Twelve years ago, Feng Xiaogang was scolded by netizens to uncover the national scars, what did a film director do to make netizens scold to this point, what are the national scars in their mouths? In the face of the accusations of netizens and the dismal box office of the movie, Feng Xiaogang is full of regrets between his words.
Twelve years have passed, and in the face of this kind of mystery, there are still many people who want to spy on the original things. The film is called "Nineteen Forty-Two", which is the most tragic event in the history of Henan, an indelible scar in China's modern history, and also a national chaos and pain, confusion and anxiety.
In 1942, a great famine occurred in Henan, 30 million people were affected and 3 million people died, and after the drought, there was a locust plague, and the locusts covered the sky and came like a black cloud pressing on the crops, and less than a bag of cigarettes was nibbled, leaving behind a cup and plate of crops, as well as the thirty million ordinary people on the ground who were sighing in the sky. There are no grasses in the wild, ten rooms and nine empty spaces, there are not a few people who fill in the gullies from the empty forest, it is common for quails to beg in the color of vegetables, and the people flee from the wilderness with mud doors, and sell their wives and women to eat flesh and bones on the way. The whole of Henan is shrouded in a cloud.
The film revolves around the word famine, in addition to analyzing the human nature in the chaotic world, the cruel reality of people eating people, and the shots of the Japanese army bombing indiscriminately in the sky, all of which portray the people as the lowest and most vulnerable group to be slaughtered. On the way to escape the wilderness, cold and hungry, the Japanese bombing, the Kuomintang deserters, are raging this wilderness of mourning. Everyone was unkempt and skinny, and the place where the face should have been the eye became two deep whirlpools. They wrapped their thin and tattered cotton jackets tightly around their bodies, staggering forward on the dry earth, under the gray sky, and in the confusion of the unknown road ahead. Their only hope is that the government will be able to help.
Li Peiji in the film is a middle-aged man with a weak and upright culture, compared with other corrupt officials and officials, he still has a more conscience, and in the year of the catastrophe, he was sent down to collect 30 million pounds of military food. Li Peiji faced Henan, where even the bark of the tree was scraped clean, he really couldn't scrape out 30 million catties of grain. So he found Jiang Dingwen, the commander of the First Theater stationed in Henan at the time, to express the disaster. Hoping to avoid paying some grain, Commander Jiang Dingwen was very touched and refused. In his words, a great war is about to break out, and the place where the victims of the disaster are starved to death is still In China, but if the soldiers starve to death, we will perish.
Xiucai could not explain the reasoning of the soldiers, and in desperation, Li Peiji could only rush to Chongqing to ask for chiang kai-shek, the supreme leader of China. Just as he was pondering how to open his mouth, the secretary came forward to report on the important news of the times: the Battle of Stalingrad had entered a fever pitch, the Japanese army had approached Henan in a vain attempt to invade, the British army was besieged by the Japanese army, and Marshal Montgomery strongly demanded Chinese support. Before I could finish speaking, Chiang Kai-shek's landline was ready. Everything was so urgent, Li Peiji didn't even have the space to interject a sentence, and in the end he could only stop it.
Seventy years later we know about the Battle of Stalingrad, we know about the Chinese Expeditionary Force about Montgomery, and who knows that there was a famine in Henan?
The author Liu Zhenyun said in an interview: As a Henan native, I never knew that there was such a severe drought in Henan in 1942, so serious that 3 million people died. During World War II, 1 million people were persecuted to death at Auschwitz. In 1942, Henan, the equivalent of three Auschwitz concentration camps, died in the drought, and what shocked him even more was that when he asked the witnesses of the disaster and their descendants about the disaster, he found that they had all chosen to forget. Why do people forget such a serious disaster? Such shock and confusion forced him into the exploration and writing of 1942.
In the face of the past suffering, most people choose to forget, and Feng Xiaogang unveiled these scars and nakedly let the audience see them, which is probably one of the reasons for being scolded. Feng Xiaogang once talked about the reason why he started filming 1942 in the program "Let's Talk", when Wang Shuo showed him the book, he was deeply touched after reading it, and he was also very surprised. Before reading this novel, he had no idea that there was such a disaster. At that time, I wondered whether we were a nation that was good at forgetting, or whether our nation had suffered too much.
The significance of making this movie is, first, to let us understand a great tragedy that once happened in Henan, and the other is through this movie
Everyone also thinks about it, why did such a tragedy occur? Will it happen again? This film is like a mirror that sees a part of our national character. Later, Liu Zhenyun found him and wanted to make 1942 into a movie, found a lot of expert directors to discuss, and walked along the clues of the novel for several months. After months of interviewing and fumbling, the framework of the script gradually emerged.
