The author of this article is a contributor @hormonal ghost
Inhabiting the movie is reassuring
In recent years, there have been many Chinese-language films that fans have been waiting for but have never been seen.
Such as "Wind Forest Volcano" directed by Mai Junlong, "Rock Solid" directed by Zhang Yimou, "Birdsong and Hehe" directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang, etc.
Although these finished films are difficult to wait, there should always be a day to wait.
Another Chinese-language blockbuster that has attracted international attention "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" does not know if there is still a chance to come out.
To talk about it, we have to mention the deceased martial arts film director Hu Jinquan (1932-1997).
In 1975, "Xia Girl" directed by Hu Jinquan won the Technology Award at Cannes, becoming the first Chinese-language film to win awards at three major film festivals; In 1978, Hu Jinquan was named one of the world's top five directors by the British magazine "International Film Guide".
It just so happened that a 220-minute documentary "Hu Jinquan" (Douban score 8.9) was recently released, giving us the opportunity to reminisce about the Chinese-speaking palace-level director who died early, and also to further understand the story behind his posthumous work "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers".
"Hu Jinquan" will be screened at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival
The documentary took director Lin Jingjie four years to complete.
He delved into Hu Jinquan's works and interviewed filmmakers who were quite related to Hu Jinquan (Shi Jun, Xu Feng, Zheng Peipei, Xu Anhua, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, etc.), and finally presented Hu Jinquan's "film style" and "life from film" in two chapters, "The Prophet Has Come" and "The Broken Intestine in the End of the World".
Looking back at Hu Jinquan's costume action films with the Ming Dynasty as the main background, they are both realistic and freehand, with both rigorous research on ancient China and the artistic conception of Chinese painting.
The bamboo forest fight scene of the amazing "Xia Girl" that year
Hu Jinquan's display of the image of the ancients is derived from ancient records and paintings, and no other information will be considered. When shooting, costumes, props, sets, environmental design, etc., he was hands-on, and he was dedicated to restoring ancient details and atmosphere, even if it was time-consuming and laborious.
《Dragon Gate Inn》
When filming "Xia Girl" (1970), for a few seconds of footage, Hu Jinquan took the crew to wait in the mountains for more than ten days; In the scene of the General's Mansion in the film, the crew planted the reeds first, and only filmed after the reeds opened a year later.
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa also has the habit of "waiting" when filming, waiting for clouds and waiting for the sun. When he filmed "Seven Samurai", he also asked the peasant group to take home clothes and grind them with light stones to highlight the texture of the era.
Hu Jinquan learned Kurosawa's film techniques in his early days, which may be one of the reasons why he is known as "Chinese Kurosawa".
In the film's freehand, Hu Jinquan makes good use of smoke to convey the artistic conception of white space, which Tsui Hark said was inspired by Director Hu seeing people burning garbage and raising smoke.
This technique was widely used in his 1979 Liaozhai-themed film "Legend of the Mountain", and the mystery of the landscape and characters came out instantly.
In the most important action scenes, Hu Jinquan also insists on the combination of real shooting and freehand.
Filming the bamboo forest battle of "Xia Girl", the light and shadow atmosphere of the bamboo forest + beautiful and powerful human body movements + dazzling editing makes people stunned;
At the end of the battle of "Zhonglietu", he constantly asks Sammo Hung and his stand-in to jump into the sea, in order to ensure the authenticity of the martial arts action while capturing the shadow cast by people on the cliff wall.
Hu Jinquan's films not only popularized his royal actors Xu Feng (producer of "Farewell My Concubine"), Shi Jun (winner of the Golden Horse Award for Lifetime Achievement) and Zheng Peipei, but also influenced the creation of many great Chinese film directors.
The gunfight action scene described by foreign media as a "ballet" in "The True Color of Heroes" directed by John Woo is taken from the Peking Opera rhythm of Hu Jinquan's martial arts action.
The scene of the jade dragon making trouble in the inn in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" directed by Ang Lee is actually a fusion of the character design in "The Drunken Man" (refer to the golden swallow) and the fighting space in "Dragon Gate Inn", and the bamboo forest drama certainly has the shadow of "Xia Girl"
Tsui Hark's "New Dragon Gate Inn" is not only a remake of "Dragon Gate Inn", but the spicy and amorous proprietress gold inlaid jade in the film is a direct reference to the "heartthrob" of the proprietress in "The Storm of Yingchun Pavilion" (1973).
As Ang Lee said, "Hu Jinquan's influence is not only the martial arts of film, but also the shaping of Chinese images."
In addition to martial arts films, Hu Jinquan's shaping of Chinese images cannot bypass his long-cherished wish, that is, the movie "History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" that he studied for 25 years but failed to complete.
The English title of "The Battle of Ono" is "The Battle of Ono", formerly known as "Igo Ono".
The so-called "Igo" and "Ono" are the real names of two small towns in the mountains of northern California, both related to the real history of the first Chinese gold panning in the United States.
In the 19th century, a group of Chinese laborers were brought to the United States to build railroads, but were abandoned and joined the gold rush in order to survive.
When they found a gold mine, the whites would cut off their beards, and the Chinese workers could only say "I go" to the whites and leave; When the gold mine was found again, the white men came to cut off the beards again, and the Chinese workers stopped working, set explosive traps to fight back, and said "O no" to the white people.
