"Go and find like a Tang monk"
Are there really aliens in this world?
In a news program in the 90s, Tang Zhijun, a young editor of the science fiction magazine "Space Exploration", was interviewed and pleased to introduce another possibility of alien existence, "There can be no life on Earth." "When all mankind knows that aliens exist, then the disputes and barriers between all people before will disappear." The only way for human civilization to evolve again," he was thrilled that he would tell the great mystery of the universe, "was to find aliens." ”
Thirty years later, in the follow-up clip of the documentary, the magazine's newsroom is more decaying than any other print media, and Tang Zhijun, the editor-in-chief in his fifties, still firmly believes in the existence of aliens. And Qin Cairong, a senior editor of the magazine, returned to the optical store she ran after work and complained: "This alien really wants them to find it, so what can they do?" Rob, rob banks, oil, big shopping malls. ”
The "Space Exploration Editorial Office", which tells the story of the editorial office of the magazine that is obsessed with finding extraterrestrial civilizations, is scheduled for April 1. At the 2021 Pingyao International Film Festival, the film was a dark horse and the venue was full.
In the first ten minutes of the film, the shooting method of pseudo-news programs and pseudo-documentaries was once a little difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. This is actually a feature film in the form of a pseudo-documentary, a group of people go to find aliens, absurd and real, transcendent and unexpected, science fiction also has a bit of fantasy elements, in that year's Pingyao won the best picture, the most popular film and other awards, and even because it was too popular and added, before the release, the Douban score has reached 8.6.
"It used to be a film festival screening, but it was really challenging in the market when it was facing a wider audience." Kong Dashan, director and screenwriter of "Space Exploration Editorial Department", pulled the bean bag sofa to lie down as soon as he entered the door. In an interview in March, he had just finished the roadshow of the movie "The Wandering Earth 2" as a director of Group B, saying that he had been rushing continuously recently, and his back hurt a little.
Kong Dashan was born in 1990 and was a young man, but he believes that he has limited energy and a weak desire to create. Before the release of "Space Exploration Editorial Office", several of his short films met the audience in several small screenings, almost every one of which was student assignment.
In 2016, because he had to hand in the graduation assignment of the Beijing Film Academy Master of Fine Arts - a feature film, Kong Dashan submitted several story synopses to his graduate supervisor Wang Hongwei, but he was not satisfied until he saw a newsreel: In 2017, a reporter from Shandong TV interviewed a farmer who claimed to have been in contact with aliens, and the farmer seriously described the whole process of encountering, interacting and capturing aliens, and finally opened the freezer at home to display the alien remains - it was a man made of silicone, Inferior alien dolls. In a news program broadcast in dialect, the farmer said that he would protect the alien's body and wait for his alien companion to pick it up in a flying saucer. In the broadcast channels of news programs, the absurdity of this story is even stronger.
Kong Dashan felt that this could be done to write a script. He told the news to director Guo Fan. In 2011, the two met because of their respective remakes of the animation "The Adventures of Li Xianji". After filming the movie "The Wandering Earth", Guo Fan once asked Kong Dashan if he had the idea of making a feature film. Kong Dashan relayed the news with dark humor in the picture — such as detailing the silicone texture of the alien doll.
Guo Fan suddenly asked him: What if everything is true?
How can all this not be true? Kong Dashan went back to write the synopsis, which at first he wrote "still bad stories", which was his favorite story genre when he was 27 years old, "a bizarre critical realism, contemporary magical landscape award." He feels that all this is still the problem that his mentor Wang Hongwei detected in the synopsis of the previous story: "critical formalism" that stays on the surface, and does not really tell stories and people.
By the time of the second draft, the character of Tang Zhijun appeared, and the whole story began to be established, that is a character obsessed with finding aliens.
When writing the script, Kong Dashan felt that this was a story a bit like "Journey to the West", "Tang Zhijun is like a Tang monk holding the grand vision of Pudu sentient beings to find aliens." He was a rhapsody in his youth, feeling that the reason why humanity is stagnant, divided and full of contradictions is because there is no connection. He was just as obsessed as the Tang monk when he was going to get the true scriptures. Kong Dashan said that in the story, the solution to everything in the world lies in learning from the scriptures - the present is to find aliens.
