Zhang Yimou, an internationally renowned director, believes that everyone is very familiar with him, and he is a legend in the Chinese film industry.
His films ushered in an era in which they told the story of film in a way that described life.
So watching his films, you can always learn a lot of new stories.
Gong Li, as Zhang Yimou's emotional career, can never be crossed, she accompanied Zhang Yimou through 8 years of youth. But Zhang Yimou finally used the way of breaking up to end this love.
The appearance of Gong Li has caused a gap in the 8-year marriage between Zhang Yimou and his first love Xiao Hua for 22 years.
Gong Li established a romantic relationship with a young man named Yang Jianxun during college, but she still fell in love with Zhang Yimou without hesitation.
Knowing that the other party has a family and a room, Gong Li still boldly pursues love and writes a confession letter to Zhang Yimou, but this matter is soon learned by Zhang Yimou's ex-wife Xiao Hua.
At this point, the marital status of the two fell into a cold war state, and it was not long before they parted ways with their wives.
In 1987, Zhang Yimou began to prepare for the first film "Red Sorghum", with the idea of boldly using new people, and then came to the Chinese opera to find the right "Jiu'er", and at a glance, he looked at Gong Li, who had a green and childish face.
In 1988, Zhang Yimou took "Red Sorghum" to Berlin to compete, and the film became a sensation in Berlin, allowing the world to see Chinese films that had never been seen before.
"Red Sorghum" won the Golden Bear Award at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival, becoming the first Asian film to win the award.
This year's Zhang Yimou can be described as fame and fortune.
If it doesn't sound, it's already a hit.
On February 4, 2022, after 14 years, the Olympic Games came to the city of Beijing again, and the 71-year-old Zhang Yimou once again issued a military order to direct the opening and closing ceremony performances of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
That night, "Chinese Unique Romance" swept across the Internet, and everyone clapped their hands and praised Zhang Yimou's ingenious "Welcome Song", "Lost Little Girl", "24 Solar Terms" and so on.
Unsurprisingly, the Beijing Winter Olympics once again amazed the world, and Zhang Yimou was also named "National Teacher" by the audience.
But in fact, when it was announced in 2004 that Zhang Yimou would be the director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games, there was a lot of scolding on the Internet.
After the eight-minute performance at the closing ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games, the opposition of the whole people went directly to the highest level.
Why was Zhang Yimou scolded so badly?
Why did he become a Chinese double Olympic director?
Time back to the 2004 Athens Olympics.
According to the convention, at the closing ceremony of each Olympic Games, eight minutes are left for the next host country to show off the city's culture and advantages, and the director of "Eight Minutes in Beijing" at that time was Zhang Yimou.
This was a great opportunity to show himself to the whole country and even the world, but he was unexpectedly "screwed" by Zhang Yimou.
In the first session, 14 Olympic girls danced in cheongsam and short skirts under the background music of "Jasmine".
Zhang Yimou's original intention was to let the world hear China's voice and see China's beauty.
However, they did not expect to be unanimously criticized by the audience, and everyone felt that the Olympic girls' skirts were too short and showed the culture very vulgar.
In the second and third links, the actors perform Chinese kung fu and Peking Opera, but the problem is that Zhang Yimou uses lanterns, waist drums and other tools, so that the audience feels that the performance is too exaggerated and cannot be on the table.
In addition, there are scholars who bombard the entire "Eight Minutes of Beijing" without the slightest cultural connotation, relying on the large number of people, large scenes and rich colors to support the scene.
Therefore, after returning from Athens, Zhang Yimou's reputation plummeted, and the superior leaders even received many complaint letters from all directions, the content of which without exception was to demand that the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games must not be handed over to Zhang Yimou.
But in fact, the problem of "eight minutes in Beijing" cannot be completely blamed on Zhang Yimou's head.
The first is that athens is completely uncooperative with Zhang Yimou
Several of his important ideas were blown away because athens were not allowed to bring equipment into the premises.
Secondly, the stage given by the closing ceremony in Athens at that time was very small, and the row of noodles was completely insufficient.
However, even after being insulted by the whole people, Zhang Yimou never defended himself.
