In addition to his father Ang Lee, his mother Lin Huijia's influence on Li Chun's performance is actually very long, when he was a child, he went to the laboratory with his mother every Saturday to do homework, and then watched movies together, he thought that perhaps it was the inspiration and beginning of his own acting interest; and until now, he would show every script to his mother, who always said, you must seize this opportunity - she is an encouraging person.
Li Chun in "Birds in the Suburbs"
It's good to have it done.
Father Ang Lee gave Li Chun such feedback after watching "Birds in the Suburbs".
Li Chun thought so. "Birds of the Suburbs" is a typical film work with a strong author's expression, and the actor strives to touch the director's subconscious deeply, bears the extension and externalization of this subconscious, and finally completes the construction of this artistic conception.
"It shows the strength of the director, not you as an actor" - Li Chun agrees with his father's view, and being able to participate in it is what he wants.
A favorite book becomes an image. Some whimsical imagery was made. Take part in a unique time travel. It is rare to penetrate deep into the interior, and it is a society that is more inward than it seems.
Even, learned some Hangzhou dialect.
Li Chun would gently boil it down to saying that he was a "Gemini" and so wanted a lot of variations of the experience; but coming behind, slowly, patiently, and spending time doing things, he felt that there was a shadow of family.
"Birds in the Suburbs" was a project three years ago, and it was finally released this year due to factors such as the epidemic, and Li Chun also has another work directed by Zheng Baorui, "Wisdom Teeth", which will also meet the audience this year.
The rest of the time — he says , two years of training almost full-time , involving boxing, Muay Thai, Shaolin, Wing Chun and some dance — because a future opportunity may require martial arts.
This is much longer than his previous 10-month study of Peking Opera in order to shoot "Martial Heaven and Earth".
Li Chun in "Wisdom Teeth"
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Director Qiu Sheng wants to treat the audience as a smart person, which makes Li Chun feel rare.
"A lot of times we see the script, the expression we want to do, the traces are too heavy, the truth we want to tell, is too obvious. Qiu Sheng's thinking was different. ”
On the one hand, his construction of structure and image is full of imagination and change, unconventional space-time structure, like the reality of mirror images or dreams, the narrative that does not explain, and the perspective of the meter bird's eye - the old director Xie Fei gave the most intuitive evaluation, "This film tries to violate the rules of various drama films."
On the other hand, in Li Chun's view, these "unconventional" have a source, and Qiu Sheng has his own memory and understanding of the world and the connection of things in his brain.
"He put his inner impression of some events or some pictures there, but he was more rational and restrained, did not read too much, and gave the audience the power to sort out and weave stories."
The actor is also a different element that is used, like Li Chun, whose very "non-local" temperament is exactly the sense of alienation that the director hopes to see in the movie - this person is suddenly strange in the environment, and there is his loneliness.
It's risky and fun.
Qiu Sheng's "Birds in the Suburbs", written and directed by Qiu Sheng and starring Li Chun and Huang Lu, was recently released, telling the story of a team of engineers who went to a certain place in the suburbs of Hangzhou to investigate the problem of ground subsidence, and engineer Xia Hao found a diary in an unoccupied classroom, which recorded the story of a group of teenagers, and the teenagers in it were also named Xia Hao. The two lines of space-time thus intersect.
Playing a survey engineer walking between the outskirts of Hangzhou, although Li Chun is somewhat unfamiliar with this locality, his perception is keen, and he has found a benchmark image - the temperament of Qiu Sheng, a director with a science and engineering background and a relatively calm attitude, which can be directly used to play this engineer "Xia Hao", "the main grasp on the external limbs is the state of hunchback".
There are more things that are inward and can only be understood, and Li Chun tries his best to tell us.
The character of Xia Hao, the director also refers to Kafka's "Castle", which is about such a land surveyor who is close to the castle and has worked hard but has never been allowed to enter. I understand that this state is always waiting, in fact, for actors, waiting is also a state that we always face, sometimes we don't know what the next job is, life outside of acting, sometimes we don't know what to do under the waiting state. A lot of my psychology in the film comes from it. ”
Perhaps one of the most bizarre parts is to play a symbolic state of a person to become a bird, whether he will experience some physical discomfort, or some psychological dryness. Li Chun has been running these images designed by the director in the script in his mind, and he has these "strange" states in his heart at any time.
Space is a very important element in this film, director Qiu Sheng rarely makes a story through the thinking of geographical age strata - just like digging tunnels in the ancient capital will always find historical relics, digging layers of foundations we can see the traces of previous generations - through the downward exploration of the surface, triggering an old time, which is his special design of two time and space in the film, but also the unique color of this film. For Li Chun's performance, space is also the key.
"As a surveyor, Xia Hao will walk in a wide space, but in fact, his inner space is very narrow, he is walking in a maze, and he can't get out."
The surface event in the film is to investigate the settlement of the strata, and Li Chun understands that the character's heart is actually experiencing a process of settlement and collapse.
In the "Birds of the Suburbs" collaboration, a key state that Li Chun groped was to open and let go. This has a lot to do with the director's creative style, Qiu Sheng's creative way in this film is "first think of a picture, first think of an emotion, and then take up the pen to write it", pursuing a more improvised state on the spot, possibly according to the interaction between the actors, the sense of atmosphere in the environment, will be adapted to adapt, the pursuit of a "naturally generated thing".
