Video loading...
July 1, 1921 screening,
This film about the "great congress" of the Communist Party of China,
Gathered more than 100 domestic powerful and new generation actors,
The total box office has exceeded 160 million.
Li Da (Huang Xuan) and Wang Huiwu (Ni Ni) in "1921" are husband and wife
The "big" representatives of the CCP in "1921"
Li Da, Li Hanjun, Mao Zedong, Liu Renjing, Chen Tanqiu...
How to present the unique sense of youth of these young representatives?
What new perspectives have been added to the film about the history of the Party?
How was the strike scene of 12,000 people filmed?
Scenes of workers striking at the Anglo-American Tobacco Factory in Shanghai
Director Huang Jianxin
A piece interviewed the director Huang Jianxin in Beijing,
He said: "It is my duty to make this play.
The spiritual light emitted by these historical figures will affect you,
Guiding us forward. ”
Self-description Huang Jianxin
Written by Liu Yameng, editor Shi Ming
Before "1921", Huang Jianxin had made the famous "Jianzi Trilogy": "The Great Cause of Building the Country", "The Great Cause of Party Building" and "The Great Cause of Building the Army". In particular, 2009's "The Founding of the People's Republic" created the all-star lineup of gift film genres, after which the main theme film became a hit in the market.
The story of "1921" takes place in Shanghai around 1920-1921, focusing on the convening of the first congress of the Communist Party of China, with Li Da and Wang Huiwu as the main line, connecting 13 group portraits of "one big" representing youth and upward mobility.
At the same time, in Shanghai, where the concessions are lined up, there are French patrols and obstructions, there are Japanese spies assassinated, and there are vigorous strikes by British and American tobacco factories.
The delegates of the "First Great" held a meeting on the boat on the South Lake, and Wang Huiwu put a guard at the bow of the boat
Not long ago, Huang Jianxin celebrated his 67th birthday during the Shanghai Film Festival, and he often had to stay up late when filming "1921", and his reading glasses were taken off and worn dozens of times a day. Talking about why such a heavyweight film is picked up at such an age, he said four words: duty is indispensable.
The following is director Huang Jianxin's self-statement.
The main characters of our play are Li Da and Wang Huiwu, husband and wife, who participated, prepared and organized the work of the conference when the "First Congress" of the Communist Party of China was held in Shanghai in 1921.
Li Da was commissioned by Chen Duxiu, who knew Japanese and English, could write articles, had a printing house, and ran a foreign Chinese society, and he was the best organizer.
Li Da teaches Japanese at the Foreign Chinese Society
Wang Huiwu never joined the party in her lifetime, but she was an important participant in the meeting, and she arranged for the accommodation of 13 deputies, including the transfer to Jiaxing South Lake for the meeting, all of which she proposed, and Mao Zedong once praised her as our "good minister of defense."
Wang Huiwu is responsible for logistics
In the 72 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 100 years since the founding of the Party, we are a young country in the long river of history, so we want to reflect a sense of youth and upward mobility in this play.
The delegates are very young, with an average age of 28 years, with the youngest Liu Renjing only 19 years old.
Liu Renjing (Liu Haoran) participated in the May Fourth Movement
At that time, Mao Zedong was 28 years old, he loved sports, and we had a scene where he ran, that kind of jumping running, a posture that people can only run when they are young.
He had dinner at Li Da's house and drank some wine, and he was a man of great drinking, blushing with drinking, and walking down the street by mistake into the French national day line, very happy.
Later, he was dragged out of the crowd by the security guards and blocked out of the door, and he suddenly woke up drunk, realizing that this was our Chinese land, and the colonists circled a piece of land and blocked the Chinese outside, so he began to run outside.
Mao Zedong (Wang Renjun) runs the streets of Shanghai
While running, while recalling his experiences as a child being chased and beaten by his father, leaving his hometown, and participating in the revolutionary movement, we recreate his past with this very stream-of-consciousness style image.
What else is there in youth? Love.
At that time, Li Da was 31 years old, Wang Huiwu was 23 years old, and the two had just gotten married and were in the honeymoon period. Wang Huiwu is a particularly beauty-loving person, and we see in historical materials that her hairstyle, glasses and clothes are very exquisite.
When Wang Huiwu married Li Da, he wore a simple dress
The couple changed the curtains together
Girls in the south, in a specific season, will pick a flower of the season, pin it on the chest, or insert it into a small bottle and rest not far in front of her eyes, so the moving scene let Wang Huiwu take a bottle of gardenia.
