"I'm just a lucky creator."
Text | Zhang Ying
Edit | Zhao Ordinary
When "Manslaughter 2" was still filming, we chatted with Chen Sicheng, who is the film's producer. Regarding the movie itself, at that time, he did not reveal much because he "did not want the queen mother to sell melons".
In the film, a father at the bottom of the ladder takes risks for the sake of his children, fighting darkness and injustice on his own. In reality, Chen Sicheng often needs to be very cautious, even walking on thin ice. "I'm just a lucky creator." He said.
But he survived by chance, which was somewhat incompatible with Chen Sicheng's personality. In the dialogue, he still talked about his expectations and worries about the film industry, and he still had a lot to say about his feelings as a producer and company owner. And the work is his most important expression.
On the day of the premiere of the movie, standing in front of the audience, Chen Sicheng only said that the world is changing, and life is not easy, as if everyone is very anxious. "So I hope that in the post-epidemic era, there will be a movie that allows the audience to feel the power of an ordinary person in all sentient beings, and then embrace each other."
Addition and subtraction
"Manslaughter 2" has currently grossed more than 1 billion yuan, and is the box office champion of the 2021 Lunar New Year slot. In the commercial dimension, such achievements at least verify the feasibility of Chen Sicheng's insistence on doing IP and series of film ideas - with the accumulation of the previous works, the audience has a cognitive premise of the suspense and crime type of the film before the screening, and when it is released, this recognition also plays a certain role in the box office of the film.
What's different is that this time he did some subtraction on the basis of Manslaughter 1. "Manslaughter 2" has weakened in the intensity of suspense, and even for many viewers with rich experience in reading genre films, the direction of the plot is not difficult to guess. But what the audience will unexpectedly get is that under the shell of the film's crime type, it tells a story closer to the lives and emotions of ordinary people:
A weak father can be desperate to save his children; an ordinary person living at the bottom can also burst out of great energy for what he wants to protect when facing the injustice of society.
This is also the addition of "Manslaughter 2": in addition to the coldness of crime films, "Manslaughter 2" has more humanistic care for social reality and individuals, and appears more warm. In Chen Sicheng's view, this addition is necessary: "Ordinary people are like fireflies, they can't see the light it emits during the day." And in the dark, its light is dazzling. He hopes to bring a little warmth to the audience.
This point also reflects the "addition" that happened to Chen Sicheng, who originally did not hide what he wanted.
In a conversation with Poison Eye (ID: DomoreDumou) three years ago, he mentioned that the business model of domestic film companies is not sound, and people should not just stare at the 60 billion yuan annual box office market to compete. He wants to touch the ceiling of the industry, determined to make only IP-friendly movies in the future, and create IP with strong entertainment and positive value;
Three years later, everything he did around the film did not deviate from the original goal: "Tang Detective" series three box office nearly 9 billion, IP-derived dramas, games and other diversified business models steadily advanced; as a producer and new director to continue to tap the market potential of commercial genre films...
However, he is more gentle than he was three years ago. When Asked by Poison Eye how far China's commercial film market can go, Chen Sicheng said it wasn't something he should have thought about.
But in all the creative process, he will consider these questions: first, how to make this movie look better; second, how to make the movie audience like it more; third, how to make the film more social topical and hot; fourth, how can it leave an afterglow for the audience and have some expression for this society?
These considerations do not mean that Chen Sicheng, as a creator, is anxious and cowering: "The truly wise person is able to use his strengths and avoid his weaknesses." "People are the product of change, and Chen Sicheng's cleverness makes him not violent tiger Feng He."
New annoyances
"Other industries are already growing aggressively, but what about the film industry?" Chen Sicheng's anxiety is not in the individual, but in the entire industry.
In his view, the market is like the dark jungle law in "The Three-Body Problem": the total amount of many things will not change, and the attention, time, and consumption power of human beings will not change, and there will be less here and there. "The more people go to play games, script killings and escape rooms, the less time they spend watching movies in the theater."
In the past few years, Chen Sicheng has proposed that commercial genre films are more valuable to the industry, and the industry needs genre films, commercial films, and blockbusters to bless them, so that more people can enter the cinema, which is still important in today's context. "We creators should be more ashamed and brave, and make more good movies, commercial films."
IP is still what Chen Sicheng values most, but after the accumulation of experience of "Tang Detective", he wants to go further ahead.
"For example, if I look at a toy thing, I will make a joint venture for it, and then make the toy into a movie, reverse the creation, and push the creation backwards from the industry side." Chen Sicheng said.
