Over the past decade or so, the Vietnamese-American filmmaker Bao Nguyen has made his reputation on incisive, compulsively watchable documentaries that unpack a wide range of cultural phenomena.

In last year’s The Stringer, for example, Nguyen interrogated the authorship of the famous “Napalm Girl” photo and its implications on the Vietnam War. In 2020’s Be Water, the filmmaker untangled Bruce Lee’s legacy within the context of the systemic racism he encountered during his career. Nguyen’s range extends to poppier projects too, like The Greatest Night in Pop, which took viewers through the making of the star-studded hit “We Are the World” and Live From New York!, which traces Saturday Night Live over four decades.

Those storytelling skills are now being showcased in BTS: The Return, his buzzy Netflix documentary that follows the biggest band in the world as they recorded their new album Arirang and prepared for their much-anticipated comeback.

Going beyond the frictionless hagiography of recent pop music docs, The Return is a snapshot of a band in transition, the seven members of BTS wrestling with questions of authenticity, relevance, and nationalism while laboring under the pressures of delivering their first studio album in nearly six years. The documentary is out today, exactly a week after Arirang’s release, providing perfectly timed context to their latest full-length statement.

In one thread that runs through the documentary, for example, we watch the band wrestle over the sample of the traditional folk song “Arirang” that would eventually feature on the track “Body to Body.” There’s genuine tension when the members debate the implications of the length of the sample—too long and it might seem tokenistic, too short and it might dilute its impact. (The discourse climaxes in a meeting with Hybe chairman and founder Bang Si-hyuk, who argues for the power and significance of the longer version.)

Ahead of the release, Nguyen talked to GQ about the long road to making the documentary, being a fly-on-the-wall while BTS had passionate debates about creative decisions, and how he earned the trust of the seven members to tell their story through the film.

GQ: It’s so interesting to me that you’re going from your Vietnam War documentary The Stringer to The Return, a documentary on BTS. How did you end up working on this?

Bao Nguyen: It was a long journey in many ways. I went to one of their SoFi shows back in 2021. I was planning to go to one of the Rose Bowl shows in 2020, but sadly that tour was canceled or postponed. When I was able to finally see them live, it was such a surreal and emotional experience in many ways.

I’m always thinking about stories. They do these long conversations with ARMY and the crowd. They were so touched by the response from the crowd, preparing their sort of farewell, and talking about their upcoming military service and their time away. It was really touching. And I saw how emotional ARMY was getting. And for me, it felt almost Homeric and mythical in many ways. It felt like The Odyssey. BTS was Odysseus, and ARMY was Penelope longing for the return.

I floated this idea to some people at [the entertainment company that BTS is signed to] Hybe. I was like, “There’s something there that I think is an incredible story that really stands the test of time.” And it didn’t work out immediately. There’s a lot of secrecy, and rightly so, with military service. A few years later, they’re like, “Well, the group is out of the military. Would you be interested in coming back and documenting their return and the creation of this album?”