With a "warm and beautiful" temperament, it has replaced the cold and slaughter and become the "new way to open the northeast". With humor, romance and vitality, it echoes the people who do their best to live with dignity. Let the perspective of the elderly who have precipitated in the years become a unique perception in suspense. The so-called "breaking point" of this drama actually lies in the stubborn pursuit of many "different", and what is more rare is that this "different" is not a simple gesture, but fits the core of the expression of the work. As director Xin Shuang said, "'New' things are risky, but they can also bring enthusiasm at the same time."
Author: Yichao
Editor: Blue Two
Format: Wang Wei
"The Long Season" directed by Xin Shuang and starring Fan Wei and Qin Hao undoubtedly brought people's excitement about this year's national drama to another high point.
In 10 days, the play scored 9 points on Douban, and all the way to the end of the drama on the evening of May 1, it had rushed to a new high of 9.4 points. This quality and state is obviously too much for domestic dramas and domestic crime suspense.
"The main thing is a sense of relaxation" - director Xin Shuang quipped in the comment area of his personal Weibo. What the audience who came to "suspense" never expected was that one day they could open a crime drama in a "relaxed movie" way - from the tone of the series, the rhythm of story advancement, to the ubiquitous Northeastern-style humor in the lines, all give people a completely different look. Some viewers summed it up like this: "This drama is not 'secret', but it is very pleasant. ”
Producer Lu Jing admits that crime stories in the northeast have many inherent elements, and the most difficult problem encountered by the whole team is "how to make it different and make it fresh".
Lu Jing once told Black and White Entertainment:
After a work is completed, what is left for everyone to think about is something we care more about.
Regarding this story, the first thing we want to talk about is how everyone faces difficulties, which is worth exploring; Looking forward and not looking back is exactly what this group of people in the play carries.
Another point worth doing about this story is the uniqueness of the perspective. The perspective of the elderly is very new, and they are rarely used as protagonists in film and television dramas. In fact, the parents of our generation are also getting older, and we have deep feelings for the elderly group, and they also need to be cared for and paid attention by society.
We want to do a good job in this project, and everyone is doing their best at every stage to roll it out with a long process.
For example, this time a lot of special effects makeup is used, it should be said that he is the first to eat crabs in domestic film and television dramas. In the early preparation, we spent a long time on setting makeup, like Fan Wei's "Wang Xiang" fixed makeup three times, slowly to find out which age is the most appropriate, how old, what should be like; Including Mr. Chen Minghao's "Ma Desheng" hairstyle, I have also tried it many times. When it came to shooting, special effects makeup took four or five hours a day, like when Mr. Qin Hao was playing the middle-aged Gong Biao, he had to get up at four or five o'clock in the morning and sit there. The same is true of other teachers. But this process is actually the process of the actors gradually penetrating into the characters
Our preparation for this scene is also very interesting. In order to shoot a different Northeast crime, we chose autumn as the background, and the entire shooting cycle is 107 days, so the question is, where do we go to find a 107-day autumn?
It's really a brain-draining process to open your mind. The final plan was actually proposed by art director Yu Haoran, who had filmed in Kunming before, so he said that we would not shoot in the northeast if we had ever thought about it, just find a place that has always been autumn.
I remember the moment we landed in Kunming, the first thing we felt was warmth, especially vibrant, the sky was very high and blue, and the trees were very green. We immediately felt very right, it is what "The Long Season" should be.
But it is not the Northeast after all, and how it can be restored to a convincing appearance must take huge efforts to solve.
I was impressed by one of the great difficulties that it didn't have the train we wanted. We looked everywhere for steam trains, and there was one in the museum in Kunming, but we went to see that it was very new, it had been painted beautifully, and it was impossible to use it. Later, I actually found it in Hubei, and I also thought of various ways to unload the train into many pieces, and then found many relevant departments to transport it to Kunming little by little, I remember that it should have been loaded with three 19-meter-long box cars.
For example, about the cornfield, when we were in the northeast in the early stage, we saw a particularly beautiful cornfield when the sun was setting, and later the director proposed that he hoped to find such a piece in Kunming. The director spoke about the picture in his mind, of course, it has now been presented in the play so that everyone can see its beauty with their own eyes, so at that time we felt that we must solve this matter and make it possible for the audience to see it.
