Text | Deep ringing, the author | Li Jinglin
A murder that was pre-publicized.
During the Republic of China, a group of filmmakers gathered to discuss the adaptation of a bloody case that sensationalized shanghai beach into a movie. Among them are the king of bad films, the former emperor of silent films, Hollywood martial arts stand-ins, former female stars, and screenwriters who have been banned from journalists. Everyone counts on this show to make a name for themselves.
In particular, the script discussion that took place in an old bungalow included the murderer himself. Qi Leshan, with a fierce bone and a gloomy face, single-handedly killed the "three elders" who held the lifeblood of Shanghai's finance. The self-interested rich producer brought him to the scene to participate in the discussion of the script as a consultant.
Eight people with their own thoughts were at the scene of the crime. Outsiders in the authorities have fallen into a trap, and greater mysteries and dangers have begun.
In the end, the lonely marginal people in the play used a movie to restore the murder scene, and Liu Xunzimo and Wan He Tianyi also moved this "middle game" into reality with a big-screen work.
The film was originally titled The Birth of a Movie.
"The expectation before the release was not to lose money, and now it has exceeded expectations." Obviously, director Liu Xunzimo did not expect to rely on this work to "make a name for himself", but the result was unexpected - the box office exceeded 140 million in the first week of release, and the cumulative box office as of press time has approached 700 million.
Wanhe Tianyi, who has produced explosive web dramas such as "Never Expected" and "Report Boss", faded out of the stage for a long time, during which the rise of short videos and the fierceness of live broadcasting, the former outlet has long been not the outlet. Perhaps it is also experiencing the ups and downs of being held high and silently forgotten, this time, Liu Xunzimo and Wan He Tianyi both chose to "do first, then say", and even "do, do not say".
Liu Xunzimo told "Deep Sound": "In the middle, everyone has experienced some ups and downs and seen a lot of things. ”
In 2018, Liu Xunzimo was in a period of confusion.
After filming the web drama "Report Boss", Liu Xunzimo seemed to have lost his direction, and in an interview with Global Characters, he said: "I was pushed away, and I made various attempts, actors, producers, screenwriters, directors. I was very excited when I was filming, and when I stopped, I was a little empty, and I didn't know what to do. At this time, the idea of making a movie began to linger in his mind, and he wanted to prove himself again through the big screen.
The Japanese comedy "Radio Time" ignited the inspiration of Liu Xunzimo - "The birth of a radio drama can be made into a movie, so can the birth of a movie also be made into a movie?" Then he hired a screenwriter and started working along this line of thinking.
It was only because the original name "The Birth of a Movie" had been registered, and the film was finally released under the name of "Fame and Fame".
The play took two years from script to filming. During this period, Liu Xunzimo's comedic genes and the deep imprint left by Wanhe Tianyi played an important role. He found his old partners Zhang Benyu and Kodak to create together.
In 2013, when Wanhe Tianyi launched "Never Expected", the three of them starred together as actors. In the same year, Liu Xunzimo directed another web drama "Report Boss", in which Zhang Benyu and Kodak also played roles. Liu Xunzimo told Shen Xiang: "I am too familiar with Ben YuGe and Kodak. When addressing other actors, Liu Xunzi Moduo used the honorific title of "teacher", and when it came to Zhang Benyu, he used the more intimate expression of "brother".
Familiarity also means that actors need to convey more novelty and surprises. "Kodak bears a lot of laughs, which I am not worried about, because he himself plays this kind of content is hand to hand", what makes the director more concerned is the interpretation of the main drama part, Kodak's role of Chen Xiaoda, behind the timid and straight funny, there is also a sense of contradiction, which is also a big challenge for actors from comedy. In the end, Kodak played well in the film.
Zhang Benyu is one of the wider actors in Wanhe Tianyi, who has starred in movies such as "Riding the Wind and Waves" and "Flying Life" over the years, and even played the literary hero Ouyang Xiu in the TV series "Qingping Le". This time in "Fame and Fame", the killer Qi Leshan, played by Zhang Benyu, is the most complex character in the play, not only to show a fierce side, but also to perform a sentient and righteous, dashing side, in the switching of multiple states, a little inattention will make the audience play.