Because she felt that in the end she had failed to live up to the expectations of the Chinese people, so she was willing to endure everyone's complaints and reprimands, which also made her voluntarily abandon the bid for the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in 2005.
However, a leader who admired Zhang Yimou very much lobbied several times, hoping that he could prove his ability again through the Beijing Summer Olympics, plus friends around him also continued to encourage him.
So after much thought, Zhang Yimou decided to give himself another chance to prove himself to the people of the whole country. Zhang Yimou, who had made up his mind, immediately gathered the team, formulated a bidding plan, and finally submitted the plan the day before the deadline.
At that time, Zhang Yimou's strongest opponents were Chen Kaige and Li An, and in the end, Zhang Yimou won the bid with 22 total scores, but this was not the end, but a new journey.
Zhang Yimou took the "letter of appointment" issued by the Olympic Organizing Committee and said that the letter of appointment was a "military order", and he felt that the burden on his shoulders was as heavy as Mount Tai.
In fact, during that time, Zhang Yimou was still filming "the city is full of golden armor", but in order not to delay the work on both sides, he was like a footless bird, constantly flying between Hengdian and Chongqing, and he had to be in a high-intensity work mode anytime and anywhere.
That year, Zhang Yimou was 55 years old, and he had to face not only problems such as program creativity, costumes, props, and the construction of the "Bird's Nest". Because the size and depth of the pit of the "Bird's Nest" represents how big the stage is and how many actors can be accommodated, he needs to make a big card surface according to these.
But all this is still unknown. In order to solve these problems, Zhang Li held a meeting with the team for more than ten hours every time.
After the meeting, he returned to the filming site of the film, which made many staff members worry that he would not be able to withstand such a high-intensity work and would have physical problems.
But the fact is that several young people in the team can't stand it, and Zhang Yimou is still as stable as Taishan.
However, after a year of brainstorming, the four major plans proposed by Zhang Yimou were completely overturned, and he could only brainstorm again with his own team.
In the 50-minute opening ceremony performance, Zhang Yimou led everyone to grind for 16 months, often just came up with a new idea in the morning, and was rejected in the afternoon.
In this way, the whole team withstood great pressure, even the pressure of deadlines, and finally came up with the concept of drawing axes.
Although this time the axis of the painting was unanimously approved by the team and the leaders, it was very difficult to drop the concept perfectly.
First of all, the "painting axis" needs to be paved with LEDs on the ground of the Bird's Nest, if there is any problem with the LEDs in the middle of the opening ceremony, there is no way to repair the scene, not to mention that such a large area of LED is unprecedented in the world, which is undoubtedly a big gamble for Zhang Yimou and his team.
Secondly, the idea of the countdown to the "scroll" is derived from an ancient book about the stroke.
The problem is that there are no strikes in the artifacts unearthed today.
This meant that Zhang Yimou's team needed to make an instrument that most likely did not exist according to the records of ancient books.
They conducted a total of 26 large-scale tests, adding up to 2200 finished, semi-finished and scrap products.
Eventually, after the research team worked day and night, they finally determined the entity of the strike.
And whether to hit or not has become a new problem that Zhang Yimou has to face.
In order to determine the most correct way, Zhang Yimou once again forgot to eat and sleep, and it took a whole year to finally determine the feasibility of singing and singing.
In addition to this, Tai Chi was also one of the performances confirmed at the opening ceremony.
In order to make the traditional impression of Tai Chi more likely, the choreographer Meng Yan choreographed for more than three months, but it was repeatedly denied.
At this point, Meng Yan almost collapsed. Also collapsing are the musicians, because Zhang Yimou's requirements for details can be said to be nitpicking.
Often a soundtrack, more than 20 musicians came up with more than 30 samples, and even some of the manuscripts were changed more than a dozen times, but the final result was still the negation of the old strategist.
Among them, there are even two musicians who can't stand it and choose to quit.
Coincidentally, in 2007, Hideko Ishioka was 68 years old and was invited to become the chief costume designer for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
However, because of the excessive intensity of work, he was hospitalized several times tired.