Obsessed with a favorite pot
At the beginning of 2020, the new crown virus epidemic broke out, and the crew set up by Kong Dashan for "Space Exploration Editorial Department" was disbanded, but "compared to the disaster faced by all mankind", this seems to be nothing, "The epidemic has aggravated my feeling that the movie is a particularly false thing." Even if this film can't be made in the future, I can accept it if I don't make a movie again in this life. ”
At the end of the year, the filming of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" finally began, and Kong Dashan was the director of a feature film for the first time, and he didn't have time to rejoice and be excited. "At that time, it was a lot of anxiety, mainly inexperience, there were too many things to deal with in the feature film, and I had to face a lot of unknown problems every day." He had to make dozens of decisions in a day, "and I didn't know if I was right or not." ”
"Making a film is a lot of uncertainty for me, and I want to work in this state forever." He said.
In the film, the protagonists go all the way from Beijing to the southwest, to the township to the village, and finally to the forest, constantly being fooled and encountering many difficulties in the cold weather.
As a small-cost film, in the 37 days of filming, the entire crew is also constantly rushing, in addition to the transition between cities, but also in a small area of transition in the mountain village, "really chaotic".
Even the shooting scene is a bit absurd.
▲Shooting scene From left: Yang Haoyu, Wang Yitong, Kong Dashan
Because of the use of pseudo-documentary filming, and the shooting budget is limited, the whole process is a bit pivotal, "After a normal movie shoots a shot or a scene, the photography and lighting may have to turn over, change the camera position and change the track, and the director may have half an hour and an hour of rest on the scene." But our film was documentary, and there were no lights on site. As a director, I don't have any respite, and after filming a scene, I may smoke a cigarette and anxiously arrange how to shoot the next scene. Kong Dashan said that he didn't have time to look at the material every night, and he didn't have much time to think about what he was shooting, "I can only go one way to the dark." ”
The first three days after filming began, it was about the scene in the office of the editorial office of "Space Exploration", and the experienced actress Arya was in a "very confused state". She plays Qin Cairong in the movie, and Cairong is more concerned about whether the heating fee of the editorial office can be paid than the editor-in-chief and old friend Tang Zhijun, who is bent on finding aliens. "I felt that this director was either crazy or stupid, which is how I felt on the spot. Because the shooting method is completely different from normal movies in the past, I feel that I must have been fooled and blinded. At the premiere exchange at the Pingyao Film Festival two years ago, Alia said that on the fourth day of filming, she slowly felt very interesting. But many amateur actors on the set, the camera always followed, "It's still quite scary." ”
Until he later entered the filming site of "The Wandering Earth 2" as the director of Group B, seeing the thousands of shooting teams with division of labor and efficient operation, Kong Dashan sighed to himself "like a roadside vendor walking into a Michelin restaurant", "There are dozens of monitors on the scene, each department has several monitors, the largest screen is larger than the wall of the office, and a cinema projection is set up on the scene as a monitor." ”
In the crew of "Space Exploration Editorial Department", most of the filming time was in the mountains of Sichuan, and the on-site monitors of the whole group were two 7-inch monitors, and Kong Dashan had one hanging around his neck, and everyone looked around him.
Kong Dashan often followed the photographer, looking at the small 7-inch screen hanging around his neck as he walked, in order to pursue the realism of the handheld camera, he specially told the photographer, "The lens shakes a little more, and the sense of breathing is stronger." It wasn't until the footage was projected from a 7-inch screen to a large screen that he realized that "breathing was a little too heavy."
Initially, on the self-driving scenic selection road in Sichuan, screenwriter and actor Wang Yitong slowly discovered Kong Dashan's "obsessive-compulsive tendencies". He plays Sun Yitong in the play, one of the amateur actors who Arya calls "terrifying" - from the name of the character, this character is obviously written by Kong Dashan, a rural poetry writer who senses the call of aliens, and carries a pot on his head in order to shield alien signals from the universe. On the road to the scenery, whenever Kong Dashan saw a hardware store, he would go in and look, holding different pots and gesturing on Wang Yitong's head, and he wanted to choose a favorite pot.
"He such a meticulous heart, because he felt that this pot was particularly important, what the bottom of the pot looked like, what the size was, what the texture was, and so on step by step." Wang Yitong said that when the art of the crew had not yet joined, Kong Dashan also had to completely control the art.
