The Paper's reporter Chen Chen
Five years ago, Malaysian director Tan Chui Mei was 38 years old and gave birth to her first child. Her last feature film, "Year Without Summer," ended in 2010, and the rest was a few short films and creative experiences that helped other young directors star.
"From pregnancy to childbirth, it's basically like going through a disaster. After giving birth to a child, basically the body is destroyed, and after taking the child, the personal freedom is completely lost, and the heart is full of grievances. Before the children were three years old, they all lived a very bad life. ”
Chen Cuimei described her life for a period of time after becoming a mother. Eventually, she did it the way of a director — making a movie and getting herself back.
Barbarian Invasion poster
The film "Barbarian Invasion" in the main competition unit of the Golden Jue of this Shanghai International Film Festival is such a film that helps Chen Cuimei find her own body and inner driving force. It is vivid, free, resolute and gentle.
Romances, action films, comedies, literary films, plays within a play, semi-autobiographical... It seems that there are many appearances that can be seen in this movie, and they can't seem to be summarized. This small-budget film, which cost less than 1 million and was self-directed and self-directed, is so special because of her freedom.
"Before, movies were everything. Up to now, everything is a movie", this is a line in the movie, and it is also Chen Cuimei's enlightenment and practice of the movie at the moment.
The birth of every child is the invasion of civilized society by barbarians
At the beginning of the film, director Hu Zijie told a story to actress Li Shengfeng.
"Miyamoto Musashi was very old, and a young man came to challenge him. They made an appointment to duel on the mountain at noon the next day. But Miyamoto Musashi didn't appear until the sun reached the west. The young man was very angry, Miyamoto Musashi turned his back on the sun, and at the critical moment of the duel, deliberately let the young man face the glare of the sun, killing him in an instant. ”
"Isn't that unsurpassed?"
"For the young man, the sword was everything. For the elderly Miyamoto Musashi, everything was a sword. Sunlight is the sword, and time is also the sword. ”
Consummation looked at Zi Jie, "So? ”
"Before, movies were everything. By now, everything is a movie. If we stay out of the way and be a calm spectator in our own lives, life is a movie. ”
"You wouldn't be looking for me to make a Hong Shangxiu movie, would you?"
Zi Jie smiled and shook his head, "I want to make an action movie." ”
Stills from Barbarian Invasion
This passage was held at the premiere of the Shanghai Film Festival, and the audience burst out laughing. This is a tacit little tacit understanding between the creator and the audience.
At the same time, the above passage is also a brief introduction to the movie that Chen Cuimei herself posted on Douban. Although she was going to participate in the film festival, the official introduction and the distribution company on the ticketing website summarized a more plot synopsis for her, so that the audience who came to see her could have a clearer expected direction. "It's hard for me to convince the distribution company not to use that kind of profile, but if I can choose myself, I won't tell the plot of the movie, so why should I say it?" That's weird. ”
The title of the film, "Barbarian Invasion", is a bit confusing at first glance.
Two years ago, Chen Cuimei and Wang Hongwei had dinner, and Wang talked about making a spy movie and wanted to find her as the heroine. Chen Cuimei suggested simply filming a story of a Chinese director looking for an actress to make a spy film, and she first went to Thailand for training, and then went there to shoot something and think about the story script.
Unable to arrange the child, she had to take the child with her. When I took my children to the martial arts gym to train, I found that it was completely impossible to do both. So the whole story develops into a variety of tugs between an actress and a child.
So I changed the title to "Barbarian Invasion", and barbarians are actually children. I felt that every child was born as an invasion of civilized society by barbarians. Chen Cuimei "complained" in the film tidbit.
She's heard some gender stereotypes, but "I never felt that female directors were inferior before I got pregnant, and I often substitute male characters in movies myself."
