Emotionally stable, industrious and efficient, what to say, not afraid of offending people - this is the evaluation of producer Liang Lin by Han Jianu, who is both a producer and a screenwriter. They are of similar age and have been in the film industry for over 6 years. Han's daughter said that Liang Lin was her own role model and a piece of "rock" in her heart - "Follow Liang Lin to eat meat." Liang Lin smiled after listening: "This is my responsibility - to be responsible for investors and creators at the same time." ”
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Enter the industry
In the more than 6 years as a professional film producer and producer, Liang Lin has participated in the planning and production of film works with remarkable achievements: "The Unknown Generation", "Riot Elimination", "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau", "Crowded", "On the Cliff", "Hedgehog"... The tribe has a voice, and has a good response in terms of word of mouth and commercial performance. As a production "newcomer" in the industry who has transformed from a post-production staff to the general manager of Emperor Film Production and Project Development, she can achieve such achievements and advancements in a very short period of time, which is not unrelated to her sober judgment of the industry and herself, and her diligent pursuit of progress and learning. In a conversation, whether it is for himself or for him, for personal growth, for the industry... The answers given by Liang Lin were all indifferent and firm. Liang Lin studied animation at university and stayed on as a teacher directly after graduation. The Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, where she was teaching at the time, was one of the eight major academies of fine arts in China, and the threshold was not low, so some freshmen Xu was admitted after a few years of examination - "I was originally a baby face, and I was not tall, and at that time I also had to take the third and fourth classes, and I was very unlike a teacher among them..." But the sense of professional responsibility and the rational and calm characteristics obtained from family education since childhood still dragged Liang Lin to play" for several years of "maturity and stability". Slowly, Liang Lin realized that "although this work has a sense of achievement, you can see the head at a glance", "Some people will feel happy because of stability, some people will constantly feel that they exist in challenges and stimuli, and I should be the latter kind of person." Another factor that prompted her to take a step further was her actual ability: "I was too young to play a mature role in front of these people. I'm just a recent graduate with no experience, what do I teach them? Is it just a technique? I don't think it's the qualities a college teacher should have, it's too basic. If you really want to teach art and creativity, I think you must practice it, and after you have experienced it in the industry, you can teach others with real talent and material. So after teaching for several years, Liang Lin made the decision to enter graduate school, and she chose to go to Hong Kong to study global multimedia management. In the year of graduation, coinciding with the financial crisis and the tightening of the economic environment, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University just happened to have a faculty vacancy. "I didn't think about going around and going back to school to teach... But the idea was practical: Live first. Survival is important. "So she stayed in Hong Kong. After that, he also switched from teaching to doing concept design and animation drawing production in a special effects company, and later encountered the opportunity to enter Emperor Films to take on post-production coordination work, until then Liang Lin did not expect to become an excellent film producer and producer in the future. But in the midst of these shifts in study and career, she identified one thing very clearly: "My core professional impulses and desires are not to express and present my thoughts to the audience through images... My desire is to be able to discover many interesting people and things, to assist them in their expression, to fulfill their desires. ”
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Around 2015, Emperor Films began to develop, plan and produce independent films in mainland China. Mr. Yang Shoucheng, chairman of the group, organized a meeting of relevant personnel, and Liang Lin bluntly expressed her views at the meeting: "When he asked us about our opinions on some projects, I directly said that this is not okay, it is definitely 'dead'. Almost everyone thinks – how dare you say that? But I think that since I have asked my opinion, I must tell the truth. After several meetings, Boss Yang named Liang Lin. Liang Lin recalled: "He asked me, so what do you want to do? I said I don't know right now, but I felt like I wanted to open up the possibilities and really understand what the mainland audience wanted to see, rather than sitting in a distant Hong Kong office and imagining it. Then there was "The Unknown Generation", a film project that Liang Lin participated in planning and producing as a producer, and it is also a feature film of director Rao Xiaozhi. The film's final box office performance was nearly 800 million yuan, becoming a well-deserved "dark horse" in the Chinese film industry that year. Liang Lin's path as a film producer has also been extended.
