In the eyes of the main creative team, adapting "The Three-Body Problem" is "running all the way with awe".
Director Yang Lei took over the "Three-Body Problem" TV series, which stemmed from an accident.
In 2019, at Tencent Video's annual press conference, he and chief producer Bai Yiqing were sitting together and chatting, and the other party suddenly proposed: "Do you want to consider filming "The Three-Body Problem"? Everyone thinks you're a good fit. Yang Lei didn't react for a while, he wasn't sure if it was a joke or a serious remark, "I said that you have to think about it, it's not a matter of taking a show, it's a state where a die-hard fan wants to go on pilgrimage."
Yang Lei is a full-fledged sci-fi fan, and "The Three-Body Problem" means a lot to him. Since the 90s, as a junior high school student, he has been keen to buy "Science Fiction World" with the few pocket money. When Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem" began to be serialized in this magazine, Yang Lei became the first reader to uncover the secrets of the Red Bank Base and the fate of the "Judgment Day".
"The most memorable episode is Operation Guzheng, and the metaphor in the book is particularly graphic, it says that the giant ship 'Judgment Day' has spread out like playing cards. I might be amazed by a point in science fiction, but Da Liu's book is a completely different level, and it is well deserved to win a Hugo Award. ”
"The Three-Body Problem" stills
After Yang Lei went back, he discussed with the team, and visual director Lu Beike urged him to quickly settle the matter. Yang Lei pondered and pondered repeatedly, spent two days re-reading the novel, and finally wrote a cover letter to Tencent Video, detailing his love for "The Three-Body Problem" and the overall shooting concept.
Four years later, the "Three-Body Problem" TV series finally came out. During the hit of the series, the reporter of New Weekly talked with the chief director Yang Lei and the chief screenwriter Tian Liangliang about the creative story behind it.
"Three-Body Problem" team work photo. "Defending the original" is the consensus of the entire "Three-Body Problem" main creative team, and in order to achieve this goal, the main creative team has experienced countless challenges. (Photo / Courtesy of interviewee)
Pilgrimage for fans of "The Three-Body Problem":
"I have one request: follow the book"
If Yang Lei's acceptance of "The Three-Body Problem" is an accident, then the assembly of the main creative team is an inevitability.
In the past few years, "The Three-Body Problem" has launched adaptations of different types and subdivisions, including the "My Three-Body Problem" series with a Douban score of 9.4 points, which also provides experience for later TV series adaptations.
Zhao Jilong, the copyright owner of the "Three-Body Problem" IP and CEO of the Three-Body Universe, said: "We have an internal saying, 'adapting "The Three-Body Problem" is to run all the way with awe', in which there are two unshakable principles, one is that the main creative team must truly love "The Three-Body Problem", and the other is that the partners must be in a leading position in the industry or have a sense of innovation. ”
In 2016, Tencent Video reached a cooperation with Three-Body Universe to jointly develop the "Three-Body Problem" TV series. From the chief producer Bai Yiqi to the chief director Yang Lei and the chief screenwriter Tian Liangliang, the main creative team is almost all die-hard fans of "The Three-Body Problem", and the adaptation of the script of "The Three-Body Problem" alone took four or five years.
Team work photos. In fact, the entire creative team has had big and small differences in script adaptation, and no one is an absolute authority. (Photo / Courtesy of interviewee)
The main creative team has screened dozens of adaptations, including the direction of focusing on criminal investigation and suspense and focusing on high-energy science fiction, but finally chose to return to the original work. In Yang Lei's words, "let's just shoot according to the book, the original book has already gone to heaven, and none of us can write better than it."
"Defending the original" is almost the consensus of the main creative team, and they are more true than the other. Yang Lei originally thought that he was a hardcore fan, but found during the meeting that Tian Liangliang's familiarity with the original book had reached the point where he could memorize the novel backwards, "I was relieved the moment I got the script, she was in awe of the original and added an explanation of the original work."
During the script adaptation of "The Three-Body Problem", Tian Liangliang's team did a lot of research on the fans of the original "Three-Body Problem", she not only hoped to retain this part of the audience, but also hoped to grasp the most popular and quintessential highlights of this work through communication with loyal fans, "Many famous scenes in the book, we have preserved them in their original places."
"The Three-Body Problem" stills
In addition to restoring the famous scenes in the novel, how to make the characters fuller is also a challenge for the screenwriting team. Based on the original story line of "The Three-Body Problem", Tian Liangliang made the character image more fleshed out by adding various details and plots: "The volume space of the original work is there, and there will be a lot of white space in the character part, so we will shape the character a little more arcual." ”
The team has also had big and small disagreements on script adaptation, and no one is an absolute authority. Tian Liangliang teased: "Everyone often can't talk together. Once, she and the special effects director debated a certain plot in Hengdian for more than an hour, and Yang Lei stood by at a loss. This kind of scene plays out almost every day.