"To be able to follow the director's subconscious", Li Chun thinks that this is also the case, completely open himself, let the director's subconscious pour in, and by the time the last scene of "becoming a bird" is over, he has completely completed the disintegration of people, crying bitterly and unable to help himself.
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Disintegration, collapse, for the perception of these two words, Li Chun is not unfamiliar.
Communicate with him and you can feel that he has completely gone beyond such a process—about the collapse of idealism, and reconstruction.
Li Chun and Huang Lu in "Birds in the Suburbs"
People who know Li Chun a little will know that his first play as an actor was the American comedy "Hangover 2". This may not be imagined by many people, even Ang Lee's son, who has to face Hollywood-style prejudices and stereotypes. In fact, to this day, the environment is much better, but Li Chun still receives some such role invitations from the American film industry - which shows that it is not easy to be an Asian American actor; and Li Chun really does not have much light.
Li Chun told us about the role of the tool man, about the discomfort of entering the crew for the first time, and about the gap between performance and reality in the ivory tower. At this time, he has no resentment, but more self-relief.
"I think that when an actor is a big piece of honing, it is actually to survive in a more realistic environment. You have to find a way to make your artistic ideals, which may not be very grounded, very grounded, and in this more commercial environment, there can be room to play. ”
From 2014 to officially enter the Chinese film circle, in 2017 for the movie "Witness Pursuit" was nominated for the best supporting actor, for Li Chun, who just began to deeply contact and integrate into the Chinese cultural context to perform, in fact, he completed a great leap forward and grew very fast; but after that, he did not take advantage of the momentum of victory and chase, but he could slow down to spend two years practicing martial arts.
From his immersed environment, this seems to make perfect sense — for example, before filming his father's "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle," he was trained for a period of special operations units, "physically suffering, and on the other hand, there will be real troop derogatory insults, and you will be psychologically frightened"—trained to a state that matches the character's war trauma.
This kind of "slowness" is an old way of relying on the "ten thousand hours" accumulation law to do solid work, and it has the influence of a family atmosphere that has been well known to the outside world - such as the famous director Ang Lee's story of seven years of home creation - which affects Li Chun's feelings and choices as a whole.
"We have largely accepted my father's concept, and you see that he is still slowly, and each work is well filmed. Like I've only been in a state of rushing once or twice, other times I've thought I'd have to prepare something and shoot well. My personal speed of life may be more like a turtle, and I myself like to find my own fun and imagination space in the ordinary life. ”
Now Li Chun, who has been in the industry for ten years, has a clear understanding of his own state and his relationship with the outside world.
Under the fame of his father, especially director Ang Lee in the entire Chinese-speaking area, not only has the influence in the circle, but also has a wide range of public favorability, which is inevitably a double-edged sword for Li Chun, on the one hand, there are higher expectations and stricter scrutiny, on the other hand, there will be a lot of well-intentioned protection.
"Honest, objective, I need such an environment. But on the other hand, there are only a few things we can control, and we have to judge ourselves while keeping a positive move forward. ”
So, what is Li Chun's current self in his eyes?
"Just like training muscles, I have been constantly strengthening my training for acting, but the more skilled things I have, the more I find myself unaware, and I feel that I have more not being able to act. But I think that's actually a good thing. ”
Chasing light QA
Black & White Entertainment: What kind of feedback did director Ang Lee give after watching your performance in "Birds in the Suburbs"?
Li Chun: His feedback is that this film is mainly based on the director's expression, mainly to show the director's strength, not to show the actors, so it is good to have the performance.
Of course, he also said that acting with these ordinary children inside, we adults and professional actors are more disadvantaged, very normal.
Black & White Entertainment: Which of your characters may have impressed you in the past?
Li Chun: In "The Pursuit of Witnesses", the role I played felt that he was too attached, and he was too much like a villain in the early stage, he said that a killer and a villain cannot jump out at any time. I thought I was hiding it well, I thought most people couldn't guess it, and I told him it was because you knew I was the villain that you thought I was too obvious (laughs).
Black & White Entertainment: Do you think your father had a great influence on you as an actor?
Li Chun: I grew up loving my father's films, "Ice Storm" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" when I was a child, and then I especially liked "Color Ring" in high school, enjoying his movies, and some of the feelings I got from his movies would affect my thinking as a performer.
But I actually became interested in acting, and I think the bigger impact was brought about by my mother, who would take me to her lab every Saturday when I was a kid to do my homework. She would rent some of the more classic movie CDs, and when we were done with our homework, we would watch them on her lab computer. I probably watched a lot of the most classic '70s and '80s films from that time, and the most powerful actors like Al Paccino were very inspiring to me.
Black and White Entertainment: Do you often communicate with your mother to perform now?
Li Chun: I have a very close relationship with my mother, she is actually a very down-to-earth person, and she reads very quickly, and I basically show her the scripts I receive. And then she responded the same every time, and I think it's a good opportunity, and you have to take it — she's more encouraging.
Black and White Entertainment: So the first thing to get the script is to show it to the mother, and then it is the father's turn?
Li Chun: Father, he is very very busy, most of my work is also with the brokerage company to discuss whether it is appropriate, if there is a very tangled project, or two projects I like very much, but there is a time conflict do not know which one to choose, I will show my father, ask for his advice. Otherwise they were too busy and he wouldn't have had time to watch that much.