gonna have sort of a "Beatlemania" moment, but kudos to our production team who really planned it well. We found a very quiet part of the beach, we checked it the week before at that time to find out how quiet it stays.

There were people just sort of stationed at different corners of the beach to make sure nothing went crazy. … And luckily, another benefit of shooting in Los Angeles is that people kind of mind their own business. If they're at the beach, they just want to be at the beach. 

There were some people who kind of got a hint that something was going on, I think more because of our cameras, but our producer, Jane Cha Cutler, told people we were just shooting a wedding party or bachelor party video, so people would not think anything was happening.

BTS: The Return is available now on Netflix.