act
At the end of January 2020, the sudden outbreak and spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic surprised everyone. At that time, Liang Linzheng and hundreds of film crews were shooting the movie "On the Cliff" in Datong, Shanxi, and as if in full swing, the news of the lockdown in Wuhan came, followed by the announcement of the withdrawal of the New Year movies one after another. Liang Lin also remembers that on the day of the decision to "suspend shooting", she and Director Zhang Yimou, the producer and director of the director team, and the four people held a meeting for a short meeting, one by one, invited all the actors and creators to communicate, explain and inform them of the subsequent filing and "worst case", everyone expressed understanding, "everyone felt that it was a reasonable and rational decision", so "collectively agreed". "A good, healthy filmmaking team needs to share the responsibility collectively." Liang Lin recalled that at that time, in the whole process, she did not have a moment of "emotional loss of control" or "unable to judge", because of the "calm and clearness of the director of the art strategy", but also because of the "completeness and professionalism of the production team". "When we are all willing to share the burden, we are actually not so panicked." For more than two months after that, everyone "crossed the river by feeling the stones" together. "At the beginning we said, first stop for ten days to see, then say ten days is not OK, stop for another week, then stop for two weeks... Until it is found that the situation will not change immediately, let everyone go home first, not in the crew. "The staff who left the group, Liang Lin, asked to arrange for the crew to send them back to their hometown." Don't let them take public transport. "During that time, she kept talking to her core creative colleagues every day to communicate plans for returning to work, including the round-trip and quarantine time of personnel, the restoration and repair of the scenery, and the construction of the scene." Every day is calculating the time, when the work can start... It also sets a time node, if it can't be opened on this day, it can't meet the atmosphere of shooting winter dramas, so it can only stop for a year and wait until the next year - if so, what is the plan filing. In those two months, the filming plan of "On the Cliff" was updated almost once a week. In such a state of work, "emotional things" are almost completely ineffective.
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When the story "On the Cliff" was first selected, Liang Lin did make a decision with "sensibility", and when the project started, she was clear: "We must use reason to deal with every step and detail." The Han family daughter said that Liang Lin in her eyes is always emotionally stable, but Liang Lin herself knows that she will actually have emotional instability: "I can't forgive people who repeat low-level mistakes." There is no problem in beginners not understanding, but the repetition of low-level mistakes is definitely not the reason for a person's IQ and emotional intelligence (or) without intention. As a producer, Liang Lin will almost have access to all kinds of work and every class of personnel in a film crew from top to bottom. In her eyes, there is no "gender" difference in a single position. Rather than men or women, she prefers to judge who is more suitable for what role based on the abilities and strengths of each individual. Liang Lin believes that the fundamental choice of project is to choose people, if you do not know the partner or do not want to understand, it is difficult to make a good project, even if it becomes more luck. She will not deliberately give girls more opportunities within the scope of her "power" because she is also a woman. "To a certain extent, a truly independent woman will not be more certain of her talents and abilities when she seeks opportunities and says what she wants because of her gender."
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reality
"This is the female producer Liang Lin" - in the past few years of her career, she has often heard others introduce herself, adding such a "female" word in front of the post. "Of course I don't mind because I'm a woman, no problem." But occasionally I do wonder why I should emphasize this? Because when the actual work unfolds, the word does not make any essential difference. Liang Lin's own team is small and refined, "more women". For years, she and her team received hundreds of projects almost every year—from formed scripts to outlines or original novels. She receives a fixed number of project reports from the team every week, and she flips through and peruses around 7-10 stories, which she reads at breakfast, on the way, and before going to bed at night. Sometimes when she sees some works with "solid text, moving text, and vivid and full characters", she will even be reluctant to read them in a hurry. "I'm looking for a very quiet environment and looking at it down-to-earth. It is also possible that after watching it again, I will come home from the busy evening, soak my coffee, and look at it again. Such works are unattainable, and once she reads them, she can immediately recognize them. As reality shows, Liang Lin has also deeply felt the lack of "female themes" in film creation over the years. But before talking about this "absence," she wants to first make clear concepts including: "What is a female subject?" What is feminism? What is femininity? In practice, she doesn't distinguish between these concepts in isolation. In her observations and reflections, she believes that what our creators lack is not the care and respect for women, but the broadening awareness of the types of creation. "On a global scale, Hollywood already has a heroine theme, as well as "Resident Evil" and "Kill Bill", which are suspenseful and science fiction films. I think our Chinese mainland now not only focus on women's stories less, but also part of the limitation is that the genre is too narrow. The subject matter of women does not have to be realistic. But the reality is that it's hard for us to jump out, and we really have the guts or the guts to let women cross the limitations of the film genre. "A trend of thought, shifting from social issues to a certain field of cultural creation and being expressed in it, cannot be achieved overnight. Liang Lin can see a glimmer of light, and she can better recognize the distance between us and it. "Chinese films have developed rapidly in recent years, there are hundreds of new works every year, excellent creators and teams are also slowly grinding and tempering, we can give each other some more time, so that practitioners and audiences can be more mature to control and accept more diverse themes, slowly, we will see this road wider and wider."