And when filming started, after the crew's art director Guo Xinbo joined, Kong Dashan was much more relaxed, but he still quarreled with the art for details, such as whether Tang Zhijun's clothes collar was round or pointed. "Who cares about this kind of thing?" When the quarrel started, Wang Yitong stood in the middle, "Two eldest brothers, as a third party, I said that except for the two of you, no third person in the world will care about these things." ”
"He's too perfectionist." Wang Yitong said, "It's too perfectionist so he is really 'very dissatisfied', and it may be this personality that allows him to sculpt the so-called works and art." ”
As a teacher at the film school, Wang Hongwei has seen the torment of many young directors when making their first feature film, "Every step needs to wait, you need to deal with all kinds of people, you keep making various changes, you keep rekindling hope, and there are new disappointments to hit him, this is the process that every director will go through, and there are few projects that are very smooth overnight." He later became the executive producer of "Space Exploration Editorial Department", "If Dashan is different from other young directors, he didn't retreat during the shooting, at least Guo Fan and I helped him so much, he couldn't say this." But the frustration he showed was quite a lot in my memory. ”
"Guo Fan will not hang his head, he is very diligent and very serious, he keeps grinding, and there is no time to slack, but this energy may not be able to fight for 10 Kong Dashan and Wang Yitong." Wang Hongwei does not think that the young man's mourning energy has to be changed, "I think it's also very good, this film is originally a little lost, not a bloody film, everyone is full of passion to do a great cause, this movie was originally written about such a group of dejected people, knowing that they are doing something that is not running, and they are doing it inexplicably." ”
The "Wandering Earth" series, which has now become a representative of Chinese science fiction films, is a magnificent and grand wandering story, and people have not abandoned the earth in the face of an existential crisis. Scientists and astronauts lead mankind to turn the earth, which carries all the history, ancestors, and hometowns, into a spaceship, and all mankind nomads in the universe.
In "Space Exploration Editorial Department", a group of "civil sciences" who look full of loser temperament, with radio equipment from more than thirty years ago, take a train to the deep mountains of Sichuan to find aliens, encounter meteorite hunters, and silicone textured alien remains that can be seen for 520 yuan. Every foot of them stepped on the land and the mud of their respective lives, tossed and turned on train sleepers and county buses, still persistently looking at the sky, using radio to collect signals from the universe.
Before setting off, Tang Zhijun's TV signal had a problem. He looked at the snowflake dots on the screen and walked around uneasily because of his excitement.
"This is not an ordinary TV snowflake spot," Tang Zhijun said, "this is the afterglow when the universe was born." ”
▲ Wang Yitong Photo/Southern People Weekly reporter Jiang Xiaoming
"What the hell did you do here?"
"Aren't you curious about who created the universe? Don't want to build a spaceship and fly to the end of the universe to see if the creator is male or female, tall, short, fat and thin? Every day I wondered, thinking, what the hell did you make me here? Kong Dashan lay on the beanbag sofa.
When he was in junior high school, Kong Dashan rented a lot of discs to kill time, played bands in high school, punk, Grunge, what to play, English is not good and struggles to write English songs, the name of the band is black history, so it is not convenient to reveal. His elders are either civil servants or teachers, and his parents have only two requirements for him: one is not to break the law and discipline, and the other is to be admitted to university, and the major is not important, because if he is admitted to university, he can be admitted to civil service or become a teacher.
Of course, he was still obedient, and after entering high school, he began to think about how to get into college on the basis of poor grades. It was also at that time that the domestic film and television profession expanded, and he watched different types of movies with this goal as the goal, only to realize that there are many great directors in the world, and it was also at that time that he set up an incentive mechanism for himself - I also want to make a great movie.
In 2011, Kong Dashan wanted to shoot his undergraduate graduation homework, but his creative ability was stretched, which coincided with the birth of the animated short film "The Adventures of Li Xianji", which he liked very much and decided to adapt it.
"The grass platform team of the grass platform, all the moving shots, you think it's a track, but it's not, it's a tripod wheel, and a piece of iron is laid on it where it encounters unevenness. Most of the time it's just two people, or more often it's just me, and I'm both an artist and a photographer. I was so impressed that I quickly ran back to the camera and turned it on. It's a purely manual job. Kong Dashan laughed, "shabby and funny." ”
But the film did not catch up with graduation, and before the school was cut, the school was on holiday, and after the dormitory was cleaned up, he moved to the teacher's apartment to continue cutting. One day when he went to eat in the cafeteria, he saw a banner that said "Welcome new students to school." It's already August. After a while, the short film "The Troubles of Young Ma Liao" adapted from "The Adventures of Li Xianji" was finally cut, and he uploaded the video online, and several assignments had been uploaded before, and it could be recommended to the homepage, he thought, this must be able to explode.
Kong Dashan's first time he had a huge sense of gap was also at that time - "The Troubles of Young Ma Liao" only had tens of thousands of hits, and stayed on that number forever.
Except for "Space Exploration Editorial Office", which is his favorite to date: Mariao, a teenager suffering from jet lag, tries to travel back in time through the secret passage in the game, but everything fails.