Using film and television content to give a toy "soul" and "emotion", so that it no longer exists in an independent form, selling both toys and movies - once this model can be operated, it can extend more imagination about games and paradise development - a new big IP may be born.
Although the idea is beautiful, Chen Sicheng also knows that this is a long road, let alone one person or one company. Just like when he made "Tang Detective" a few years ago, he proposed that while making films according to industrial standards, he should use China's own team. "If the chain of production of everything depends entirely on external and not your own power, sooner or later someone else will get stuck in your neck and productivity will be broken." Chen Sicheng said.
This recognition is also directly reflected in his own company's internal planning: covering the whole industry process such as screenwriting, production, post-production, and publicity, forming an ecological closed loop of the whole industry chain. "The deeper the industrial moat is dug, the more resistant it will be to foreign enemies and variables in the future." As a result, his company had three clear production lines.
The first is to make big IP movies that can be serialized and can resonate with other industries. For example, "Tang Detective", "Mozart in Outer Space" and subsequent new series of movies, these IPs must have a strong possibility of empowering industries such as games, derivatives and parks - not only sell movie tickets, but also break away from the traditional and old single profit model, to expand the value of IP indefinitely, and to transfer the audience's attraction to other industries.
The second is the training program for young directors. "While retaining the authorship, it has a strong commercial and social integration, meets the audience's social and exploration needs, allows the audience to enter the cinema, and has some author's attitude in it." In Chen Sicheng's view, this kind of film is a regular commercial genre film with a production cost of about 100 million yuan, and has obvious authorship, "We don't do pure popcorn things." ”
The third line is to do something more pure about the author's expression. If the story of the young creator impresses Chen Sicheng, he is also willing to stand in the position of supporting the promotion of new people, but the proportion will be significantly lower than that of commercial genre films.
After the three business lines were pulled out, the role played by Chen Sicheng had a new story to tell.
Take it one more step
After the release of "Manslaughter 2", Chen Sicheng, as a producer, said that participating in the creation of newcomer directors is also a process of mutual learning, "Everyone has their own unique shining points, and more importantly, they can understand them through creation, and then create more possibilities together in the future." ”
Executive producer Chen Sicheng believes that his role is more like a big producer. He wanted to minimize the shortcomings of young directors in the creative process and provide them with some ways to make up for it. And "Manslaughter 1" director Ke Wenli once told Poison Eye that Chen Sicheng is a person with a very large pattern, "The work he has done is relatively comprehensive." As executive producer he would give us a lot of space to let the director go and create freely. ”
But all this premise is that the young directors who cooperate must meet Chen Sicheng's selection criteria. "I'll start by asking him what kind of film he wants to make, who his favorite director is, and if his list is filled with artists like Apichatpong, forget it; if he wants to make commercial films, he likes to be a director who is Spielberg, Nolan, Park Chan-wook, that's all."
With this clear standard, Chen Sicheng wants to work with young directors to make "commercial films with authorship" - integrating individuality and industrialization. In his view, personality is relative not absolute, and it is more important to pay attention to the process and respect the basic rules of big commercial films.
Movies have commodity attributes, the audience votes on their feet, at the moment, can entertain them while bringing some thoughts about society and people, is the reason why the film can survive and be paid by the audience, which Chen Sicheng has figured out from the first work he created as a director.
At present, these seemingly "Chen Sicheng has retreated to the background" actions are actually to be able to move forward better.
After more and more identities, Chen Sicheng wanted to do more and more things to do, some of them progressed faster, some of them were very slow, and these were not something that his strength alone could change. "Everyone has their own different life dilemmas, I also face my dilemmas, and there are also problems that I urgently need to solve or can't solve."
Making movies, being a producer, bringing new people, these are the problems he can solve on his own. There were also some problems that he could only hand over to time. For example, as the owner of a company, he wants to find good "left and right hands" to help himself. Although it is not easy to find such a person, you need to wait slowly, but even in the process of waiting, Chen Sicheng will not stop doing things:
In the dialogue three years ago, he said that he wanted to become an artist with industrial thinking, more thinking about "what can I do" and "what I want to do", and now, he has learned to unite more young creative forces to try to make the film industry bigger and let the film business have more imagination space - compared to the past, Chen Sicheng is more like an industry and businessman.
At the end of this dialogue, Poison Eye asked the question that he wanted to ask at the beginning: sign a batch of new directors, do some commercial films of about 100 million volumes, and where to find investment in the case that the industry as a whole is tight on funds?
Chen Sicheng replied in a tone that was neither too firm nor emboldened: I rely on my own endorsement.