13 delegates came to the meeting, and where to live was a question. Wang Huiwu thought of Bowen Girls' School, the summer vacation is empty, she needs to tell a little lie to the principal Huang Shaolan, saying that the "Peking University Summer Tour Group" is going to come to spend the night.
But Wang Huiwu is a person who blushes when he lies. Li Da gave her advice, let her run, sweating and blushing to cover her expression. When she ran, our background music used a particularly modern guitar version of the international song, producing a lively and free feeling.
Wang Will Goku runs
Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui had just gotten married in 1921. Mao Zedong wanted to leave Changsha for Shanghai, Yang Kaihui said goodbye in the rain, and the two snuggled under an umbrella. He Shuheng was next to him, he was a very interesting person, a late Qing Xiucai, shy and did not dare to look, so he used an umbrella to cover his face.
Join the international eye: spying and car chases
The film takes an international perspective, and in addition to the domestic representatives, we also have two lines of Marin and Japanese spies.
After the October Revolution in Russia, the Communist International was formed to send revolutionary experience to the outside world, and Marin and Nikolsky were assigned by Lenin to come to China to attend the "Great" Conference.
Comintern representative Marin (Eric Dean)
Marin, a Dutchman, was released after his arrest in Austria, but the Austrian government sent a notice to the French consulate in Shanghai that "dangerous elements" would come. At that time, Jin Rong was the inspector general of the patrol house in the French Concession, and he sent his men to follow Marin, and there was a car chase scene in our movie.
At the same time, the Japanese Communists also wanted to meet with Marin, and the spies of the special high school followed him to Shanghai.
While searching for material during the preparatory period, we found a telegram record in the Japanese Warning Hall showing that the Japanese had the news that the Comintern was going to meet in Shanghai, and that they were afraid that the Congress would obstruct Japan's Manchu-Mongolian policy, so they sent spies.
Japanese spy Okawa (Ikematsu Shōryō)
At that time, Shanghai was the most economically and culturally active city in the Far East, with many concessions, and there would be some room for activities in the articulation department of the concessions.
Li Da lived in the French Concession and the printing factory was in the public concession, so he needed to cross two areas. There is a scene where he is followed by a Japanese spy in a rickshaw, but the spy is lost, why? Because the latter's license plate is not enough.
It takes two license plates to pass from the French Concession to the public concession, and After Li Da's car arrived at a circular roundabout at the junction, it needed to change lanes, from right to left, and even the traffic rules were different. The Japanese spy's car could not enter the area without a public concession license.
One-third of the "big" delegates are good at foreign languages. Li Da had been in Japan, good Japanese, fluent in English, and when he shaved his head in the barbershop, he was holding a Russian newspaper in his hand and playing crossword puzzles.
Li Da was in the barbershop, reading a Russian newspaper in between waiting
Li Hanjun is even more language is too good to be true, his home is in the French Concession, No. 106 Wangzhi Road, which is the main place where the "big" is held, and the French come, he wants to negotiate with the other party.
Lee Han-joon is also very strong in Japanese, it turned out that we had a scene, he and the famous Japanese writer Ryunosuke Wasagawa, completely in Japanese dialogue, because of the time limit, this scene was later deleted.
Therefore, the representatives of the "Big One" are all a group of people with an international perspective. The Chinese revolution was part of the world revolution, and at the end they read on the red boat "Proletarians of the whole world unite", which is why we highlight the sense of internationalism.
It took 3 months to restore the old building 1:1
This time, we made a 1:1 restoration of the "Big One" site, the "Second Big" meeting site, the Bowen Girls' School, and the editorial department of "New Youth", and it took more than 3 months to connect with the old Shikumen and Nanjing East Road in the original film and television base.
We invited these buildings made by the East China Architectural Design Institute, because they had been responsible for the restoration of the real "big" meeting site before, so the house that came out of the play was not a scene, but a real residential building, with a 50-year life span. It's just that because we were filmed, there are walls that can't be dead, can move, and the rest is no different from the real house.
The crew performed a 1:1 reproduction of the classic historical building
The Shikumen in old Shanghai has a patio after entering, and the windows of each room upstairs are arranged in a circle, facing the patio. There was a night scene in which the delegates opened the windows in their rooms, and everyone could immediately speak in a circle around the patio.
