Babel Tower is the second series based on my novel. The novel "Peeping into One Hundred and Twenty Days" was written in the second half of 2013 and early 2014, when my studio was on the roof of a 21-story duplex building on Changshou Road in Shanghai, and there was a quiet rooftop garden, where I used to play Four Kingdoms War chess with my friends. I remember one day in the summer of 2013, I suddenly had a flash of thought: If someone is trapped on this roof, can they survive? Why does the protagonist encounter such a desperate situation? How would someone react if they saw someone trapped from a higher roof?
I like to put stories on the roof, or the top floor. Not only is there a sense of overlooking sentient beings, but there is also a sense of fatalism. It's like climbing a staircase, as if it were over, and there was no way to go up. Either that, they are cursed and divide us into different words, thus causing the Tower of Babel to fall apart. "Peeping One Hundred and Twenty Days" is both a story about the roof and a story about a woman. The woman on the top of the building, like standing at the top of a pyramid, is either full of charm or spurned. When Choi Sun stood on top of the Tower of Babel and was imprisoned in an aerial prison, I didn't want to judge anyone with morality. Here we are merely human beings. There are basic desires for men and women to eat, there are joys and sorrows, and there is also a sense of loneliness. At that time, drones were not yet widespread, so I used a model airplane helicopter to deliver food and notes. Later, with cheap drones, I also looked down on the roofs of the city from the air, and even saw the secrets in many windows.
I don't have any voyeuristic evil thoughts, but how much privacy do we have at the moment? But those of us who use mobile phones and the Internet are actually being spied on every minute and every second. Some people are spied on in their lives, some people are spied on physically, and some people are spied on inside. In any case, people always have some secrets in their minds. After the Korean movie "Parasite" won the Oscar, we found that every house in the city, whether it is a villa in a rich area or a rooftop in a dense city, is playing out such a story everywhere. We are artificially divided. But no one can be separated from each other, and we are forced to coexist with each other. Sometimes, snooping and being spied on can also be transformed. Eventually, the secrets of the snoopers are at a glance, but Choi Sun flies to the Tower of the Black Swan with her secrets.
After its completion, Peep one hundred and twenty days was first published in Sprout magazine and published by Writers Press in the summer of 2014. In the past few years since its publication, the novel has undergone a long process of film and television adaptation, and the building that trapped Cui Shan in the novel is called "Tower of Babylon", which is probably the origin of the title of "Tower of Babel". In the summer of 2020, "Babel Tower" started filming in Chongqing. I wasn't involved in the screenwriting, I just went to the crew for a few days. It was a pleasant experience, and I had a good exchange with the producer and director of the web drama, as well as the main actors Qin Junjie and Deng Jiajia. But I don't interfere with their creation, so I let the main creators finish it in a comfortable state of their own. After a long post-production and schedule, in the summer of 2022, "Babel Tower" finally aired.
At present, the web drama "19 Floors", based on another work of mine, is being filmed in Hengdian and is scheduled to be broadcast within this year. At the same time, if the cadre network drama is in the process of preparation, it is expected to be launched next year and the year after. The Story of X, an adaptation of my novella, was recently selected for the FIRST Youth Film Festival, and I hope I can take this film further. Whether in Europe, the United States or Japan and South Korea, suspense (including reasoning, thriller and other related genres) is a very mainstream genre. Many big directors have also had the experience of suspense thrillers, such as Kubrick's "The Shining", David Finch's "Fight Club", Nolan's "Inception", and has already accumulated countless audiences. In contrast, China's online suspense dramas have emerged since about 2015, but the real general attention has begun with the two works of "The Hidden Corner" and "The Silent Truth" after 2020. Compared with the number of audiences of the suspense genre, the spring of Chinese suspense dramas is really too late.
The suspense genre is mainly expressed through narrative and atmosphere, which is very suitable for film and television adaptations. But if you pay too much attention to the power of film and television, or even write a novel specifically for film and television adaptation, you will lose the original meaning of writing. Writers must use the power of literature and use the power of stories to get more readers. Breaking through through film and television adaptation is an important path, but it is certainly not the only path, especially not to produce path dependence, once literature becomes an accessory to film and television, then it is not far from extinction. I am often asked: What is a suspense novel? I think suspense is first of all a form of narrative expression, and any type of work and pure literature will produce suspenseful expressions, including film and television works and other art forms. Because our material world is full of unknowns, our history and humanities are full of suspense, and even our own lives have many unpredictable things. In the era of "epidemic", you can't even predict whether tomorrow will suddenly become a close connection. The biggest suspense is the human heart — no one can detect the human heart, and this often forms the core of many suspense novels.
Then say type. When I first started writing suspense novels, I didn't know what to call and define the genre. Reasoning, detective, horror, horror, and so on. For example, Japanese speculative fiction has influenced many Chinese writers, but in Japan, the concept of "reasoning" covers many different types of literature, and it is by no means Chinese a literal understanding of "reasoning". There is no such thing as "reasoning" in Europe and the United States, which are either crime novels based on detectives and murders, or Stephen King's thrillers. But all of the above types have one thing in common, which is full of suspense – who is the murderer? Can the protagonist turn the tide? Are there ghosts? Where did the sin of that year come from? All the plot revolves around the throwing and unraveling of this suspense.
But the genre of the novel is only the form, and the kernel should be untethered by the type. For example, in "Peeping one hundred and twenty days", on the surface, the protagonist's dilemma on the roof is incredible, but in fact, each of us may be in this state of isolation. In recent years of creation, I often borrow "suspense" to observe many social phenomena, such as the class solidification of "Murder Like Water", the youth writing and the changes of the times of "Endless Summer", which is probably the power that suspense novels give to society and people's hearts.
Back to "Babel Tower", since the show was launched, it has generated good attention on multiple platforms. I've observed a lot of discussion on the web, some of which are my readers, some of whom are fans of the stars, who haven't seen the original. I actually hope that the latter part of the audience will take the time to read the original novel. Literature and film and television are two different art forms, but both use "story", while the human narrative tradition begins with prehistoric civilization and then from Homer's Epic and ancient Greek drama all the way to the present. The difference between literature and film and television lies in the form of expression, after all, words and lens language are completely different ways of telling stories, but they are the same way, stories are always an important spiritual need of human beings, and they are also the carriers of our relationship with the world to express ourselves. Excellent film and television works need a literary foundation, novelists are equivalent to helping screenwriters complete the first time of story and character screening, and the second creation carried out by screenwriters and directors is an image sublimation on the basis of literature, but the core is still in the story and characters. All literary genres can be adapted into film and television works, but literature has no threshold, everyone has a pen, a keyboard can be created. However, film and television works have thresholds, depending on the main creators such as screenwriters, directors, actors, etc., and also depends on the investment budget behind them. For example, the science fiction genre, especially the "space opera" category, must have huge funds to support, and unlike the story of daily life can be presented at a very low cost - many directors' early works are to show the people and things around us, and even use amateur actors, because there is no money, naturally it will be presented in this way. Now many film and television works often invest hundreds of millions of dollars, money is no longer a problem, but ignoring the script and story, which requires more nutrition from literature.
In the second half of this year, the stage play "Peeping One Hundred and Twenty Days" will be performed, and you can see the effect on the stage of the drama. I'm also working on the movie One Hundred and Twenty Days of Peeping. Pray that Cui Shan on the Tower of Babel can find his true self.
Author: Cai Jun
Editor: Xu Yang