"I miss the shooting state at that time, there were no rules to speak of, there was no ideological baggage, to shoot indiscriminately, especially to fly, and to use some very cheap means to achieve it." Kong Dashan said. He kept the homemade New Year painting doll hood at home during the shooting, a total of 4, which took up a lot of space. But they also became a mocking and absurd symbol, reproduced in the Space Exploration Editorial Office.
The explosion was another short film, Kong Dashan's "Legal Future Time" shot four years later.
In 2015, Kong Dashan was a graduate student at the Beijing Film Academy, and "Legal Future Time" was his coursework, modeled on a legal news program, in the context of frequent suffocation incidents in literary and art films, the police successfully visited and cleaned up a nest of literary and art film crews. Kong Dashan wrote, directed and acted by himself, and the literary film director Kong Zhao Zheng tearfully confessed after being imprisoned: "I will definitely accept the transformation and strive to make a box office hit." ”
But Kong Dashan feels that the fire of this film has nothing to do with him. "That's just the popular mood finding a release through this film. I feel especially like everyone facing a behemoth, I don't know how to face him, my piece is a rotten egg, everyone takes it to vent their disgust for the behemoth. But I didn't mean to provoke this confrontation, I was just joking. ”
"It's very, and the absurd, bad fun stuff in the whole story appeals to me." Wang Yitong liked "Legal Future Time", so much so that when he first met Kong Dashan, he said, "Where have we met?" Kong Dashan thought he was pleasant. Wang Yitong said, "No, it's actually because he acted in that film." ”
That year, Wang Yitong's "The Pig Killer" won the Best Film in the Development Plan at the Pingyao International Film Festival, and the short version was violent, weird and mixed with philosophical atmosphere. Kong Dashan also never hid his love for him and Wang Yitong. A year later, he received a call from Wang Yitong, and Wang Yitong said, how about we write the script together? Kong Dashan agreed.
In the winter of 2019, he took the roughly formed script of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" and packed his luggage and went to Chengdu, Wang Yitong's home.
▲ "Space Exploration Editorial Department" stills
"It's not a definitive answer, it's just a delusion"
Later, Kong Dashan repeatedly mentioned the scene of that meeting - just after entering the door and putting down his luggage, Wang Yitong told him, I wrote a poem and read it to you.
"It's not my routine." Talking about this during the interview, Wang Yitong straightened up from the beanbag sofa, "I didn't write poems for people to read every day, like neuropathy, but I happened to be there to write, and after writing, I said read it." I don't write much for people to read. His (Kong Dashan) sentence particularly touched me, that is, in "The Future of the Legal System", the reporter said, I heard that the recent suffocation of literary and art films has made a lot of trouble, how dare you do this. Then he said, it's okay, anyway, we never watch ourselves when we shoot ourselves. ”
In the summer of 2018, before cooperating in writing the script, they went to Daliangshan to collect style, lived in the home of Yi villagers, and walked in the sun every day, which ended in three or four days. Although the harvest was short and unsatisfactory, it was not for nothing. On the way to Liangshan, Kong Dashan told Wang Yitong about Luo Yonghao, listened to Lao Luo's quotations, and Wang Yitong showed Kong Dashan "Nietzsche, at the turning point of the century", "Introduce each other to the (spiritual) godfather." Later, Kong Dashan bought copies of "Nietzsche, at the turning point of the century" and "Broken Pen of Sickness" and sent them to actor Yang Haoyu who played Tang Zhijun, saying that he found the spiritual core of Tang Zhijun there.
When writing the script together, the two slumped on the sofa, unable to hold back a word for a long time, sitting farther and farther away, until they each retreated to the corner of the room and pulled a diagonal. In the process of sudden distance and nearness, poetry, Nietzsche's superman and the last man continued into the "Space Exploration Editorial Department", and the arrogant spirit of "Dionysus" was projected on Tang Zhijun.
The script has undergone a significant change. The character Sun Yitong was originally both a liar and possessed some definite extraterrestrial clues, a combination of philistine and romance. Later they decided to split it into two parts, with Sun Yitong assuming only the latter.
"Sun Yitong gradually became more and more simple, more and more extreme, and finally became very extreme, and there was something in him that was beyond the evaluation system." Wang Yitong said.
"A person who jumps outside the three realms is not in the existence of the five elements. He has the ability to connect to a higher universe, so he has no seven emotions and six desires, and he can't explain it with normal humans. Kong Dashan said.