In addition, Zhang Yimou's idea can also be said to be once a day, and there are often new ideas proposed, which makes some teams just rehearse the action in the morning and directly change the action in the afternoon.
This repeatedly caused some departments to directly cross the level to file a complaint, and finally the work department had to coordinate, so that Zhang Yimou could not change it as much as possible.
However, for the sake of the overall program effect, Zhang Yimou did not listen to the words of the work department, and it still cut down many programs with great effort, so that many people's hard work was wasted. Others paid the price for the rest of their lives.
After deciding that the theme song of the opening ceremony was "Me and You", Zhang Yimou's first idea was to let two volunteers sing through the audition.
But just a dozen days before the opening ceremony, he suddenly changed his mind and decided to be sung by Chinese singer Liu Huan and British singer Sarah Brightman.
If replacing two people is still a trivial matter, then Zhang Yimou also drastically removed a shadow puppet play performed by more than 1,000 soldiers.
In order to successfully complete this performance, more than 1,000 fighters have been rehearsing for more than a year, but in the end, because of creative mistakes, Zhang Yimou still gave up the show.
But to say that in the entire Olympic performance, zhang Yimou has probably only left a message that makes Zhang Yimou feel guilty all his life.
Originally, the message had a personal dance performance in the whole performance, but due to errors in rehearsals, it eventually led to paraplegia in high positions and could no longer dance for life.
Zhang Yimou once left a message saying that you are my deepest guilt, and I will always have your place in my heart.
But at this time, Zhang Yimou actually had no time to take care of anything else, because not long ago, the original "Phoenix Homecoming" ignition ceremony was leaked, and finally Zhang Yimou could only cut off this idea and replace it with Li Ning lighting the torch in the air.
Kung Fu pays off, Zhang Yimou's four years of wasted sleep and forgetting to eat finally ushered in the day of acceptance results.
On August 8, 2008, the lights were lit above the Bird's Nest, and the Chinese used movable type printing, Silk Road civilization, sundials, fireworks, footprints, etc. to make the world feel China's great power style.
Until now, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics is still the favorite of people around the world. Zhang Yimou, the first person in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, finally proved himself four years later, and he has since been enshrined as a national teacher.
14 years later, Zhang Yimou once again took on a heavy burden as the general director of the 2022 Winter Olympics
From the welcome pine fireworks at the opening ceremony to the "folding willows" at the closing ceremony, it made the world feel the romance of "Chinese". But behind such brilliance, there is an unknown hardship.
As the general director, Zhang Yimou needs to personally confirm all the details, from the construction site in the suburbs full of mud and sand to the messy and dangerous construction site, Zhang Yimou will lead the team to check one by one, even if he climbs up to the bird's nest to confirm the roof, he also has to climb up to confirm it after the staff checks.
Because of the hard work, Zhang Yimou sometimes did not even have time to eat, and he was really hungry, so he directly made a small bucket of instant noodles, sat on a stool and ate two bites before continuing to work.
At the "Eight Minutes in Beijing" of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, Zhang Yimou stayed up late to prepare for the battle with a high fever.
After the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Zhang Yimou's wife, Chen Ting, said on Weibo that in order to successfully complete the opening ceremony, Zhang Yimou arranged every day to the fullest.
In addition to sleeping, he is thinking of new ideas, and sometimes he will not sleep all night.
When his body desperately needed to rest, he had to walk five kilometers a day and regret it.
In the last few months of the opening ceremony, Zhang Yimou even had to use medicine to maintain it in order to speak smoothly.
Even with a high fever for several consecutive days, the daytime workload does not decrease at all.
As a wife, Chen Ting does not have so many ambitions and ideals, all she thinks is to hope that her husband can be safe and secure.
However, this Weibo has caused him to attract a lot of scolding, and many people think that he is ostensibly distressed about Zhang Yimou, but in fact he is for himself.
Some people also said that such a grand event, even if Zhang Yimou does not do it, there are many directors who are rushing to do it.
But no matter what others say, Zhang Yimou has proved his strength to the people of the country and to the world with his strength, and it is precisely because he has the spirit of desperate Sanlang that he can achieve the supreme glory of his first double Olympic director in the country.