Dapeng, hard enough

Author | Nanfeng window reporter Zhu Yue

When he connected the interview call from the South Wind Window, Dapeng was on his way to the next post-screening exchange meeting of the movie "Warm". His voice was steady, but he coughed from time to time.

"Yes, I seem to have talked a little too much lately." Then, Dapeng smiled lightly, and he said to Nanfeng Window: "Because I am on the road and at the roadshow every day, but I enjoy the process very much, and I am also very happy." ”

This pleasure of Dapeng is scattered in various publicity scenes of "Warm". It was not enough to go to the theater of the road show, he also took to the streets in a frog suit, took the crew members to ride, checked tickets for the audience in the theater, sold popcorn... His enthusiasm and smile are frozen by every photo of the scene.

Dapeng and the crew wore frog costumes for road show publicity

Dapeng seems to seize every gap and bring his new film "Warm" that he has just released into the audience's life.

"During every promotional period after the release of a movie, I do my best to ignite audiences in every city. I feel that this kind of sparing no effort is an attitude of mine, a confidence in the work. ”

2023 also allowed many audiences to see Dapeng's "best efforts" for film creation. From the beginning of starring in the Spring Festival movie "Nameless", to the already released director's works "Keep You Safe" and "Warm", and then there are the upcoming "The Eighth Suspect" and "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop", in one year, five works appeared on the big screen, and many fans were surprised by this high production.

"Keep You Safe" stills

Dapeng knows that he is familiar to the audience through "Dick Men", so he has the opportunity to start film creation, and he cherishes this opportunity, so he is willing to "personally practice and infect the audience".

With all his strength, spare no effort, and go all out, similar words frequently appear in Dapeng's self-statement, constituting his life dictionary.

01

Effort is a sine qua non

This summer, the fifth film "Warm" directed by Dapeng was officially released.

The film tells a story of a relentless pursuit of love. The protagonist Chen Shuo (played by Wang Yibo) is a young man who loves street dance, and in order to be able to enter Ding Lei (played by Huang Bo)'s dance troupe "exclamation point", he constantly faces difficulties and setbacks in reality. In the end, Chen Shuo and the members of the "Exclamation Point" challenged the world-class strong team on the stage of the national competition and won the championship.

Film and reality form an intertext. For Dapeng, "Heat" itself is a new challenge.

"Warm" poster

New challenges were encountered during the filming phase. Large and small street dance competitions occupy a lot of space in "Heat". How to shoot the impact and rhythm of street dance movements, and do a good job in scene scheduling of multi-person scenes, the team carried out technical research and development in Beijing half a year in advance.

But for Dapeng, the most difficult thing is to unify the performance standards of the actors. The dancers in "Exclamation Point" are the best in all of China hip-hop, but they are new to performance. In the movie, they have to play against an experienced actor like Huang Bo, and it is inevitable that there will be pressure in their hearts.

Dapeng chose to let everyone give up acting and forget about acting. "I think it's good to let them live a life, which is to train and live in the 'exclamation point'." To this end, many of the character names in the play retained the names of the actors' lives, and the dancers also began intensive training before filming, in order to find a sense of team and truly become a collective.

The dancers in "Heat" gave a high standard of performance

This is the first time that Dapeng has made a film purely as a director. Unlike his previous self-directing and acting performances, he has more opportunities to collide with actors, and is often moved by the actors' live performances when watching the monitor.

The actors' hard work and seriousness exceeded Dapeng's expectations. In an interview with Sina Entertainment, he mentioned Huang Bo and Wang Yibo's hip-hop performance: "The two of them are very serious, and sometimes the seriousness is even beyond my expectations. ”

In the movie, Ding Lei, played by Huang Bo, wants to perform a backflip, and he insists on completing it himself; In the final battle scene, Wang Yibo pursues perfection and hopes that his performance will be good from beginning to end. In order to live up to the actors' efforts, when editing, Dapeng will also try to keep their complete performance under the same camera position.

Wang Yibo's street dance moves in "Warm"

The common persistence of everyone inside and outside the film is just like the theme conveyed by "Heat" - "If you keep working hard, you will succeed".

Dapeng himself believes so. In his view, "success" is not necessarily a result, but also a process. Therefore, from film creation, to communicating with the audience, and even giving interviews, every moment he will enjoy.

