After being crowned a god, the whole world waited for him for 4 years
On April 3, the movie "Grass and Trees" was released.
The tea picker played by Jiang Qinqin,
In order to find her disappeared husband, she came to Hangzhou,
fell in love with a weak tea farmer (played by Chen Jianbin ),
She was tricked into a pyramid scheme,
Sell your hometown house to buy a foot sticker.
From a rustic bottom woman,
to madness, collapse, loss of reason,
almost broke with his son (played by Wu Lei),
Jiang Qinqin contributed breakthrough acting skills in his career,
won the Asian Film Award for Best Actress.
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Jiang Qinqin and Wu Lei play a mother and son
"The World of Grass and Trees" is directed by Gu Xiaogang
The second part of the landscape diagram trilogy,
The previous work "Spring River Plumbing" is an international sensational literary film in 2019.
Cannes Film Critics' Week's first Chinese-language closing film,
Top 10 of the year in the French "Cinémato".
The shooting is in the middle of urban demolition,
The life test of three generations of the Fuyang family.
At that time, the actors he was looking for were all relatives and friends,
At one time, because of insufficient funds,
Go and borrow an online loan yourself,
The crew was forced to disband and restart several times.
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Qiantang Trilogy's "Spring River Plumbing" and "Grass and Trees in the World"
After a lapse of four years, "The World of Grass and Trees"
The story shifts from the banks of the Fuchun River to the West Lake,
He continued to work intensively.
Filming MLM dramas really simulates a complete MLM system,
Filming tea-related scenes to restore the skills of ordering tea and boiling tea,
He tried to leave a cultural context of water and soil in the film.
and the spirit and desires of the people in it.
The following is Gu Xiaogang's own statement:
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Director: Gu Xiaogang
Statement: Gu Xiaogang
Written by: Hong Bingchan
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The crazy brainwashing process of the MLM organization
When I was filming the last movie "Spring River Plumbing", my own family entered the MLM system. It was a big shock to me at the time. When a loved one you know tells you that you have a product, do you want to use it? He is talking to you in a structured set of words that are obviously trained, and you can't convince him.
News events that are very far away happen to you so intuitively, causing property losses to the family and endless troubles. Now that the social security and anti-fraud investment has been very large, we will download the anti-fraud APP, and we will be reminded when we go to the bank counter. So why are there still so many people who have been defrauded, it is more like a human question, a question that goes straight to people's hearts. When we enter an era of material abundance, the theme of anti-pyramid marketing is very motivated, and it is through this theme to discuss the human spirit.
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Show a group portrait of MLM victims
Different from the mainstream impression, many of the characters portrayed in the movie who strayed into MLM organizations are not aiming for the dream of getting rich or have defective IQs. There are college students who want their parents to live a good life, girls who want to find romance, full-time housewives who want to realize the value of their lives, and frustrated men who have a terminal illness.
These are real stories that we've researched. We've also had some extreme cases. For example, there was a girl who entered the organization, she called her father over to give money, and he tore up all the cash he was carrying at the scene, broke his ID card, and jumped off the building. But in the end, it is the ordinary cases of ordinary people that enter the script, and what we hope to present is not curiosity, but the waves under the seemingly calm and ordinary sea.
In addition to contacting a large number of people who have been involved in MLM organizations, we have also gone undercover inside. What I find fascinating about it is that they encounter "spiritual enlightenment" that they have never encountered in traditional life.
Who am I, where am I, what am I going to do? These questions don't come up in a normal profession because you don't need to think about them. The scary thing about it is that you think it's enlightenment, but it implants greed and hatred in your mind in a crooked way.
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Moss Flower changed from a tea girl to Mr. Wu
Many of the victims we have come into contact with have a hard time getting back into their old lives. After the MLM organization was defeated, they went back or started to do it themselves, because the previous spiritual world has been dismantled, he has been implanted with a new discourse system, his personality, his understanding of the path of life has been transformed, and he will think, this can make money, even if it is illegal.
On the other hand, objectively they are dead. After the person who does MLM comes out, others will say, you must not believe this person's words. The bankruptcy of their reputation may cause them a second damage. It seems that his body is not harmed, but he can't go back to his family and can't be accepted by the original race, but they are also living individuals, and how to repair and help such a personality is actually very difficult.
Jiang Qinqin and Wu Lei play a pair of mothers and sons from the Sichuan-Chongqing region who came to Hangzhou. Wu Moss Hua is a tea picker, and He Mulian is in college. Why did they come to Hangzhou? They came to find the husband who disappeared in the family.