So we went to the art teacher and asked him to figure out how to grow corn. One is to know how to plant it, and the other is where we plant it and how can we have such a land. In the end, we finished it in Xishuangbanna, because the weather there is more suitable for growing corn, but it is also quite complicated, the production director first tried to convince the village chief, who then took us from house to house to ask the farmers to use their land to plant corn, and also had to ask them to help us plant it together. Little by little, we planted it before the start-up, and by the last few days of the entire shooting period, the corn was already thriving and we were finally able to finish shooting there.
That's why we've spent three years on this project, and everything has been polished. It took 11 months to make the script in the early stage, more than 100 days of shooting, and it took a year in the later stage, and in the year from finishing to launching, in addition to taking three days off for the New Year, he accompanied different departments in the machine room every day to do post-work, and the creative energy in the later stage was huge.
Focus, wholeheartedly dedicated, is the best we can do for this work.
Indeed, from the current point of view, this drama has not only achieved a bright eye, but also still has full stamina. Below, as we come together, let's feel the new charm of this show from the beginning.
A new way to open a Northeast crime story
/ Replace cold and killing with warmth and brightness /
From the first episode, what has been shown to the audience is a small northeastern city of Hualin City with a clean blue sky and street trees hung with golden autumn leaves, and Wang Xiang (played by Fan Wei), the protagonist of a bright green taxi and former train driver of Hualin Iron and Steel No. 1 General Factory, appeared in the bright sun.
Everything started peacefully, even romantically.
Replacing killing with bright and warm instead of cold is the intentional intention of the show's creator.
Lu Jing said that from the beginning, it was clear that the symbols of the northeast such as heavy snow and coldness were "unwanted", and chose the shortest and precious autumn in the four seasons of the northeast as the main environmental setting of the story.
Xin Shuang called this "warm and beautiful" temperament "the opening of the new northeast". In this context, "The Long Season" naturally creates an atmosphere of eloquence, which does not want to immediately strain the audience's nerves, but wants to make people calm down and slowly discover the unexpected.
What brings relaxation to the audience is the extremely dense northeastern humor in the series.
Wang Xiang comforted his wife who had installed a heart stent: "You are okay, there is a Santana in the heart, the whole building is not as expensive as you", and ridiculed "Your fire, Santana is out of the fire, I should be on fire."
The elderly Gong Biao played by Qin Hao, not only his humble appearance made Qin Hao's "face fans" exclaim and dare not recognize each other, but he laughed at himself in the play "I am a stupid roe deer", every time he appears, he seems to have his own laughter, which is a typical "Northeast Silver" who advocates "should eat and drink, and don't put anything to your heart".
Lu Jing once said that the Northeasterners she understands are "very positive, optimistic and humorous", and putting such attributes into crime suspense dramas is a very unique attempt - even in difficult and dangerous situations, you can show humor engraved in your bones from time to time, which is the real daily life of Northeasterners.
/ Talk about cases, more people /
"The Long Season" has a case plot and solving process throughout the case, but telling the case has not become the whole content of the series, and even the case itself has become a hidden clue, an undercurrent, flowing quietly under all life scenes and character relationships.
Xin Shuang said that he hopes to change this work from talking about cases to "talking about the relationship between people and the world and the relationship between people and people caused by this case."
The case is like the thread exposed under the wear and tear of the years, pulling out the continuous and connected veins and truths. On the one hand, this makes the connection between the series and life richer and more interesting, and on the other hand, it is also outside the case, trying to ask the reason behind it.
The series talks about "quacks and feuds".
Xing Jianchun, the head of the Huagang security section, once reported to Wang Xiang, who "blocked the way of wealth", affecting the other party's family. Years later, Wang Xiang accidentally discovered Xing's predicament and took the initiative to let him go, and afterwards Xing came to Wang Xiang's door with a bag of stupid eggs, and told him to "call me San'er in the future, listen closer." Just as the emotion floating in the barrage, "After all the robbery brothers are there, meet each other with a smile and a vendetta", time finally faded the past grudges.
The series also talks about the relationship between people and the social environment.
When explaining the dilemma of the birch steel workers "breaking the iron rice bowl", drastic descriptions are rarely used, and the impact of all changes in the environment on individuals is silently interspersed with the changes of each character. For example, the various social occupations that people flow to after being laid off, such as Gong Biao's gradually blessed belly and the gradually thinning top of the head of criminal police captain Ma Desheng (played by Chen Minghao). It was not until halfway through the episode that he borrowed the words of Wang Xiang's wife and clicked the question: "Our generation is used to arrangement, there is a circle on the body, we walk in the circle step by step, and no one asks why, and no one has wandered outside the circle." ”
The family is the most complex corner of all the characters' relationships.