"From a creative point of view, it is really a group of "Three-Body Problem" fans 'tearing each other' every day, and everyone hopes to fully convey their feelings. There is a plot in the novel where Wang Miao comes out of Ding Yi's house after playing billiards and falls into a chaotic mood next to the building. Later, we wondered if Tomoko was also influencing him at this time, so we changed the scene to the red wall (third perspective). This is how we find the ultimate common ground in the repeated debate and present it again. ”
"The Three-Body Problem" stills
Four years to sharpen a sword:
"With a realistic attitude, make a science fiction masterpiece"
For Yang Lei, the biggest challenge in filming "The Three-Body Problem" is how to make the audience "believe" the story.
For a long time, "special effects technology" was one of the criteria for domestic audiences to judge the quality of a science fiction work. Yang Lei still remembers the first imported sci-fi film he watched when he was a child, "Heavenly Earth Strikes Back", which was the first time that people had a concrete cognition of sci-fi blockbusters.
But for a Chinese sci-fi masterpiece like "The Three-Body Problem", Yang Lei believes that localization is more important than special effects: "The first thing I said at the crew meeting was that we should use the attitude of shooting realistic works to shoot this sci-fi drama - bring the audience into the world of "The Three-Body Problem" and make them believe that the world is real, so that when they peel off the cocoon and reveal the sci-fi side, everyone will have a creepy feeling." If you blindly shoot according to Western science fiction ideas, you don't know what will become of it. ”
In order to make the audience feel a sense of substitution, the main creative team carried out a lot of research work during the creation period: in order to ensure the credibility of the science fiction part, the team specially set up a scientific advisory group, spent three months consulting scientists in various fields, accurate to the astronomical data on a piece of paper, and finally won the permission of the major national scientific research bases for real-life shooting.
Team work photos. (Photo / Courtesy of interviewee)
In order to restore the sense of age in the novel "The Three-Body Problem", the main creator also added various Olympic news to the loudspeaker broadcast during the later mixing, restoring the Beijing style in 2007: "Our art scene has also reached an extremely crazy point, in order to find a suitable river, the team of dozens of people started from Sichuan all the way north, spent two months, looked at the branch lines of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River, and almost covered half of the map of China." ”
Not only that, in the casting of the core characters of "The Three-Body Problem", the main creative team also gave priority to actors with "realistic texture". On the set of the crew, almost everyone has the script and the original book in their hands at the same time, and opens the novel at any time to discuss the content against the script.
One of the actors who impressed Tian Liangliang was Chen Jin, who played the elderly Ye Wenjie, "She hardly communicates with anyone on the scene because she has to immerse herself in Ye Wenjie's loneliness."
The elderly Ye Wenjie played by Chen Jin. / Stills from "The Three-Body Problem"
And Wang Ziwen, who played the young Ye Wenjie, was shocked by her performance in several major scenes, "We will have performance hints in the script, but some of Wang Ziwen's action designs will make me feel more in line with the role, and her processing is above my words."
The young Ye Wenjie played by Wang Ziwen. / Stills from "The Three-Body Problem"
And the actor who surprised Yang Lei the most was Yu Hewei, who played Shi Qiang. When reading the novel "The Three-Body Problem", Yang Lei's Shi Qiang in his mind is a "ruder and burlier" big man, which is not consistent with the image of an intellectual played by Yu Hewei on a daily basis.
But Yu Hewei's handling of this role made Yang Lei completely accept this version of Shi Qiang: "Shi Qiang is actually a thick and thin person, he can judge the direction of the case through any subtle expression and abnormal details, so he will propose the guzheng action." Yu Hewei successfully achieved three points - first, external roughness; Second, be careful; Third, humor – it was completely beyond my imagination, and I was completely impressed after the performance. ”
Shi Qiang played by Yu Hewei. / Stills from "The Three-Body Problem"
Returning to the "special effects" part that most sci-fi fans pay attention to, Yang Lei believes that the special effects in "The Three-Body Problem" are not pure show-offs, but just serve the plot, and in turn enhance the sense of reality - for the "three-body game" part of the play, the team specially scanned the image of the actors into the game to create a game texture between real and unreal; And the most difficult highlight of "The Three-Body Problem", that is, the boat-cutting part of the guzheng operation, the main creative team has also achieved the ultimate restoration.
Everyone can imagine the shape of a room after it is blown up; But after a ship is cut, what kind of state it will be squeezed into has no reference in past film and television works - so the team built a complete cabin, and then used a machine to cut it, crush and weld it one by one, and through experiments obtained a form that "Judgment Day" may appear after cutting, "the storage data of a lens alone is as much as 60 T".