Moss Hua met carpenter He Shan in his hometown. He Shan came to the village to repair the wind and rain building, and went to the restaurant where Moss Hua worked to eat every three or five days, so they had a marriage and gave birth to their son Mulian. But He Shan said to go, leaving an unsolved mystery. Moss Hua is an infatuated person, in the past ten years, the mother and son left home to look for He Shan in various big cities, and when they heard that he was working in Hangzhou, they also moved over.
In a foreign land, there are always financial considerations, she worked as a nanny, a cleaner, and eventually a tea picker. In order to find her father, Mu Lian chose to go to college in Hangzhou. Moss Hua had a relationship with Lao Qian, a tea farmer played by Chen Jianbin , and was kicked out by Lao Qian's mother, and then strayed into a pyramid scheme.
Moss Flower changed from a tea picker to Manager Wu, a social identity she never thought she could achieve, so she exchanged her soul and entered a state of demonic madness. Mu Lian went undercover in a pyramid scheme organization for her, trying to wake up her mother, and finally the truth was revealed, and she found the most primitive existence of human nature in nature, arousing the desire for life.
Writing the scene of Moss Hua entering the MLM organization, I and another screenwriter, novelist Guo Shuang, did not write completely from the perspective of a screenwriter, but from the perspective of the founder of a MLM organization "Butterfly International", developed these courses, learned the discourse system of those lecturers, and also designed the VI and promotional videos of all products from beginning to end, which were all played on the shooting site. We have completely built our own "MLM system" and simulated a 3-day brainwashing program for all actors.
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The tea mountain and the tea picker in "The World of Grass and Trees".
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Fuchun River and fishermen in "Spring River Plumbing".
The name of the moss flower comes from the poem "Moss" by Yuan Mei, a native of Qiantang: The day is not everywhere, and youth comes naturally. Moss flowers are as small as rice, and they also learn to bloom peonies. In addition to the homonym of the name of the mythological character, Mulian also has the meaning of "out of the mud and not stained".
The movie is about the relationship between the mother and son, a modern version of the story of saving the mother. In order to give her son a better life and realize her self-worth, Moss Flower entered the MLM organization, and Mulian wanted to save her mother.
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Jiang Qinqin interprets two extreme emotional states
After reading the script to Sister Qinqin, we met. At that time, the script had not yet been written, and she quickly put forward her thoughts on the characters in the script, and also talked about the setting of the ending. At the end, there is a part where she shows her body in the water, and I asked, "Do you dare to act?" and she said, "If the director dares to write it, I dare to shoot it." "I was very moved at the time, after all, the first time we met, I won the greatest trust of the actors.
She has moments when her soul is delivered to the character in the movie, and she tears herself out in many scenes where her heart and conflict erupt. Sister Qinqin is a very diligent person, the script is full of notes, every time I tell her, it's too serious, don't be so serious.
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In order to shoot when there are few people, Wu Lei's bicycle scenes are all early in the morning
Meeting Lei Lei is also due to fate. Because she wants to speak dialects, Sister Qinqin is from Chongqing, and based on the role setting, she also has to find actors from Sichuan and Chongqing. Mu Lian is a young man with the image of a divine child of nature, Wu Lei is well-known to the public, because he has a sunny appearance, loves sports and loves cycling.
He was filming at the time, and I flew over to meet him. He kept asking me why I wanted him to play this role. I didn't say anything at the time, I just looked into his eyes. His eyes are very clear. Wu Lei is strictly my senior, although he is younger than me, he made his acting debut at the age of 5 and has more than 10 years of work experience. In such a long process of socialization, being able to maintain the purity of his eyes is actually another talent, or the spirituality brought by himself.
In the movie, his body, especially his eyes, is particularly revealed and displayed. Because his body and mind can withstand the power of this character's divinity.
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A close-up of the details of Wu Lei's eyes
At the beginning, there were not too many complicated scenes, but the most difficult thing was his interaction with plants. We all grew up in the city, and when he enters the woods, he has a connection with nature and is accepted by this space, and this feeling is indescribable.
Before Lei Lei joined the group, he began to raise plants and replaced his avatar with one related to trees. Because we want to ride on irregular terrain such as woodland slopes, we also hired a special instructor to train mountain biking.
I used to make movies looking for relatives and friends in my hometown, all of whom were non-professional actors, and "Spring River Plumbing" was filmed all year round, and it was started several times. To "The World of Grass and Trees", we also shoot in spring and summer. The actors have all watched "Spring River Plumbing" and are looking forward to the way we work. For example, in Wu Lei's plays, the situation often occurs that the notice of the past two days only reads "Stay in the forest and ride a bicycle and stay with the plants." In two days, it was again "to the forest and to stay with the plants." Other than that, there are no lines and no plot. There is no such thing as "we show started" "you perform the intimacy with the trees. "Without those instructions, we just wait, wait for the actor to come into character.
