Produced by Huang Lei, directed by Lin Jidong, and starring Chai Biyun, Sun Shaolong, Wan Siwei and Shen Taoran, the annual emotional drama "I want to be with you" will usher in the finale this week. "I want to be with you" has received a series of praise since its inception, and its reputation has continued to rise, ranking second in the same period of the country, ranking in the top three of the golden file, and once jumped to the top of the list.
This is a very rare scene for this year's urban emotional drama, and it has also aroused heated discussion among the audience. Lin Meiya rejects her ex-boyfriend Chen Zhe, Ouyang's life is reversed, and the small climax of each plot can trigger a craze for chasing dramas. This drama that focuses on the real life of urban youth is directed by Lin Jidong, who was a teacher at the North Film Academy and later involved actors, producers, directors and other creative roles. "I want to be with you" is an urban positive energy light comedy work created by him and three generations of teachers and students of Beiying.
Recently, we conducted an exclusive interview with Lin Jidong, the director of "I want to be with you", and listened to his answers to the success factors of the drama "I want to be with you".
Character shaping: starting from the core of the script
Urban love stories have always been said to be dream machines. Two young people, one is Lin Meiya, who returned from studying abroad, and the other is the rich man Ouyang, quietly meet in the city, from the surface, "I want to be with you" seems to be a sweet love story full of romantic bubbles.
But the core of "I Want to Be with You" is not so simple. In the early stage of script writing, Lin Jidong finalized with the screenwriter to promote the development of the story with fast-paced strong plots such as business war love, while Lin Jidong deeply cultivated the core of the story. He focuses on the emotional resonance, in the ultimate character events, explore the re-established expression between people, focus on the new youth emotional concept and values of the times, and hope that this kind of story can span its own characteristics of the times, but also across the class attributes represented by the characters, and directly establish the commonality of the emotional level.
"All stories have similarities, just as every individual's life has similarities, but because of different personalities and different ways of acting, different lives are produced, and the character arc of the characters is also shown at the twisting inflection point."
Implemented in "I want to be with you", Lin Jidong tried to pursue a sense of reality. When the urban emotional story returns to the basics, the search for the theme is implemented to the original state of love: when the series really has commonality, directly hits the pain points of life, and explores the most sincere emotional appeals of modern urban people, how to polish the characters to the most real and initial state? And how to convey this original intention to the audience?
The transmission of any feeling needs to be conveyed by the truth as a medium. "How to better influence the mood and sorrow of the audience? How to better control this proportion through the plot? This is the most important point to pay attention to in the early stages. ”
There are many "countervailing" passages in the script: the story is obviously very painful, and the actors are also showing this, but the audience feels the hidden humor and humor. After the broadcast, many viewers gave the same feedback: one second they were still crying because of the sad plot, and the next second they couldn't help but laugh.
"The protagonist's loveless emotions will naturally drive the audience's sad emotions; but if this emotion is rendered in a relaxed way, the audience can also feel this ease." Because this kind of plot comes from the audience's real life experience. In the creative process, re-placement, amplification, and the display of real emotions are all processes in which the characters interact with the audience. We hope that in the process of laughing, the audience can taste a little sour aftertaste, which is the emotional goal we are trying to achieve: let the audience experience the true complexity of emotions, which is a realistic flavor of life. ”
In the process of creating the script, Lin Jidong and screenwriter Shen Taoran basically discussed every scene together. By the end, some of the scenes are still divided. "In the early stage of script creation, because Shen and I are both actors, we often try to experience the characters ourselves, enter the performance state, and experience whether the lines are appropriate through our own feelings."
"We first have to solve the most important problem: the characters have to live in the story like people. The actions and plot of the characters are superficial, and the vividness of the soul determines the key to the play, and a story about puppets and props cannot move the audience. ”
His most skillful creative mode is to organize the rhythm of group portraits from the character biography, take the story, and put people with different personalities and different behaviors together to cross. First sort out the character relationship line, try to show a good story that can show the human world, let the "good-looking" people collide, and there is no need to worry about no real modern story.
"When the story is based on people, a single scene will have a natural 'drama core' jumping out. In this state, let's design their external elements: what clothes should everyone wear? What social identity do you have? Only under the interweaving of a perfect emotional network, the advancement of the plot and the resonance of emotions are natural. ”
How do I talk to an actor about acting?
Lin Jidong entered film school in 1997 and was Huang Lei's first batch of students. When he was in college, he was the class leader of the 97-level acting class, he was one of Huang Lei's "three proud protégés" and has always been considered an "all-rounder". After graduation, he chose to stay in school to teach, and worked as a teacher in the film school for 16 years, at the same time, Lin Jidong co-directed "TianshengShui" with his teacher Huang Lei in 2004, and then began to dabble in animation, and the "Genie Century" written and directed by him currently has a Douban score of 9.4.