Broadcast response to "The Three-Body Problem":
"After raising children for so many years, I finally want to meet someone"
Yang Lei never expected that the later process of "The Three-Body Problem" would be so long.
The post-production of conventional TV series often takes one to two months, and Yang Lei thought that this drama was more complicated, and also reserved four months, "I didn't expect that the post-cutting of the first episode would be three months, which is one thing that made me extremely collapsed."
For a whole year, Yang Lei and the editing team were immersed in the machine room to cut films, and then he simply moved the machine home, got up every day to go to the study to work, and fell into insomnia for a while, even dreaming about the content of "The Three-Body Problem". During this period, Yang Lei also politely refused a lot of drama offers, "My friend said that there is something to get in the later stage, can't it be finished by cutting it." But I really loved the novel and couldn't bear to let go of a single detail, so I spent a year editing it."
Not only that, the post-soundtrack of "The Three-Body Problem" also took more than half a year: Yang Lei called the composition team in the United States almost every morning to communicate, and the next day waited for the other party to send a version of the soundtrack, writing nearly 800 minutes of music back and forth, equivalent to the workload of 9 TV series. "No way, this play involves too many complex emotional expressions, from reality, criminal investigation to science fiction, you can't put the soundtrack of Qin Shihuang's part in Ye Wenjie's part, the composition took more than 6 months to write, and I mixed and recorded for almost 3 months to complete."
The rise of Chinese science fiction works is also inseparable from the behind-the-scenes team full of enthusiasm for science fiction. (Photo / Courtesy of interviewee)
In June 2022, the mixing of "The Three-Body Problem" ended. Yang Lei ran to the machine room and looked at the finished product from beginning to end, "feeling that the heart was empty at once." Two days before the broadcast of "The Three-Body Problem," a student assistant sat in the room watching the finished product, while Yang Lei sat on the sidelines to observe his reaction. When the "Guzheng Action" boat cutting screen appeared on the screen, the student assistant suddenly pressed the pause button and gasped on the side, "I said what are you going to do, he said 'no, I have to slow my heart', at this time, I know that the effect has been achieved."
Unlike Yang Lei, who has a bottom in his heart, Tian Liangliang is very apprehensive - as early as when she came into contact with the "Three-Body Problem" project, her junior high school gave her a lot of "pressure", saying that if the adaptation is not good, it will be cloudy, "This mood is like a child who has been raised for many years, he is finally going to be known by everyone, you don't know if he looks the same as everyone thinks."
After the broadcast of "The Three-Body Problem", whether it was a hot ratings record or a high reputation of 8.3 points on Douban, Tian Liangliang was relieved. In addition to the praise for the restoration of the original work, the audience also found Easter eggs and foreshadowing in the play, "such as the Zhizi perspective and Zhizi Road we designed, Hu Xiaoxi's pen name 'Chuantuo's Poet', and the scientific boundary meeting place is 'Shula Hutong 4-2', all of which were discovered by the audience one by one, and there was a feeling of encountering a confidant."
Wang Miao played by Zhang Luyi. / Stills from "The Three-Body Problem"
A barrage in the play jokingly called the countdown that appeared in front of Wang Miao's eyes "Miao Watch", which made Yang Lei couldn't help but be handsome, "Zhizi didn't expect that he still had this function." The upsurge of Chinese science fiction discussions triggered by "The Three-Body Problem" and "The Wandering Earth 2" also inspired him: "I think "The Wandering Earth 2" does a good job, it makes a strong sense of substitution of Chinese science fiction, and then on this basis to realize the science fiction part, I think we began to find the 'root' of Chinese science fiction, which is the attitude that creators should have." ”
The rise of Chinese science fiction works is inseparable from the behind-the-scenes team full of enthusiasm for science fiction. Yang Lei recalled that the first time he and Lu Beike met was at the door of the computer room of a certain play in 2007: the two happened to chat about the new Neil Gaiman short story on "Science Fiction World", which opened the chatterbox and became friends for 16 years. And Bai Yiqi is also a sci-fi fan who can draw the base map of "The Legend of the Galactic Heroes".
It is the love of science fiction that brings more and more like-minded people together. "In the four years since the creation of "The Three-Body Problem", from the boss, the producer to the staff, everyone is promoting the project with a sincere attitude towards science fiction, and no one has said 'you have to cut it quickly, we have to broadcast it quickly', it is all that kind of silent support, and we have knocked "The Three-Body Problem" out little by little."
Everything is like the phrase they wrote on the finale cake: "Who hasn't ordered an ideal yet?" ”