I wanted to come up with a rotational photography above 360 degrees, but it was difficult to practice. At the beginning of the house design, we made the patio wider than the original, which made it easier for the camera to move. Because on the second floor, the photographer could not go up, so he used a small elevator to top the high place, and then installed a remote control head on it, and assembled the two devices together to remotely control the camera.
A 360-degree rotating patio scene
White walls, coffee-colored windows, faces accumulate emotions, the camera moves steadily in between, will convey particularly delicate feelings, coupled with Zhang Songwen's play is particularly good, he tells Why He Shuheng joined the revolution, are personal experience stories, very substitutionary.
The biggest scene was the strike of workers at the Anglo-American Tobacco Factory in Shanghai, which began on July 20, 1921 and lasted for 20 days, just during the "Great" period, and the leader of the strike movement was Li Qihan, who was sent by the Party organization in Shanghai.
Li Qihan (Ou Hao) leads a strike of workers at the Anglo-American Tobacco Factory in Shanghai
The young deputies who were participating in the "First Congress" were very excited and wanted to go to the scene, but Dong Biwu said no, "It is more important to set up a political party." So the "big" meetings and the workers' movement are cut together in parallel.
Just for that one shot of Nanjing Road, we used a thousand actors, a thousand because our workers only had so many costumes, and finally shot a scene of twelve thousand people. We shot in sections and shot 15 segments.
Four machines are fixed, a thousand people stand in the designated range, shoot well, and then these people re-scramble the order, and then stand in another designated range, so that from 6 am to 7 pm, and finally 15 shots are combined to form 1 shot.
Nanjing Road crowd drama scene
The charm of these characters guides us forward
Huang Xuan has an intellectual temperament, simple, and Li Da's stubbornness, so we wanted to find him to act at the beginning.
Ni Ni is a southerner, has that kind of bookish temperament, her appearance is very modern, which is very in line with the role of Wang Huiwu. After I met Nini, I said only one thing, you have to cut your hair short. After so many years, she is also very mature in acting, and the pair she played with Huang Xuan has a lot of positive evaluations.
Huang Xuan and Ni Ni looked at the picture in the monitor
Wang Renjun looks a lot like Mao Zedong. A few days ago, we went to Hunan and went to Orange Island to see a statue of Chairman Mao in his youth, and when we took a group photo, the tourists next to us saw it and said, "It's too similar and too similar," and we all want to take a picture with Wang Renjun.
Moreover, Wang Renjun had a radiance in his eyes, that kind of simple shining thing. There was a scene between him and Chen Duxiu, Chen Duxiu said: "The era of completely changing China has come", and Wang Renjun's eyes lit up.
Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were the early founders of the Chinese Communist Party and also played important roles.
I have cooperated with Chen Kun in more than one play, he has an intellectual temperament, and he has an unfathomable look in his eyes, I know him very well, so I chose him to play Chen Duxiu. Chen Duxiu was a person with a very flamboyant personality, and at that time we were worried that the audience did not understand this historical figure, so we still accepted it when we performed.
Chen Duxiu (played by Chen Kun)
Li Chen plays Li Dazhao, first of all, he looks like, that kind of northern figure, a kind of thick temperament. Li Chen's best performance is a look before the sacrifice, the rope is put around the neck, the camera pushes up the close-up, when he raises his eyes, there is light in the eyes, as if he saw the future of China before dying, and we were very touched by the scene.
Li Dazhao (Li Chen) and the students
I have previously directed "The Great Undertaking of Building the People's Republic" and "The Great Cause of Building the Party", and also supervised the production of "The Great Undertaking of Building the Army", and near the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party, the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee approached me and hoped that I would make another film.
But as soon as I received it, I found that it was a hot potato, which was too difficult. Because you have filmed "The Great Cause of Party Building", there is no point in repeating it, we have to find new angles, find new paths to reach the hearts of these characters. Later, we really found it, new perspectives and details began to come out, and these characters gradually stood up in our minds.
Huang Jianxin was filmed on the scene of "1921"
In fact, these people in the early days of the Chinese Communist Party could all take biographies. You shoot these scenes, the kind of spiritual light that these people emit will affect you, and there was a chat in our group, and everyone said that it was strange to shoot this scene, and it felt like everyone had improved.
I just celebrated my 67th birthday the other day, and a lot of people ask me why I continue to make movies, and I think it's the charm of these characters that has been guiding us forward.