In the words of the interviewee in "The Great Hero Hu Jinquan", the development of the United States is indispensable to the blood and tears of the Chinese, but the Chinese workers have not been recognized, and Director Hu feels that he must tell this matter.
Therefore, the title of "Igo Ono" not only has geographical and historical significance in a foreign land, but also contains the blood and tears of Chinese laborers.
However, in Hu Jinquan's design, "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" is not a documentary-style biographical historical film, but a Chinese-language blockbuster that integrates many genre elements such as war, martial arts, and traps, and has reflective significance.
Since the film began to be prepared in the 1970s, Hu Jinquan can be said to have worked hard for it.
At first, it was Hu Jinquan's trip to the United States after filming "Dragon Gate Inn" that made him have the idea of photographing Chinese laborers. In 1977, his experience of being ticketed by a white police officer in Los Angeles made him firm up the idea of filming "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers".
Hu Jinquan loves books and is a real literati director in the film industry
In the early 80s, Hu Jinquan met Hollywood female producer Sarah Pillsbury, Sarah agreed to be the producer of "The History of Chinese Workers' Blood and Tears", and invited the Chinese-American playwright Huang Gelun (the original author of the movie "Butterfly Jun" and the winner of the Tony Award for American Drama) as the screenwriter.
For the next five or six years, Hu Jinquan and Huang Zhelun discussed the details of the story on the basis of the first draft of the script.
Hu Jinquan is notoriously slow in making movies, "Xia Girl" and "Zhonglietu" and other films have been filmed for three years, while "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" took several years to write alone, which shows its status in Hu Jinquan's heart.
But the film never went well in terms of funding.
Hu Jinquan originally planned to start shooting the film in 1990, which was expected to cost $7.5 million.
Before that, he contacted the then Vice Minister of Culture Ying Ruocheng (Yingda's father, who participated in "The Last Emperor"), the Japanese production company Daiei of "Rashomon", and some Hong Kong producers.
Even if he raised money on Zunlong's intention to play the leading role, these efforts were ultimately not supported by the producers.
Dragon Honor
In the 90s, director Hu Jinquan, who had fallen into career difficulties, still insisted on raising funds for "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" and continued to improve the script.
It wasn't until 1996 that funding finally came in.
Britain's Goldcrest (the producer of the Oscar for Best Picture Gandhi) was willing to invest half of it, and the other half would be run by John Woo, who successfully broke into Hollywood, and the film was scheduled to start shooting in 1997.
John Woo was filming "Changing Face" at the time
After many years of long-cherished wishes, Hu Jinquan is naturally very excited.
A month before the start of filming, he suffered from heart disease and went to Taipei for heart surgery, but on the afternoon after the operation, he suddenly developed irregular heart rhythm symptoms, and then died regretfully at the age of 66.
Hu Jinquan's cemetery in the United States was donated by John Woo
According to the recollections of "Drunken Man" starring Zheng Peipei, Director Hu actually did not have to do that operation, he was completely to ensure that he could have enough physical strength when filming "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers", but who knew that it would be a farewell forever.
It can be said that Hu Jinquan spent his later years running for this movie, and his life was extremely tight, and the balance in his bank account was only one or two thousand yuan when he died.
Hu Jinquan once returned to his hometown in Beijing to visit relatives
In the 1980s and 1990s, when Chinese films were shining internationally, new directors such as Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, and Chen Kaige frequently won awards in Venice, Berlin and Cannes.
However, how many people know that behind this prosperity, there is also a work of predecessors who are struggling to succeed?
It is gratifying that in 2001, John Woo, who was a fan of director Hu Jinquan, took over the project and announced the preparation of "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers", but later it was again stranded due to investment and script problems.
In 2005, Fox bought the copyright of "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" and planned to promote the production of the film in the form of Sino-US co-production, and the director was replaced by John Woo to Indian director Sheikar Kapoor (whose "Elizabeth" was nominated for 7 Oscars in 1999), and the film budget was increased to 150 million US dollars.
The actor of the film's protagonist Lum also moved from the original Zun Long to Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Jet Li, Jiang Wen and others, and finally went around back to Chow Yun-fat (Chow Yun-fat is also the actor originally selected by Hu Jinquan).
The opposite actor with Chow Yun-fat may be "Schindler's List" and "Hurricane Rescue" starring Liam Neeson. When "Red Cliff" was released in 2008, the media asked John Woo about the progress of "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers", when he said that he was still revising the script, and Chow Yun-fat was still starring
However, after so many years, "The History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" is still in the preparatory stage, and there has been basically no news since 2010
In short, the future of the "History of Blood and Tears of Chinese Workers" that has been put aside for 26 years is still unclear.
John Woo, who regards Hu Jinquan as an idol and master, is now nearly 80 years old and has not been in good health in recent years, so it is estimated that this big production led by him will be difficult to put on the agenda for a while and a half
Director John Woo has not released a new film for 6 years
Even if someone can take on this big project later (as Spielberg completed Kubrick's posthumous work "Artificial Intelligence"), it will not be possible to fully reproduce the personal style of director Hu Jinquan, but that hidden history hopes to be seen one day.
Note: Some of the pictures in this article come from Douban and the Internet, if there is infringement, please contact us.