"After getting pregnant and having a baby in 2016, I was in a very anxious and depressed state for three years. I feel that my body is a ruin, and I feel that my film career is doomed. There was no way to create, and the film plan was pushed back and forth, and then it was cancelled outright. At that time, I felt that it was impossible to be a director, and I did not dare to take on new plans. ”
She remembers having just given birth to a child, "A master told me that if you have a child, you will have to be 'insane for three years.'" "Epilepsy is probably highly disturbed and stimulated, so that it is highly nervous and hysterical." I was often overwhelmed by children and couldn't help but cry. ”
So the film actually originated from the director's own question, "In the process of losing myself and taking the child, I constantly think about what I am." But even if you think, you can't restore your own life," and at the same time, he saw how a life gradually formed his self, so what is he? How to shape the self? In the end, I think I can re-establish myself by making films. Chen Cuimei finally put into action when the child was three years old.
Break the cage of the body with your own hands
According to the distribution company's version, the introduction of the film is: the former actress Li Shengxing raised her son alone after the divorce, and is undergoing arduous martial arts training in the new kung fu film directed by her old friend in preparation for the comeback, but the producer asks her star ex-husband to play the male lead.
Not a complicated story, but Chen Cuimei is extremely interesting. Playing an actress herself, the dilemma of taking the baby is a portrayal of personal experience; the process of practicing exercises presents the reshaping of the body and the results that are intuitively visible to the naked eye; the Southeast Asian version of the "Mission Impossible" play-in-the-play shows a film author's ability to control and deconstruct genre films.
Chen Cuimei could have invited "film queens" such as Li Xinjie and Yang Yanyan to participate, especially Yang Yanyan, who has a good martial arts background, is a very suitable candidate, but the heroine's journey of learning kung fu completely makes Chen Cuimei moved. Out of the selfishness of a director, she decided to take the battle herself.
"This movie is about finding oneself, about one regaining one's body. So I still have to experience it myself, which is the selfishness of the director. At the same time, she knew, "It's a particularly wayward thing." According to normal operation, no producer will agree. ”
Set photos from Barbarian Invasion
Chen Cuimei said that she wanted to learn kung fu since she was a child, Muay Thai, free fighting, Brazilian jiu-jitsu... She learned them one by one, and then in order to make the movies look good, she joined israeli magashu, Filipino martial arts and so on. The actress in the movie is three months fast, and Chen Cuimei herself has almost undergone a full year of intensive training. Later, she discovered that martial arts could also be "used as a method of meditation, a moving meditation that allows you to perceive your body and make you feel ready to know what you are doing and react."
This also means that more trust should be given to the team in the process of shooting, Chen Cuimei said, the special thing about this shooting is that, "the whole crew is helping me share the work of the director, and many times it is really difficult to direct and act." But from the shooting footage, you can still see that she carefully informed the cameraman of the camera scheduling of the scene before starting the camera, there was a shot of being knocked unconscious and thrown into the river, and the voiceover also heard her shouting "card" in the water.
In the early preparation, master Luo kicked Ah Man on the side of the rehearsal, and Ah Man flew back to the wall of the play. Chen Cuimei wanted to retreat faster, and as a result, she fell to the ground. At that time, I endured the pain and said that it was okay, continued to rehearse every day, and after a few weeks, I went to take X-rays before shooting, in fact, the two bone joints of L3 and L4 were already a bit misaligned. At that time, the doctor said that to rest for a month, it was best to lie down. She didn't tell anyone, she continued shooting.
You can see the shadow of the old Hong Kong martial arts film in the movie. Born in 1978, Chen Cuimei remembers that the most seen in the theater as a child was the Hong Kong gangster movie. "The earliest film recall is of a man like Huang Jinshen sawing off a woman's leg with a chainsaw. I don't know if there are any mistakes in my memory. It was never found out which movie it was. Then there's the videotape, the Hong Kong TVB martial arts TV series, and the Taiwanese song and boy drama. At that time, Guo Jing was Huang Rihua, and Yang Guo was Andy Lau. Lu Xiaofeng is Wan Ziliang. Chu Liuxiang is Zheng Shaoqiu, and it seems that there is also Miao Qiaowei. She counted her martial arts film memories like this, "There is a very short, maybe only four episodes, or one episode, called "Yue Nu Sword". A girl of unknown origin, with a clever sword skill, suddenly appeared and left sadly. There must have been love and affection in it, but I don't remember it at all, because I didn't understand it. I only remember the girl's face, and I always remember that her name was Li Saifeng, Moon Lee. ”
Moon Lee also became the name of Chen Cuimei's character in "Barbarian Invasion". "I wanted to make a modern martial arts film before. This one has a few small action scenes, which is considered to be an experiment first. ”
Before the film was officially unveiled at the Shanghai Film Festival, Chen Cuimei had already imagined in her heart that her friends would be shocked when they saw the movie. "I felt like a mischievous kid who put a live frog in a box and let them be startled when they opened it." After watching the movie, you can probably understand the meaning of her prank, she cuts open her own pain in the movie, the amazing cruel hand under herself in the movie, and the joke of movie and life in the movie.