At the end of 2010, Lin Jidong returned to the field of TELEVISION dramas, during which he starred in many works such as "Never Look Back", "Love of hawthorn trees", "AA marriage", "I am very good in Beijing" and many other works, after experiencing multiple role conversions, Lin Jidong admitted that as a director, when choosing his own actor, he believes that the actor's understanding of a role is the most critical.
"In school, teachers teach the art of acting. A truly good actor should not emphasize simple expressiveness, but more importantly, understanding. The actor's understanding of the difference in the depth of the work and the character will make the character have a qualitative leap. ”
His communication with the actors is divided into three stages: the first stage, the choice when meeting for the first time; the second stage, reading the script, before starting the camera, with up to a month, and all the actors to read through the script, to promote deeper judgment and run-in; to the scene of the filming, everyone enters the single-scene practice and begins the third level of judgment.
"The third layer of judgment is more about communicating, giving and excavating. The director is not teaching the actor how to play this role, but to dig out the things that the actors will have. ”
The scene of "I want to be with you" is very relaxed, and Lin Jidong, as a director, has his own unique way to protect this atmosphere. "We should give actors as much space as possible for self-development and performance." A good atmosphere will be the icing on the cake, and if there is a disagreement, let's find a way that young actors can accept. ”
He knows better than others how vulnerable actors are: "Actors are sensitive, so sensitive that when the director sighs in front of a camera, it can shake the actor's ability to perform, the dignity of the performance, and the expressiveness in front of everyone." Good actors also need self-confidence, and really good actors also need to be protected by directors. ”
But in terms of performance, Lin Jidong is also more demanding than other directors. In the first few episodes of the noodle splash scene, Li Weiwei not only had to fight with Lin Meiya in a slippery environment, fell down, and even wanted to spill a whole bowl of noodles on each other. In pursuit of the right effect, this one was shot nearly six times. Due to the tight shooting time and heavy tasks, after filming this scene, the actors immediately changed their clothes and prepared for the next scene.
There are many such stories in the shooting, and Lin Jidong not only has strict requirements for the performance of the protagonist, but also pays attention to the details that are difficult for the camera to collect. In the first episode of the beginning of the story, Lin Zhiguo, who plays the protagonist's father, has a long-term professional skill under the smoke of fireworks, because the actor himself is not a professional chef, so under lin Jidong's arrangement, he found a professional chef and learned the skill of reversing spoons.
Although this scene is not deliberately displayed with close-ups, in Lin Jidong's mind, the value of details is through repeated superposition in the background to build the texture of real life.
Lin Jidong calls such subtleties "fireworks": "If in a play, the audience can't see what is in life, then what is the camera capturing?" Is it just the end of the line? If the value is to be measured, then the value of the character's behavior, the inner feeling, will far exceed the vocabulary and language. ”
From actor to director: one small step
Lin Jidong and performance have a deep relationship. As a disciple of Huang Lei, when filming "I Want to Be with You", a phone call invited Huang Lei to be a producer. As an actor, he has a lot of acting experience. But Lin Jidong is also aware of the limitations of a single identity. If it is solidified by the performance identity for a long time, then it can only be expressed from the theme of a role and close to the role.
"An actor's mission is to get close to the character, not to change it. A common mode of performance is to change the character to bring the character closer to the self. But this raises many questions, and sometimes there is an insurmountable gulf between the self and the character. ”
In order to cross this insurmountable gap as an actor, he took a step forward and became a director. Taking this step, the initial goal is to have more avenues to express. At the same time, Lin Jidong hopes to make his deduction level more abundant in this process.
"Being a director is also a model that you learn through other actors. Now that I jump out one step, I can better appreciate the process of learning to act, although acting is excellent, but after becoming a director, I may be better than the original acting. The transformation of identity is not a solidified and one-line process, it can blend with each other and reach a complementary state. ”
However, any expression has shackles and constraints, and Lin Jidong also admitted that being a director is not a random way to express anything you want to express. But taking this step as a director is something he does from the heart. The nature of his own temperament is pushing him forward on the road of acting.
epilogue:
Lin Jidong has always been known as an "all-rounder", and after experiencing multiple transformations of directors, producers, producers and actors, he seems to always have a new definition of his future. In the future, he hopes to try more genre series, and apparently, after "I Want to Be with You", he has anchored himself to a new goal, and he always seems to have plenty of energy to support himself in a direction he has never set foot in.
At the end of the interview, we talked about his many attempts to take the "first step", and Lin Jidong replied:
"It's not much, but a little more is a little bit. You should run in the direction you want, even if you are like an ant, and one step forward is a step forward. ”
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