When filming in the spring, the actors may still be groping, but in the summer when they joined the group for the second time, I felt that everyone had changed in the first scene, and they all became characters in the play with the passage of time, without any hesitation.
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Jiang Qinqin and Chen Jianbin play a couple
Looking for Chen Jianbin is because of the addition of Sister Qinqin, we want to ask Mr. Chen if he has any intentions in this regard. We know that he has played the leading role before, but this time he came to play a supporting role, and he didn't have much hope. Unexpectedly, he was obligated to act for the sake of Sister Qinqin.
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Landscape shots from "Spring River Plumbing".
The first seed of this movie was when I saw Mr. Wang Zengqi's essay "Grass and Trees in the World". "Tea" is people in the grass and trees, as a native of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, we have a lot of relatives who pick tea around us, and there is an image of a tea picker very early.
The long shot at the beginning of the movie is still a continuation of the possibility of landscape films, called "Traveling to the Montage". It really seems to have become the vision of the people in the ancient paintings, swimming in the picture without being constrained by space.
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The landscape of Hangzhou
In the early morning, along the side of Faxi Temple, the road behind Shifeng Mountain in Longjing Village, through the tunnel, and then to the whole mountain, the tea girls are shouting about the mountain.
We spent a lot of time and cost to achieve this beginning, and we shot in two seasons, and we could only shoot four or five shots per shot, because we used real natural light in the morning, and we couldn't shoot when the light was bright, and the amount of group performances was too large, and the space for scheduling was very far. Technically, the "air relay" was used, which was still being developed at the time. There are technical barriers in the film, and aerial photography requires passing through a tunnel and a mountain barrier. We set up two pilots, one in front of the tunnel and one on the top of the mountain, and they complete the signal handover in the air, and there will be a blind flight for about a second. We were the first film to see this technology in a cinema. Combined with Mr. Shigeru Umebayashi's music, the final result is very impressive.
Geographically, it is the main urban area of Hangzhou, which is dominated by West Lake, with Leifeng sunset, Su Causeway spring dawn, Quyuan wind lotus and so on.
These spaces are familiar landscapes, and in a way, they represent our own context. In the past, generations of literati and writers came here to write poems for this place. Nowadays, they are consumed by the masses as attractions and cultural labels.
This is a very challenging thing for creators, how to refine the soul and how to face the traditional culture itself.
In the movie, I gave an intuitive perspective, with the ancient tea mountains in front of me, the West Lake in the middle, which has been there for thousands of years, and the modern city in the distance. This is what makes this land special, where modernity and landscape come together. Just as we are standing between the mountains and the city in the tide of our times, there is an extreme contrast between tradition and modernity. What is the spiritual world of man? What are man's desires?
Choosing the fusion of crime genre and landscape movies, the crime is very intense, the landscape is quiet and detached, and I also want to have the ultimate contrast from hell to heaven. The grass and trees are small, but the world is very large.
Why is MLM associated with tea Zen, because when discussing spiritual beliefs, it often needs the symbols of cultural imagery to carry it.
Tea has a unique and subtle place in the system of Chinese culture. The tea of firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar tea, to the tea of qin, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, wine, tea, and then to the concept of tea ceremony. It is both a market and a literati, and tea Zen also represents the spirit.
The market is like the old money of the tea farmer, and the tea can be exchanged for money. MLM organizations meet on a cruise ship on the West Lake, and some people make tea from the Song Dynasty during the banquet, which is again the social method of the urban elite.
In order to understand thousands of years of tea, we have basically sorted out the historical evolution. For example, Lu Yu's tea brewing has been lost for a long time, and we found a tea addict monk to restore this process, tea cakes, raw materials and the most important 24 tea boiling utensils with his own utensils.
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A documentary of tea pickers filmed by Gu Xiaogang's team
We also went to find tea pickers in different mountains in Hangzhou, such as lions, dragons, clouds, tigers, and plums. Finally, in the area of Manjuelong and Longjing Village, I found two mountains where I could see the West Lake, and followed and accompanied a team of tea girls. I picked tea with them and lived together, and also made a complete documentary, telling how they picked tea, how to eat on the tea mountain, and how to rest. Before the actors joined the group, we showed them this documentary. Later, many of the tea girls who were performed in the movie were the tea girls when we were researching.
In the end, what the audience can see is that the tea part is just a glimpse, but behind the scenes, 60-70% of our efforts are researching tea. In the end we just take a scoop of water, but as a presentation of the wind, whether it is accurate and usable, is important to me. I want to try to keep a little bit of our context in the film, it can penetrate time.