The old monk in the movie said, "Thinking that the body is the cage of the mind, in fact, the mind is the cage of the body." At the end, the director of the film throws away the stick and weapon in his hand on the vast sea, not to disarm, but to be more frank and self-satisfied. At least the sense of destruction in the body was broken by Chen Cuimei herself.
Despite a lot of confusion, "there is still no answer, you think you found something, but something else pops up, it's all questions and processes." Chen Cuimei said.
1 million freedom
"Barbarian Invasion" actually belongs to a small-budget film project of a Chinese film company. A few years ago, Chen Cuimei met director Yang Jin in Hong Kong, and the other party asked, "Now give you 600,000 yuan, can you still make a feature film?" Chen Cuimei said, "Good." ”
They grew up together when small-cost productions were still a happy land of their own more than a decade ago, and then capital entered the Chinese film market in a big way, and Yang Jin missed the era when he could make a safe and pure film with very little money. So she was invited to join the "B2B+X Young Directors Film Project" of Tianhua Painting Day, and completed the challenge of shooting a feature film within 1 million yuan with Asian directors such as Cai Mingliang, Yuya Ishii, Weng Ziguang, and Zhang Lu.
"Because the challenge of a million people completing a film is clear and specific, we have to be within budget from writing the script, forming a crew, finding a venue, and so on. There's an old saying in our independent film industry: if you don't have money, you'd better have friends. Asked her the secret of low-cost shooting, Chen Cuimei said triumphantly, "I am fortunately a person with a lot of friends." ”
In Malaysia filmmaking, 1 million is not so tight, for Chen Cuimei, "the most attractive thing is the director's creative freedom." For example, you can not worry about the commercial recycling after that, such as letting yourself play the heroine. "After all, if you have to find an actress, go to three months of martial arts training, and calculate it, the producer will also know that the budget is definitely not enough."
In addition to this game within a play, Chen Cuimei said that she actually wants to try any type of movie. "Especially want to shoot modern martial arts, black, or sci-fi." Through the appearance of "Barbarian Invasion", she also shouted for her follow-up creation, "The next one wants to make a sci-fi love sketch, it is also 1 million can be filmed." You can invest. Buy and leave. ”
The million-dollar film project set a common theme for the six directors, "Love Conquers Everything", which is the name of Chen Cuimei's feature film debut at the age of 27. So this movie has a ridiculous positioning - love action movies. There is a love of separation and reunion in the movie, with a warm undercurrent of adult exhaustion and restraint.
At that time, "Love Conquers Everything" was an anti-love movie, and today I inadvertently skipped love with action talk, Chen Cuimei said, "I have indeed changed a lot in my state of mind." Experienced so much love. Start cherishing friendship. I also feel that I love this world and the people in this world more than before. ”
Chen Cuimei and the Shanghai Film Festival are also quite lucky, "Barbarian Invasion", a project launched in Shanghai, has returned to Shanghai, and she feels that there is a sense of completeness in the darkness that makes people happy. After the film was screened, she was very well received, so I asked her if she had any expectations of winning the award. "Sometimes a joke is told and a few people understand it, and I feel very happy. There's no need for a room full of people laughing. Chen Cuimei said, "My ambition, that is, a few people who watch my movies, understand, let's make a friend." So I saw a few film reviews after the Shanghai screening and thought it was already my grand prize. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Ding Xiao