In addition to Wanhe Tianyi himself, Yin Zheng, Yu Entai, Deng Jiajia and other actors also cooperated with Liu Xunzimo for the first time, and when the past impressions and real collisions were superimposed, Liu Xunzimo always received unexpected surprises: "The real Yang Haoyu (playing the silent film emperor Guan Jingnian in the play) is completely different from the image he created before, which is surprising. ”
"Fame and Fame" is a group portrait film. The eight people in the play do not have the main role and supporting roles, and each person undertakes the task of advancing the plot, improving the story structure, and throwing away the burden of shaking. When the set became a crime-solving scene, it is no wonder that the audience will naturally associate it with the script killing, although Liu Xunzimo has never played the script killing at all.
The unconscious coincidence and the twists and turns of this year's schedule pattern have indirectly made "Fame and Fame" gain the attention of the market, but the establishment of word of mouth still depends on content to win.
Therefore, being able to act has become the primary criterion for Liu Xunzimo's casting. Eight actors in the play constitute a stable structure like an octagonal building, and once one corner is missing, it will make the whole look abrupt. Among them, the performance of newcomer Qin Xiaoxian is particularly interesting, and the film also intercepts the bridge section of Qin Xiaoxian's death in the play in the short video promotion to show the control of emotions by this cross-talk actor.
The moment when the sea is shot in the movie
"People who can act together make each other and the story better." Liu Xunzimo sighed.
The special structure of this film also makes the director have more consideration when selecting actors, and Liu Xunzimo especially values the actor's ability to seamlessly switch between comedy and drama.
Many audiences walked into the cinema with the four words of Wanhe Tianyi. After many years, nonsense funny is still a label attached to this company.
But this time, "Fame and Fame" broke the stereotype of the audience, who never intended to make a pure comedy from the beginning.
Liu Xunzimo usually likes to read books and watch movies, and he reads the most works on crime, suspense and realism, "They made me understand that the world is not so good, but it is not so bad." As for the comedic elements, it is also his love, and the creative experience of comedy can bring him a wild imagination, but flying in the sky all the time will make it difficult for the work to land.
Therefore, as Liu Xunzimo said in an interview with Forbes, the movie "Fame and Fame" is a comedy is embellishment, and suspense is the background. This also creates a direct perception of the audience, the first half of the film is spent in hip-hop, and the real main line is a thrilling suspense case.
However, there are indeed many bridges in the film that remind the audience that this movie is from the hand of Wanhe Tianyi.
"I call you Dad, you beat me on a horse, right?" The lyrics from Jay Chou's song "Daddy I'm Back" are used; the phrase "I'm sorry, I'm a policeman" by The Sea (Qin Xiaoxian) pays tribute to "Infernal Affairs"... Such a method, like the reference and deconstruction of a large number of classic film and television dramas and advertisements in "Report Boss", "The Matrix", "Jingwumen", "Titanic" and other works have not escaped the fate of being used by nonsense.
In the director's view, the addition of funny content can adjust the atmosphere of the film and deepen the audience's understanding of the characters. As for the suspense plot, it is really the plot and characters of this movie that fall into reality.
Frustrated journalist Lee Ka-fai (Yin Zheng) never gives up his almost paranoid search for facts; bad film director Zheng Qianli (Yu Entai), although full of "box office passwords", eventually risked filming the murder; as for the murderer Qi Leshan, after the investigation of the cocoon, he revealed the unavoidable and tender feelings hidden under the fierce surface.
Today's comedy creation is often caught in a certain kind of dilemma, especially the sketches, after the dense baggage and laughter, it is always inexplicably sensational and adds a touching story ending. Fixed routines and obvious fragmentations make the audience aesthetically tired.
However, "Fame and Fame" seems to be difficult to nest into the conventional genre, comedy, nonsense, suspense, and a variety of content elements are integrated. Liu Xunzimo said that when shooting, he did not set what the main type was, and wanted to do the content that belonged to these characters. What each person does is deduced little by little, acting within the scope of his logic.