Shen Mo (played by Li Gengxi) has never received true parental love, is wary of everyone, low self-esteem and sensitivity, and the evil of her adoptive father and those around her distorts her cognition. The estrangement between Wang Xiang and his son Wang Yang is widespread in a generation of families, and the father will not lament until he loses his son: "I didn't know what he wanted at the time, and it's too late to know now." ”
/ Forget time in the timeline /
In this episode, "long" seems to intuitively point to a flow of time.
In Xin's words, the feeling he most wants to present to the audience is "forgetting time", "there is a feeling that it is pulled into an eternity in a short time", and he feels that the story will eventually converge as a "whole" rather than "cut by time".
1997, 1998 and 2016 are three parallel timelines in the play, but there is no deliberate division between them. Director of photography Chao Ming introduced that the director did not want to be particularly clear about the changes between the timelines, "let the audience feel the presence of photography"; So he chose only two shots for shooting, just "subtly let the audience feel this little difference".
Xin Shuang believes that this series is not a period drama, reflected in photography and art, and when "The Long Season" flashes back to scenes from the last century, it does not show the old texture, on the contrary, the three timelines are designed to have sunlight throughout, "there is a golden feeling" - "because that time is Wang Xiang's moment and everything is vibrant, I want the audience to see that moment", Xin Shuang thought.
To this end, the series has designed some "silky" transitions between different timelines. For example, Wang Yang met Shen Mo for the first time at the school gate, and the two transition scenes in which Wang Yang looked in the mirror in the bathroom at home are regarded as classics in the series, and netizens commented that these scenes are the most suspenseful and "mad" places in the play. For example, the past 20 years have made great changes in the appearance of several main characters in the play, and the audience can identify Wang Xiang's era from his white or black hair and wrinkles on his face.
A quote from Lu Jing points out the meaning of integrating the story into the whole in the timeline: "How did we become what we are today?" It must come from the past, and it must end up returning to the present destination. "Focusing on the past is actually about better caring for the present.
The perspective of the elderly, "writing poetry" in "realism"
/ "Writing poetry" in "realistic" scenes /
The main story of "The Long Season" is set in the old steel factory in the northeast, but the inherent coldness is not the main tone of the series, and the steel mill and the people around it who work hard to live are the prospects of the story.
The final "Birch Steel Factory" is very close to the "look of the factory that Wang Xiang will like" imagined in Xin Shuang's mind, it is "not very dilapidated, very brilliant, very new", colorful small flowers and golden cornfields also appear in the camera, becoming a symbol of vitality, echoing all the people in the play who do their best to live with dignity.
"We try to make it have romantic things", Xin Shuang uses the language of the lens to create poetry.
"Snap your fingers / He said / We snap our fingers that resonate / Distant things will be shattered / The people in front of you do not know at this time" - this poem, sounded on the side of the railway where Wang Yang and Shen Mo date in the play, jumping and alive in the sun; At night, the colorful smoke produced by the burning gas of the steel mill was the "fireworks" that Wang Yang specially brought Shen Mo to see.
Even Gong Biao, who has a big personality, has to talk to his favorite girl Huang Liru about Freud's theory that "dreams are a reflection of reality" when watching a movie. These poetics in the realistic scenes in the play are a kind of literary imageization, so that the series easily highlights a unique style in the suspense crime genre, and under the strong contrast between this poetry and reality, the audience is like riding a roller coaster into the dream and returning to reality.
There is a scene in the play set in the swimming pool behind the video hall, which is a little strange in the general logic of life, and what Xin Shuang hopes to achieve is precisely in some realistic scenes to "find a fresh element that can break away from this scene", this collision may not seem so real to him, "but it can give you a more different and fresh feeling".
/ The perspective of the elderly, forbearance precipitated in the years /
Another unique narrative method of the series is to put the perspective of the narration on a group of old people: "They have experienced the era when materials are not so rich, everyone is either in the institution or in the factory, there is a very unified plan, and then suddenly one day the world changes and begins to accelerate, and they have to keep up with this accelerated world, chasing and running behind." ”
The creators believe that in this story about time, only people in the old age are enough to bear the thickness of life and are qualified to summarize and review. The persistent and serious energy of the older generation is the inertia left for them by that era, and it is also their unwillingness in the long years.