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BAZAAR: In your career, have any female filmmakers inspired and inspired you? Liang Lin: There are two. One is stylist Wu Lilu. She made me see a lot of beautiful things, that is, she was able to really visualize the description of a movie in words. She'll make this character come alive more than you think. She can always surprise you, and she is gentle and stable. You will believe that this person, the things you have handed over to her will be very reassuring. There is also an actor Ren Suxi. She often said: This script is written, you see this woman is so charming, beautiful, sexy... She said, I can act, but can we change the word? She was so cute, very professional and very humorous. It looks like a big grin, but you see she really gets into a role, and she's very delicate, very soft, very accurate. BAZAAR: How do you think your current self has changed compared to your self, who returned to the mainland from Hong Kong alone? Liang Lin: Mentally, almost. I will still meet all the people who come to deliver the project one by one, and when I meet excellent people, I will take the initiative to want to know. Because I don't think anyone in this business is better than anyone else. Producers are constantly trying to find talented people, bring them together, and move forward towards a goal. BAZAAR: What other places need to be broken through in the current "women's theme" film projects that you have observed, in addition to the narrow genre? Liang Lin: As far as the projects I have seen are concerned, I think that the content of our current women's films is also single, most of them are in the liberation stage of women's consciousness in the early stages, such as sexual liberation, reproductive liberation, economic independence, survival liberation... Homogenization is more serious, and maybe eight out of ten books are talking about this. The status quo is of course cruel, but I personally wonder, where is our hope and strength? If there is more than a story of speculation and warmth, I would be willing to try to do it. BAZAAR: How do you see your professional identity now? Liang Lin: In fact, every producer's choice is different, and every female producer's choice will be different. What a person does is not about gender, but about his own character. My mindset at the moment is: a movie is a movie. I don't think the next one must be successful just because the last movie was successful; I don't think this one will definitely not work because the last one failed. This is an industry where ups and downs are always changing, and a stable mindset can determine how far and how long you can go down. Do not confuse one's own heart with one's own words.
BAZAAR: In your opinion, is there a difference between strong and weak between people? Liang Lin: What kind of strength and weakness? Ability, mentality, and experience are strong or weak, and positions and fame are high or low, so "strong" people should not be proud of themselves and use wisdom in the right place; "weak" people should not be vain and thin, they will be strong. BAZAAR: What do you think your presence will bring to Chinese cinema? Liang Lin: Don't mention what you bring, you can do it without bringing trouble to others.
Why do we want to learn about these female filmmakers?
This is an era when we always talk about "women" from time to time and see them in our writings. She will become a hot topic of discussion, and there must be some inevitable factor in it. So when my colleagues in the Basha film group proposed the theme of "female power" among filmmakers, I was unconsciously ignited in my heart.
One of the most important qualities of feminine power that Harper's Bazaar has been promoting for years is chi beauty.
Beauty is to make people beautiful, this thing is what we are best at doing, but now it is no longer the first thing we pursue, because in the era of personalization, everyone's perception of beauty is different, and beauty is becoming more and more without a unified standard.
And "wisdom", before "beauty", why? Because we attach great importance to the spiritual world of women, the power that spirit brings to people is very far-reaching.
"Female filmmakers" - when we put forward these five words, the first thing we think of is not mostly: they are very hard, very tired, dusty servants, wind and food and sleeping... In fact, from my own experience, I know a lot of women in this industry, who are behind the scenes, but there is no lack of independent detachment. They are tired, but they are full of love for their profession, they are beautiful, full of energy and wisdom.
In my opinion, every female filmmaker is influencing this society with her own works, and indirectly promoting women to find their own positions in this society more and more clearly and strive for their own rights and interests.
Female producers, screenwriters, directors, cinematographers, editors, art directors, styling directors, director assistants, field notes, makeup artists... Every woman in the film industry has a great place. As a media person, I realized that I should let their journey be known to more people. Before they become successful filmmakers, they are first and foremost people with wonderful stories. These stories bring us more of an inspiration. Their tolerance, love, tenacity and love of life are particularly dazzling.
Many people still have some established views on accomplished women, thinking that they must be very strong, everything can be handled well, even if there is a painful side, it will not be seen, will hide the vulnerability, it is easy to let people have a sense of distance. In fact, each of them has their own softness and cuteness.
Under the aura, they have a true story that is different from each person. These "realities" will be an inspiration to each of us. Any role model or goal may seem lofty, but are we sure we want to become another "she"? No. Everyone is unique and has their own barriers to break through.
You can see from their stories how they got through these difficulties. At every moment when we feel that "there is really no way to break through", as long as we insist on it, we can do it. This is a great encouragement.
When we talk about "female filmmakers", in fact we are not talking about the differences between one gender, we are talking about the differences of each individual. The premise of becoming an ideal woman must first be an ideal person.
I hope that people who see this issue can find their beliefs and directions in it.
Whether in life or at work, what is the most important thing for you? Do you choose a career to please the eyes of others, or is it really to meet your own needs to realize value? What is the purpose of persistence? Only when we truly know the answers to these questions in our hearts can we go down this long bumpy road without fear of any ups and downs and joys.
——Sha Xiaoli, executive publisher and editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar
Photography / Zhang Yue
Planning / Ge Haichen Interview & Writing / Lv Yanni Co-ordinator / Li Haojia Image / Wang Defu Han Family Women's Makeup Hair / Liu Shanshan Liang Lin Makeup / He Lei Ma Li Makeup / Tang Zi Xin Ma Li Hairstyle / He Zhiguo Zhang Final Makeup Hair / Matt Clothing Assistant / Jiang Yao Typography / Yuer