"Manjiang Red", which is reversed and reversed, brings a shock that hits the heart in addition to suspense and comedy. The spiritual core of this song is rooted in our deep cultural genes, about filial piety, commitment, loyalty and integrity, and this film is an extreme attempt at the new mainstream film.
Author| Wei Qiao, editor | Ding Yu
On the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, halfway through the Spring Festival file, "Manjiang Red" has become the movie currently at the top of the box office.
In this 159-minute story, the unexpected and reasonable anti-transfer audience is overwhelmed, and the exquisite dramatic structure, tense suspense atmosphere, hilarious comedy bridge and the magnificent theme are complemented. Zhang Yimou once again showed amazing creativity.
"Manjiang Red" Douban scored 8.1 points, and the cumulative box office has exceeded 1.5 billion as of press time. Zhang Yimou said that he hopes to create a film that is recognized by more people, watched by more people, and has a strong viewing ability. Now it seems that the dual performance of "Manjiang Red" in word of mouth and in the market can be regarded as achieving this goal.
Zhang Yimou also mentioned another goal - to be a "professional director". For this reason, he let go of the words, as long as there is an excellent original script, his openness will be very strong, and he is willing to shoot any theme.
The original script of "Manjiang Hong" was created by screenwriter Chen Yu. This is also the third cooperation between Zhang Yimou and Chen Yu after "Rock Solid" and "Sniper", and the second time to participate in the Spring Festival file.
In 2022, "Sniper" will become the best film in the Spring Festival file. This movie, which is strictly only "one scene", is quite experimental.
This time, in "Manjiang Red", they made a new attempt. In the genre grasp and integration of costume suspense comedy, it can be seen that the cooperation between the two is becoming more and more tacit, and the grasp of commercial genre films is becoming more and more proficient.
At the beginning of the film, it is an extreme setting - a large house and an hour - after space and time are limited, the story and characters unfold interestingly. In the context of the Shaoxing period of the Southern Song Dynasty and four years after Yue Fei's death, the protagonists are two small characters - the little soldier Zhang Da (played by Shen Teng) and the deputy commander Sun Jun (played by Yi Yangqianxi), which paves the way for the later game and multiple reversals, and also makes the final ending more resonant with the audience.
Recently, the blogger spoke with Chen Yu, the original script author and screenwriter of "Manjiang Hong", and listened to him tell the creative process behind the story. In the dialogue, we found that Chen Yu himself is a master storyteller, with clear logic and vivid language, and interprets many concepts.
Screenwriter Chen Yu
He also answered many questions, such as, how did he and director Zhang Yimou start to work together? How was such a suspenseful script born? Why did you use the word "Manjiang Hong" as the starting point of the story?
Chen Yu is not only a screenwriter, but also a professor at Peking University's School of Arts, offering film theory courses, and a senior practitioner in the film and television industry. He specializes in the "high-concept situation" approach, "not just a cue setting, it should have the power, guide our hearts, and be holistic and continuous." ”
This is the case with "Manjiang Red". The high-concept scenario continues to escalate, and finally sublimates to the feelings of home and country. Chen Yu believes that this is a practice in a new mainstream film, and the spiritual core of the song "Manjiang Red" flows in the blood of each of us. Filial piety, commitment, loyalty and integrity, these cultural genes are rooted in our hearts, and I think this is called mainstream values. ”
The following is Chen Yu's account.
(The following content involves some spoilers, if you haven't watched the movie, it is recommended to collect or forward it to friends who have seen it, welcome to read it after watching the movie)
Start with a house
At the beginning of the creation of "Man Jiang Hong", director Zhang Yimou did not frame the scope of content at all, but bought me a train ticket and asked me to go to Taiyuan, Shanxi to see a house, saying that I would make a movie in this house.
I went to see the house, went through the house, felt it in that space, and wrote this story. Why do you have to go there? Because in the earliest days, the director once wanted to shoot the entire film with one shot, even a fundamentalist shot to the end.
At that time, we planned to shoot like this, we first went to the house to rehearse, rehearsed once a day, rehearsed for 20 days, and adjusted the situation of each department according to the rehearsal. Then start shooting, shoot 7 times in 7 days, pick the best one, and then turn off the phone and go home. At that time, we were all very excited and thought that this movie was powerful.
In the early years, there was "Russian Ark", and in recent years, there was "1917", these films are art films, and "Manjiang Hong" must ensure the rhythm of commercial films, which is very difficult for script creation.
For example, characters go from door to door, from courtyard to yard, and they have to pinch the stopwatch to calculate how much time it takes. As the characters move, the play must not fall short, and the tight beat must be maintained. So we made a picture, where the characters go and where they say have a very detailed and exquisite design.
Although the director eventually abandoned the shooting plan for all considerations, we left one of the best legacies, which is this script. It is a highly crafted, tightly paced and powerful script. I even suspect that this is likely to be the director's brilliant design, and he did not intend to shoot it to the end in the first place, just to force out such a script.