Diluting the film genre and taking the character as the shooting perspective also avoids the separation of comedy and suspense elements to a certain extent, and integrates the genre elements into the logic of story development, Liu Xunzimo said: "From the beginning of the film, it is necessary to let the suspense and comedy plot penetrate each other. ”
In the final analysis, the use of technology must serve the emotions, any type of setting is only the appearance, Liu Xunzimo wants to use stories to show humanity, he hopes to bring warmth and courage to people.
"Suspense and comedy can't be too preemptive, the main performance is 'people'."
After "Fame and Fame" gained word of mouth and popularity, people's "nostalgic" feelings for Wanhe Tianyi were mobilized. Some people have regained joy, and some people have also lamented that the times have changed, and it is advisable for Wanhe Tianyi to "no longer be young".
Indeed, Wanhe Tianyi can be said to be the "peak of debut" - in 2013, once "Never Expected" was broadcast, it achieved the success of the main creative team that was "unthinkable". To this day, "being the CEO, embarking on the peak of life, marrying Bai Fumei" and "remembering your running under the sunset is your lost youth" are still popular passages. The first season of "Never Expected" reached a Douban score of 8.3.
Immediately afterward, Liu Xunzimo, Together with Bai Ke, Zhang Benyu, Kodak, Xiao Ai and others, produced "Report Boss", adding a fire to the boom of this network short drama.
The success of these two works made Wanhe Tianyi fire out of the circle, and also completely released Liu Xunzimo's imagination. In "Report Boss", he played various roles, such as courier brother, porter, etc., and also played Snow White and Korean drama heroines.
But after the completion of the second season of "Report Boss" in 2016, Liu Xunzimo's creativity was somewhat hollowed out, describing his state at that time: "Constantly outputting, in the end it was a bit exhausted." ”
Stills from "Never Expected"
In almost the same time period, Wanhe Tianyi also encountered Waterloo. In 2015, "Never Expected", which was put on the big screen, only had a 5.6 score on Douban, although it got 322 million at the box office, but the reputation was not satisfactory. The rhythm of web dramas is very different from that of movies, and blunt grafting will only backfire.
The bigger threat comes from the outside. The short video platform represented by Douyin and Kuaishou has completely reconstructed the content creation mode and the audience's preferences. Originating on the PC side, Wanhe Tianyi Comedy still maintains the traditional film and television drama production process of "screenwriting-shooting-editing-reviewing-publishing", which is a bit unable to keep up with the rapidly changing era, and a wave of emerging short video bloggers such as Papi sauce are on the tide.
Transforming or even leaving, the team of Wanhe Tianyi has changed.
Bidding farewell to the white guest of Wang Sledgehammer's identity, he tried various roles in a few years. In works such as "The Man Taken by the Light", "More Than Endless", "Door Lock" and so on, the plasticity and multi-faceted nature of an actor are shown. In 2020, The beast Yi Xiaoxing left the Wanhe Tianyi self-reliance portal, and he said in Weibo: "Twelve years ago, I didn't expect to be able to make Wanhe Tianyi so big, make so many good works, and have so many good brothers. Twelve years later, I also did not expect that I would sign the document leaving the world. ”
Partners have transformed, and Liu Xunzimo has also made up his mind to try to make movies. However, the sudden divestment of investors has temporarily become a bubble in the movie version of "Report Boss", which he spent a lot of effort on. This experience made Liu Xunzimo fall into a trough, fortunately, the idea of "Fame and Fame" appeared, which made him suddenly cheerful.
And this period of low tide also consciously or unconsciously acted in "Fame and Fame". Liu Xunzimo told Shen Xiang: "Maybe the characters inside will have some characteristics and psychological states of the people around us. ”
"Fame and Fame" is like a stone thrown into the water, stirring up a splash of water through the cold schedule. The success of "Never Expected" may have unexpected elements, and now that it is trying to regain its fame, wanhe tianyi still has a lot to do.
After the release of the movie, Liu Xunzimo posted that he did not seek fame and fame, but sought to be ashamed. Having tried multiple identities, he has now found his way in the role of director, and he has more content to express through the big screen.
A "Fame and Fame" has given Liu Xunzimo more confidence. The current warm market feedback may also bring greater confidence to the future of Wanhe Tianyi.