As of 19:00 on December 20, the movie "Manslaughter 2" has earned 350 million yuan at the box office, becoming the biggest winner of the current Lunar New Year file. If the film's lead actor Xiao Yang and producer Chen Sicheng are the two golden signs of the "manslaughter" IP, then Dai Mo, the director who directed the film for the first time, successfully continued this IP and made his film director resume have a beautiful start.
Dai Mo (right) on the set of Manslaughter 2
Dai Mo graduated from the Mixed Class of Directors of the Central Academy of Drama, rehearsed dramas, acted in TV dramas, and gradually shifted the focus of his work to the work of directing. Audiences who are not familiar with him may think that he has suddenly changed from actor to director, but in fact he has been quietly working in this industry for many years. "I have my name in the director group of the TV series 'Beijing Love Story', and the film version is also the same, and I began to work as an assistant director and executive director very early." After directing the "Rose's Name" unit drama in the web drama "Detective Chinatown", Dai Mo's directing ability was finally recognized by Chen Sicheng and won the directing right of "Manslaughter 2". "When he asked me if I would like to take on this project, I was still a little nervous, after all, it was my first feature film debut, Whether I could shoot it well or not, and the box office reputation of the previous work was so good, at least I couldn't lose points, right?" Dai Mo said that he finally took on the challenge because he felt that he could face the difficulties and pressure was also the motivation.
Starting in November 2020, Dai Mo and the two screenwriters of "Manslaughter 2", Li Peng and Liu Wusi, began to write a closed script in an apartment. "It's like going back to the student dormitory, every day everyone gets up and starts to create, until late at night, then goes to bed, and the next day it's the same, constantly arguing, overturning, and finishing the first draft a month later." Dai Mo revealed that they wrote a total of ten drafts of the relatively large changes. At the beginning, the crew planned to go to Thailand to shoot, but as a result, they encountered another outbreak of local epidemics when they arrived in Thailand, and they could only return to China to shoot on the scene. The crew found an abandoned building in Zhuhai, transformed it into the emergency center of the film's main scene, and also renovated the buildings around the building, replacing all the billboards, creating an atmosphere in Southeast Asia, where the film's story takes place.
The first scene of "Manslaughter 2" is that the protagonist Lin Zhilang, played by Xiao Yang, hijacks the emergency center, with a sharp and fast rhythm, fierce contradictions and conflicts, and a particularly large amount of information, which suddenly firmly grasps the attention of the audience. Dai Mo laughed and said that this is exactly the shooting style of their team. "We adjusted the structure at the script stage, mentioned this paragraph to the beginning, came up to the accident, and then talked about why there was an accident, which is more in line with the current narrative structure and the audience's taste." He said that although the scene looked short, it was particularly complicated to shoot. "I call it 'Death Ground Stadium', basically everyone in the film appears, and the police pull out the cordon, all kinds of crowds watching, media reports, etc., all of which are groups of shots, which need to be shot one by one, which is time-consuming, but after spelling it out, the effect is very cool."
Xiao Yang, Ren Dahua, Wen Yongshan, Song Yang, Zhang Shi, Jiang Haowen... The actors of "Manslaughter 2" are all powerful factions, and Dai Mo, who is an actor, works very smoothly with them. "I understand how actors act, so I'll talk to them from the perspective of the script I understand, say what I want to feel, they will give me more choices in the end, sometimes I have passed, they will say 'I'll come again' and 'the director will give me another chance'. Xiao Yangguang acted in several different ways in the last scene, providing a lot of reference for the post-production; other actors were the same, and even when they were dubbing in the later stage, they were still creating, saying 'I can't add a word like this'. Dai Mo said that this is a film that is completed by all the staff with their hearts, and he hopes that the emotions in it can touch the audience. As for his next work, he admits that he doesn't know it yet, but he wants to make a work that is not the same as his current style, such as comedy.