As we all know, director Zhang Yimou has said on many occasions that his creativity is very vigorous, but the headache is that the script cannot keep up. So he has been constantly looking for a script that meets his requirements, and even put words, he is very open, and he is willing to shoot any subject, but the script must reach the artistic level he wants.
A broad artistic standard includes: stories that contain great energy, feasibility in shooting, and emotional cores that the public can understand. The story of "Rock Solid" is what he wants, after the filming was completed, he still affirmed my ability, and felt more tacit and smooth in the process of cooperation, and the mutual concept was relatively close, he said let's do it again, so there was the cooperation of "Manjiang Red".
Generally, to create a commercial film or a genre film, I must do a "high-concept situation", that is, when all the audience hears this sentence, it must trigger their desire to understand the subsequent story. This setting is not just a reminder, it should have power, guide our hearts, and be holistic and continuous.
When I was creating "Man Jiang Hong", I just thought in my mind: If a group of people come to this big mansion and want to do a big thing, they don't want to go out at all, what kind of plot height can this reach?
This high-concept situation has the meaning of dominating the whole film, and in this situation you have to constantly upgrade. If the storyline is just a simple reversal, it becomes a script-killing story.
And upgrading is a process of quantitative change, "Manjiang Hong" began as a trivial matter of investigating the murderer to find a secret letter, and then slowly found that this case involved more characters and rose to a major event that affected the family and country, which is a dramatic structure that must be completed.
In the process of upgrading, a qualitative change occurs, which is the dimension upgrading. In the movie, I am roughly divided into three latitudes, the first of which is an ordinary soldier who is inexplicably involved in a big event and his demand for survival.
After a certain point in time, Zhang Da became the mastermind. What is he going to do, and what is the conspiracy behind it? This is a suspenseful proposition, and everyone began to study this problem. Then he slowly found out that he wanted revenge and to gain the trust of Qin Hui or the people around him. This is the second dimension.
When writing this layer of revenge, I took advantage of the inertia of the audience's thinking. In fact, there is no place in the movie that explicitly indicates that they are going to assassinate Qin Huan, which is guessed by the audience's own brain. Finally, when he arrived in front of Qin Huan, the knife was on his neck, only to find that they had other purposes. This is the third dimension.
Therefore, "Manjiang Red" has achieved something that is difficult for commercial films to do - let the audience not lose their mind for a moment. In fact, the audience also needs a good story, with a certain level of complexity, a large amount of information, a high density of stories, and at the same time can have ups and downs, which is unexpected. As long as the audience pays the cost of watching carefully, they can reap the satisfaction of the narrative.
Every character is smart
As a commercial blockbuster, the genre must be clear, as far as the current film is concerned, "Manjiang Hong" is a very clear suspense type, and comedy is added as a genre element.
I agree with the director that comedy is extremely dependent on actors, which means that many times you have to stimulate the creativity of good actors on the spot.
On a textual level, I need to give them the foundation of a comedic situation. Because comedy is not a joke, it cannot be designed locally based on the memes or rhythms of language.
Advanced comedy is produced in the middle of the plot and the situation. For example, at the beginning, everyone was grabbing the secret letter, really grabbed the eyes, no one dared to watch it, but pushed each other, which belongs to the absurd comedy situation. I don't want to read the letter because everyone knows that if you read it, your life will not be saved, and this situation is integrated into the plot.
You have to build an absurd comedic situation on which the actors can unfold to present their personal stuff, so we have to do a lot of these situations in it.
In fact, when on the scene, the director gave the actors a lot of freedom, and these actors were very serious, whether at the script stage or the performance stage, they were picking out details and designing comedy elements. There is an exclusive "black talk" system between them, which stimulates each other and gives to each other, and the creative atmosphere is very good, and the scene breaks out into cheerful laughter from time to time.
And for this movie, there is very little room to shape the characters, because it is impossible to come up with a scene to specifically shape the characters. In the case that the whole text is basically plot information, it is necessary to complete the personality shaping of the characters between the lines.
What the director requires is that everyone must be very smart and get the maximum benefit while saving their own life. So I pulled a moving line for each character, sorting out their purpose and behavior at different times, as well as the logic behind them.
The movements of different characters are intertwined, and the thoughts and states of each character at each moment must be considered comprehensively. Even if only one of the characters is filmed in a certain segment, the behavior and state of the other characters must be targeted.
For the characters, when writing the script, there will be a preliminary impression in the mind, when the script is completed, the script will be used to communicate with the intended actors, after confirming the actors, and then make some appropriate adjustments according to the characteristics of the actors themselves, and then do some breakthrough things, in fact, this is a development, dynamic process.
In my mind, there will initially be some image designs, such as Shen Teng's Zhang Da, and the animal I think of when I write is a monkey. Shen Teng's own temperament of special skin and special oil is very suitable for the characters, and in the movie, Zhang Da tried to find a way to pull things around, and crawled to keep himself alive. At first, the audience's attention was focused here, this buddy is too unlucky, he is involved in a big event, can he survive?