"It doesn't have to be perfect in the end, and it doesn't have to be a result, but the process itself is important." Dapeng said, "So I believe that we must always work hard, and we must always work hard." ”

"Heat" stills

The word "effort" is written into every stage of life by Dapeng. When he was in school, he was always a good student, because good grades were a manifestation of his "dedication" as a student; In order to add some celebrities to "Dick Men", he provided several optional scripts for each party, and also rehearsed for them in advance to save time; After entering the film industry, he also had the idea of learning from excellent directors and often participated in films by other directors.

Experience on other sets forms an important part of "Director Dapeng". But more often, he did not learn any specific technical methods, but felt a serious attitude towards the work from each director, which strengthened his determination to do a good job in the film.

At the end of the day, the ultimate answer is still "effort." Dapeng wrote on Weibo that "Warm" is a movie that he shot "very hard and hard". But when I asked what that meant, he said it wasn't that special, because "every shot is full effort." For him, "hard work is a necessary condition".

02

Being busy is less anxious

More often than effort, Dapeng often refers to "efficiency." "Heat" is his most efficient film. From script creation, shooting to post-production, the film took two years, and the team was running at full capacity in every step.

Maintaining a high frequency of output is what Dapeng has always required itself. In 2019, he set a goal to ensure that he can produce a directorial work every three years, while maintaining the participation in other people's films every year.

Even though there will be 5 films to audiences this year (3 of which have already been released), his expectation is still to "improve efficiency" today.

"After all, the current energy, physical strength, age, and experience have reached a very productive state. So you should seize this period and let yourself turn. Dapeng said.

"Heat" set / Source: Photo provided by interviewee

The pursuit of efficiency is related to his past identity as an Internet editor. In April 2004, Dapeng joined Sohu as a web editor. At that time, the portal was also the main channel for people's news. As an editor, what Dapeng needs to do is stay ahead of other websites and send out new information faster.

This kind of work has cultivated Dapeng's "sense of rhythm" and made him more adaptable to the changes of the Internet era. He realized that the fast pace of the Internet age has changed people's acceptance habits, just as many movies can be summarized in five minutes online. However, the time cost of creating a film is high, and it often needs to be calculated on a year-by-year basis. The time gap between output and reception makes Dapeng pay more attention to its own creative efficiency.

But this does not mean that it is a pressure, or that Dapeng is not afraid of this pressure, because "self-motivated people are stressed".

Looking back, he may have been moving forward in the alternation of "improvement" and "pressure", constantly making changes. Becoming a web editor, he was not satisfied with copying and pasting news information every day, and began to write music inventory and news reviews; As the host of the online program "Star Chat Room", he was also unwilling to follow the inherent pattern, began to think about the changes in the shooting lens, and set up a more targeted question session by himself...

This self-drive also puts him in a constant state of anxiety. "Sometimes being busy may be more relaxing than idle, and stopping may make me nervous." In the first half of 2020, under the epidemic, Dapeng had to be in a state of "nothing to do", which became a particularly uncomfortable memory for him. At that time, his third film "Auspicious Ruyi" was in the editing stage, and facing those materials again was equally painful for Dapeng. But eventually he forced himself to plunge in, using this time to cut out the pieces.

Dapeng's directorial work "Auspicious Ruyi"

Only creation itself can cure this anxiety. Starting with his first film "Pancake Man" in 2015, Dapeng discovered the appeal of the "directing" profession to him. His self-motivation is naturally integrated into his creative passion for film.

The root of his creative passion lies in his excavation of himself. In Dapeng's view, works and creators need to be consistent. Only self-expression and perception can arouse his excitement all the time, so that he can persist in the creative process in years for a long time.

The temperament of the film is therefore inevitably related to the creator. Many audiences have seen the focus on the lives of "little people" in Dapeng's films, and Dapeng feels that it is because he is such a person, and the creation of the film comes from his attention to his own life.

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If you read his 2013 book Laugh Out Loud on Difficult Days, you'll know that this is true. The experience of "rubbing stars" in various ways when filming "Dick Men" was used by him as the main bridge of "Pancake Man"; Memories of cobbling together a rock band in high school became part of The Sewing Machine Band.

Even more prominent is still "temperament", and Dapeng's writing always turns suddenly when writing setbacks, towards warmth or self-deprecation, as in his films.