In their separate descriptions, Sun Yitong is like a god, unattainable, or in other words, faintly the embodiment of their ideals.
"In the end, it was actually Sun Yitong who turned on Tang Zhijun." Kong Dashan recounted that in "Journey to the West", the Tang monk asked Sun Wukong, "How long do we have to walk to reach the Spirit Mountain where the Buddha lives?" Goku replied, "You have grown old since you were a child, no matter how young you are, it is still difficult for you to be old and young. As long as you see the sincerity of nature and look back, it is the Spirit Mountain. "Because the Tang monk is too obsessed with a true Western Heaven, but Sun Wukong uses a very Zen point of view to enlighten him."
"You look for aliens, you find it. It is never a definitive answer, just a delusion. Kong Dashan said.
The story of "Space Exploration Editorial Office" finally falls back to the softest emotional part of people, "I didn't make this movie to show off my skills, I didn't just play with a sense of form, I don't think it's necessary." Maybe I could do this when I first studied film as a teenager, and I didn't want to be so universal before, and I had to be especially rebellious. But I hope now that this is a very universal movie, hoping to give more audiences a sense of closeness. ”
Although he has always said that "Space Exploration Editorial Office" is "a serious nonsense", Kong Dashan thought, I hope it gives everyone the feeling, like you have a particularly unreliable friend, when you are sad, he suddenly runs over, keeps playing all kinds of inexplicable jokes to you, and finally you suddenly realize that he is just very clumsy trying to comfort you.
▲ Movie "Space Exploration Editorial Department" National Roadshow Enters Peking University (second from left is director Kong Dashan) Wang Yitong Photo/Southern People Weekly reporter Jiang Xiaoming
Subtraction in the increasing entropy of the universe
The soil of rhapsody nurtures possibilities, while the age of too certain inhibits curiosity, and we are slowly entering the latter.
Having taught in the directing department of the Beijing Film Academy for 27 years, Wang Hongwei often criticizes students for being "not new enough." In "Space Exploration Editorial Department", the stone ball in the mouth of the stone lion disappeared and the body was full of sparrows, "Are you really an image left by aliens, or some kind of folk fable, is it an illusion of a person, an illusion of a group of people, or some magic?" If there is one thing that these and science fiction have in common, it is that it belongs to the human imagination and the possibility of the unknown world calling people. He said.
This student, who he took for 10 years and was originally only to guide the completion of his graduation work, finally made a theatrical feature film, bringing a film that he could not define, "The first step is handed over to the audience, and the second step is given to time, all of which will be said later." If we know what it is now, then it's an old thing. To make something that was not there before, everyone can still see it and feel interesting, which may be innovation, which is innovation with a relatively moderate stride. ”
The film shows another possibility of science fiction. During the interview, when Wang Hongwei supervised another film "The Wandering Earth 2" campus roadshow, writer Liu Cixin said in one of the roadshows that the value of science fiction is to let us trapped in daily life see farther, for individuals it is spiritual sustenance, and for a generation it reaches greater significance. "Criticism is a limited and present thing, but if it is oriented to a larger future, then art and film can cultivate a possibility." ”
After the Pingyao Film Festival, a top producer and director approached Wang Hongwei with a project, hoping to find Kong Dashan to cooperate, "I feel that his film language is universal." Kong Dashan is relatively indifferent to these, and Wang Hongwei even feels that Kong Dashan has avoided these "opportunities" to a certain extent.
In Wang Hongwei's view, although the film industry is very short of good young directors, "from the perspective of young directors themselves, I think it is not a duty to provide labor for the industry."
"We are first of all a person, my first thought should be how to be comfortable and how to stay, why should I materialize myself into a labor force, materialize into an industrial link? I felt that once I had this screw built, I had to quickly press myself up, which was not necessary, so I thought it was good for him to do so. ”
▲ After the last shot of "Space Exploration Editorial Department", Wang Yitong and Kong Dashan soaked their feet by the river
What did the world make me here for? Kong Dashan still thinks from time to time.
At the end of the interview, Kong Dashan still repeatedly nagged about his "good and bad work", the roadshow of the new film is about to start, he lies on the bean bag, can't help but look at the ceiling, the tone of uncertainty and expectation seems to want to talk to something, "because the operation of the world is meaningless, chaotic, from the macroscopic scale there is no cause and effect, only continuous entropy increase, we humans can't stand it, there must be a cause and effect." ”
"I think the film is a good carrier, giving a referent and giving a cause and effect." Regarding the matter of making movies, Kong Dashan now feels, "It may be a subtraction I made in the process of fighting entropy increase in the universe." ”