Writing about the role of Sun Jun played by Yi Yangqianxi, I imagine more that the character is similar to a canine, he was a lackey in the early stage, and later he was a wolf who broke free of his chains.
When they put on makeup and stood in front of the camera for the first time to shoot a close-up, neither of them was the temperament in the middle of my impression, and I felt a little unrecognizable, and I felt extremely shocked at that moment. Shen Teng can have a certain powerful positive drama aura, and Qianxi, his sense of age has suddenly improved a lot, and he has become a very fierce, fierce, and mature man.
Actors all hope to build on the original performance style, so during the filming process, they must not only maintain their basic characteristics, but also break through the boundaries of their performance. So in this regard, not only the two of them, including Zhang Yi, Lei Jiayin, and Yue Yunpeng, are all doing this, and I think they are all doing very well.
There are a lot of main actors this time, but everyone is alive and has their own strong characteristics and personalities, which is quite rare.
New mainstream films
There are two reasons for using the word "Manjiang Red" as the starting point of the story.
First of all, for Chinese, "Manjiang Red" should be the most popular word, and the first word I will memorize is it, probably the same is true for most people; Secondly, I want to use movies to answer the reasons behind this phenomenon, and I think I can explore the cultural genes that we have been existing in folk culture for Chinese thousand years.
Throughout the film, the recitation of "Manjiang Hong" is the emotional high point of the whole text. When writing the script, I felt that the plot must surprise the audience. First of all, when the knife was placed on the neck and Qin Hui was asked to read the poem, the audience realized that he was reading "Manjiang Hong". Secondly, if one person does not read enough, the three armies must read together, forming a big dynamic of mountains and tsunamis, so I began to lay the foundation for the method of "transmitting military orders" earlier.
This familiar word, read in this specific context, the content itself can evoke the audience's feelings of home and country. This also includes so many people who sacrificed for this song without hesitation, so that the audience had sympathy, coupled with the director's lens language, music, the combination of several factors, the film finally brought the audience a general sense of the touch, but a shock that hit the heart.
At the end of the story, director Zhang Yimou encountered the same problem as when he filmed "Heroes" 20 years ago, sting or not?
From the perspective of historical facts, Qin Hui was not stabbed to death, and we must respect this historical fact. But when the audience's emotions have accumulated here, as a closed-loop structure, Qin Juniper must finally prick before the audience's emotions can be expressed.
On the one hand, it must be pricked, and on the other hand, it cannot be pricked, so the design of the final stand-in is a choice under the trade-off when creating. When the stand-in was assassinated, the real Qin Hui came out, in fact, the audience's emotions had been released. At this time, you say that Yue Fei was considered an anti-thief before this, and since then, the judgment of the world has been different, so it is no longer important to kill Qin Hui or not, he may be more alive than dead, and the audience can accept it. If the stab is a real Qin juniper, he does not know the existence of "Manjiang Hong", and there may be no later story. As a result, a stand-in was caught in the end, and the real purpose was achieved.
The design of the stand-in is very simple, but the difficulty is that it is necessary to build a character with very little ink, he is not a functional character, we have to construct his life. He finally said that I don't want to live anymore, I don't want to live such a life worse than death anymore, and this character also has a living life.
In the movie, you can see the entire mental journey of this stand-in, from the wind wave pavilion to see the word "Manjiang Red", to the time he finally pronounced the word, this is the highlight of his life.
And "Manjiang Red", as a song that almost every Chinese we will memorize, that spirit is rooted in the blood. Just like our filial piety to our parents, our commitment to our friends, and our adherence to loyalty and integrity, these are all cultural genes rooted in our hearts, and I think this is called mainstream values.
In my eyes, the so-called new mainstream film is a combination of commercial blockbusters and the theme of the main theme, and this theme is the presentation of the mainstream values of our Chinese itself in the public. This time in "Manjiang Hong", I tried to do another more extreme practice on the new mainstream movie I understand. In fact, in the new mainstream films, the ultimate goal of the director and the screenwriter is the same, that is, to tell a good story.
The process of my cooperation with director Zhang Yimou is also a learning process, a commercial blockbuster of this scale, the process difficulty is extremely high, and there are many dimensions of needs and elements that affect the creative decision. Whether it is the balance of space and various elements, or the integration between commercial attributes, public attributes and art forms, it is very exercised. So in the middle of this process, I was very teachable and gained a lot of experience.
I'm currently preparing to collaborate with him on his next work, and I'm also thinking about making a work of my own. In the future, I will do a lot of experiments in genre, I am not just loyal to or like one genre, I am very interested in science fiction films, and I am also interested in youth films.
Whether as a screenwriter or as a director, telling the story of genre films is my constant goal, but as for what kind of genre, I don't think it's necessarily.