The pursuit of freshness is another source of motivation for Dapeng's creation. Just as Chen Shuo pursued his love in "Heat", Dapeng said in an interview with the media that his passion is "doing things that no one else has seen".

"Warm" actor Chen Shuo

Now, Dapeng is also working on several scripts at the same time, and the only thing that can be revealed is that none of them are duplicates.

"In fact, every time my movie is released, everyone will feel that this time is different," Dapeng seemed to make a declaration, "I will be different next time." ”

03

On the way to run

Being different is Dapeng's creative pursuit and his expectation of himself.

In his autobiography, there is a headline, written very bluntly, called "I want to be different."

The yearning for being different began with a children's song: "When the sun shines, the flowers smile at me..." The popular melody was not learned by Dapeng - it was on his first day of elementary school, when the whole class sang this children's song, Dapeng felt for the first time that he might be missing something compared to other children. Because he had not been to preschool, not only this children's song, but also some basic arithmetic and language, he did not know.

In Dapeng's book, this is also a plausible source for his personality. Since then, the inferiority character and the desire to be noticed and recognized have become inseparable two sides of the same body.

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Dapeng always cares about "presence". When he was a child, he was the flag bearer in the class, so he always carried the flag at every class activity, whether walking or eating. As an Internet editor, he offered to sign the end of the article he edited, and if the article had a high click-through rate, his name would appear on the page. The sense of presence has become the "basic driving force" of his work.

Being a TV host, he also cares about every opportunity to speak. In April 2009, when he first hosted a TV show, Dapeng lacked experience in flexible response and often couldn't interject. In order to explore the rules of the TV program, he used a small book to memorize the golden sentences of other hosts.

During the game session of the show, Dapeng fell from a height, very embarrassed, and the audience was happy. The host handed him the microphone and asked him to introduce his experience playing the game. But Dapeng was still dizzy, just staring at the microphone blankly, and couldn't connect it for half a day.

After a few seconds of blankness, the microphone was removed and the show continued after the host's circle. At the end of the recording, Dapeng lay on the hotel bed crying, crying that he was too stupid to seize the opportunity. While crying, he figured out how to answer the sentence: "Do you think I am so embarrassed now, like I am very experienced?" He also wrote this sentence down in a small book, but he never used it again.

Today, low self-esteem still makes Dapeng present some contradictions: on the one hand, he is calm and introverted, and even a little introverted; On the other hand, at the event site, he often seems particularly enthusiastic and passionate.

"Because of my low self-esteem, I always don't want to disappoint the people around me and want to make them happy." Dapeng explains, "So when it comes to large-scale events and external conferences, I hope that I can take on the function of enlivening the atmosphere as much as possible, and I can become more outgoing as much as possible." ”

Dapeng is happy to do such "contradictory" things, but he will still be frustrated that he is not good enough.

"Warm" publicity scene

Perhaps, Dapeng always feels that he is not good enough. This is his self-evaluation under the combined effect of "inferiority" and "self-motivation".

So you can always see similar bridges in his past: he encountered new difficulties at work, he was frustrated and slack about it, but in the end, he always returned to himself. "This is my problem," Dapeng often concludes.

"If you want to keep improving, you have to face up to the gaps." Every setback becomes the nourishment for Dapeng's self-reflection.

Today, this self-evaluation of "not good enough" remains unchanged. 2023 is a fruitful year for Dapeng. On June 17, Dapeng won the Best Actor Award at the 25th Shanghai International Film Festival for his role "Chen Xinwen" in "The Eighth Suspect". The already released "Keep You Safe" and "Warm" have also received good reputation and box office. So I asked, if your life is also a movie, is this year one of the small highs?

Dapeng replied crisply: "I have higher requirements for myself. "2023 is a busy year, but whether it is the highlight of his career or not, he is reluctant to make a conclusion now. Dapeng has always felt that he still has the possibility of progress, and there are more parts that can be seen by everyone.

From young people in the small city to website editors, to hosts, reporters, actors, directors, along the way, Dapeng has accumulated so many identities and experiences. As he writes in the book, he doesn't belong to a particular track, "just runs himself."

Until now, Dapeng has also been running.

On June 17, 2023, at the Golden Goblet Award Ceremony of the 25th Shanghai International Film Festival, Dapeng won the "Best Actor" crown for his outstanding performance in "The Eighth Suspect".

Edit | Wu Qing

Typesetting | Akane Kazama

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