When Wang Xiang, Gong Biao, and Ma Desheng, three "old brothers" who are almost 200 years old together, got together and looked at the blurry surveillance footage with reading glasses, they were evaluated by the audience in the barrage as "elderly technology flow". The squatting trio "boiling eagle" style squatting can not survive the sub-healthy body of the elderly after all; When the civil investigation team finally caught Xing Jianchun and his people, "Xing Saner" was no longer awe-inspiring under the black trench coat he had worn since he was young, but a urine bag that made him ashamed to show people.
The elderly are tolerant most of the time: Gong Biao calmly and skillfully copes with his wife's medical dispute and needs to lose money, and when a pigeon droppings above his head "leaks in the house" and falls on his mobile phone overnight, he silently says to himself that "the bud valley has fed more". The outbreak of the elderly also came in an instant: Wang Xiang faced Ma Desheng's question of "who is not dead" on the wine table, and finally talked about Wang Yang's death head-on for the first time, loudly shouting out the heart knot that could not be solved for many years.
/ Special effects makeup to make both actors and audiences "believe" /
"We're doing something special about eating crabs."
When Xin Shuang talked about the widespread use of "special effects makeup" to present a convincing image of old age, he said that although there were many concerns, it actually brought excitement to the whole team.
According to reports, the crew directly used "physical special effects makeup" with better sensory effects, which can change the facial structure of the actors and make the sagging and aging of the skin visible to the naked eye; At the same time, the special effects makeup will also adjust the shape according to the actor's performance style, so that the actor also has a sense of natural aging at different times.
Wang Jiajia, who plays Huang Liru, laments that this real feeling of aging makes people "feel that it has changed, but can't tell where it has changed", and Liu Lin, who plays Li Qiaoyun, also said that she "can fully believe that she is really completely old"; Actor Yang Yiwei, who plays Xing Jianchun, said frankly, "If the actor doesn't have some help with makeup, he can only say to find such a feeling." As Chen Minghao concluded: special effects makeup allows the actors to find a special, "strength to find from the outside in", and the actors enhance their sense of belief in the performance in the process of simulating aging.
What has been left in this group of people in 18 years? The successful makeup and the actors' performances make the audience believe that after the baptism of time, countless experiences will definitely leave deep and shallow traces on everyone.
"Stubborn" creators, breaking new possibilities
Director Xin Shuang, who is well known to the audience for works such as "Hidden Corner", has always maintained sufficient personal recognition when creating.
This time, viewers of Tencent Video will find that this drama cannot choose to "skip the opening and closing credits". As a musician, Xin Shuang is more comfortable to incorporate music as part of the creation of the series, and even makes the music one of the actors, promoting the emotional rhythm of the series.
In addition to the background music in the play, the ending song that is different for each episode is nicknamed "Easter egg" by the audience; Even when the end list is all played and the screen is black, the longer ending song is still not over, and the audience says that they do not want to miss the final note, it has become part of the series, the sequel and aftermath of the plot.
For example, at the end of episode 7, when Wang Xiang found a bloody protective suit under the bed in his son Wang Yang's room, the music in the style of houpeng sounded at the right time ("Detached" by the solid Li Kui band), which appropriately undertook the progress of the storyline at this moment, becoming a precise aural externalization of the image atmosphere.
In terms of actors, in addition to actors who are very familiar to the audience, such as Qin Hao made breakthrough performances, Xin Shuang also selected some actors who were "not according to the routine, unfamiliar to the audience, and even a little unpopular" based on the criteria of suitable for the role. For example, drama actor Jiang Qiming played the deaf-mute Fu Weijun in the play - without a single line, the performance is brilliant in a few scenes, and the appearance is highlighted, which is an impressive "dark horse" in this play.
Zhang Na commented on Xin Shuang: "He has been innovating, but he still wants not to repeat himself and do something different." Judging from the current audience's reputation, the so-called "breaking point" of this drama is precisely because it gives people a "different" feeling in many aspects; What is even more rare is that this "different" is not a simple gesture, but meets the expression needs of the work, as Xin Shuang said: this expression is for communication, "you receive my communication, the creator and the audience can form a resonance, I especially hope to have such a relationship with the audience in each work."
The biggest value that "The Long Season" brings to the opening year of the suspense drama in 2023 also lies in all the "different" possibilities. "The 'new' thing is risky, but it can also bring enthusiasm for creation." Xin Shuang affirmed.
References: "The Long Season" official "Production Special", "Grow Old Together Special"
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