The filming process went up and down several times, and the light film crew was set up three times, and the scene was selected with great fanfare to find actors, and after several years of preparation, the film was finally shot smoothly. Yang Lan once interviewed the author Liu Zhenyun and the director Feng Xiaogang, and learned from their narratives that since wang Shuo recommended Liu Zhenyun's novel "Wen Gu 1942", he had the idea of making a movie, but for various reasons, "1942" was prepared in 1994, 2000 and 2002, and failed to start smoothly. It was not until 2011 that the film was completely determined to shoot, the film went through 9 months of preparation and 5 months of shooting, traveled to 7 cities, the crew remade 100,000 historical photos, small knick-knacks and more than 1,000 plaques in the shops on both sides of the street, all designed according to historical pictures.
Feng Xiaogang led the interview team and Liu Zhenyun to almost repeat the road of the disaster victims to escape the famine in that year, and they also continued to speculate on the way to how to reproduce the escape road of the disaster victims in that year. This is a film about suffering, but how to show this suffering in the film, is it a complete catharsis or a sense of moderation that respects the sense of history? Feng Xiaogang feels that he has squandered the trust of the audience accumulated over the years on the movie "Nineteen Forty-Two", because this movie is not just a story, but a real history of existence. What he has to do is to restore this history to the audience in its original form.
In order to shoot the film crew up and down have made a lot of efforts, filming "1942" Zhang Guoguo zero remuneration starring, in order to prepare for the filming of the film, all the main actors must be hungry to maintain the state to conform to the character image, and finally Zhang Guoguo's hungry speech is weak, had to ask the screenwriter Liu Zhenyun to revise the script, after filming lost more than twenty pounds. In addition, there are 19 protagonists and 50 minor roles, many of which are starred in friendship.
Before filming, a group of leading actors must practice the Henan dialect, Zhang Guoli Zhang Hanyu Feng Expedition Xu Fan and other actors, in the filming of dangerous scenes, insisted on personal battle, shooting explosion scenes, every time there were hot rubble, hit Xu Fan Feng Expedition's face and neck. Academy Award for Best Actor winner Adrian Brody is next to the railroad tracks, stepping on the tipping point at zero distance. Not only the actors behind the film, but also the film's efforts to shoot the film, the director of photography Lu Le needed to hang a rope to choose the best shooting position on the frozen cliff.
In the scene where the refugees pickpocketed the train, in order to be realistic, the filming team moved from Shanxi to the northeast, and finally found a locomotive made in the United States in 1942, but did not expect to be able to drive, so quickly made the kind of flatbed truck used to pull goods, and Feng Xiaogang, as a director, also clashed with the actor. What he remembers most is a dispute with Xu Fan in a scene, Xu Fan played a farmer in the movie 1942, she and her husband and mother-in-law with two children, together embarked on the road to escape from their hometown, in one of the scenes to save the life of the child, about the moderation of emotions or release, the two had a difference in performance.
After five months of painstaking shooting, the film entered the later 8 months of production, and the four-hour film was repeatedly reduced by Feng Xiaogang to an airtight 146 minutes.
On November 2, 2012, the news of the trial of "1942" came, and Feng Xiaogang bluntly said that this was the happiest thing for him in 2012. Subsequently, the film carried out a lot of trailer publicity, and many film critics clapped their hands and applauded, but what everyone did not expect was that the film was brutally beaten in the face within a few days of its release, and the box office was dismal. Many netizens shelled Feng Xiaogang after watching it, accusing him of making misery and making money to earn the tears of the Chinese people. In the face of overwhelming verbal criticism, Feng Xiaogang shed tears several times, for "1942", he gambled on all the popularity accumulated by the previous 12 films, hoping that through this tragic film created by the strength of the people, in the era of excessive entertainment, bring the audience not to forget the pain of war and remember the pain of history.
Novel author Liu Zhenyun regrets that in today's era of entertainment supremacy, people have long been accustomed to avoiding suffering, no one wants to see such a tragic story, today we look back at this film, it brings people more, is a sense of sadness and compassion. For thousands of years, this land under our feet has staged countless tragedies, some of which are for the state and for the home, we have cried all the way, lost all the way and all the way forward, what is not extinguished is the goodness in the heart, and what is not extinguished is the soul of the nation.