Author: Wei Jie
After the broadcast of "Faint Fire", a friend told Yao Xiaofeng and Zhang Shuwei that this film is too bitter and not easy to watch.
It is a not-so-typical model of a suspense drama. The length of twenty-eight episodes, the main line is one, on the Chinese New Year's Eve of the millennium, the rich man in the town, Xu Yi, was killed by his wife.
In this relatively simple case, what is shown more is the excavation of human nature. In a small rural town, how to eat people without spitting out bones, how to habitually pour dirty water on people, and how to justify the harm caused by ignorance.
"This waywardness has created difficulties and troubles for everyone (the team)." Although Yao Xiaofeng expected such a market performance, he was a little sorry for it.
But on the other hand, it is precisely this kind of "blackness" that makes "Faint Fire" come out, and the biggest evaluation it gets is "too daring to shoot".
An interesting point is that "Faint Fire" was actually filmed before "Wind Chaser". After the "Holiday Warmth" series, it is Yao Xiaofeng's first step to explore with personal preferences.
"I've taken a big step forward, and since the final result is good, I think I can continue to explore, but I still have to follow the laws of the market."
When "Faint Fire" was broadcast more than halfway through, Entertainment Capital met Yao Xiaofeng in Dongzhimen. He looked no different from the previous video, smiling, wearing a pair of slippers, sitting on a lazy sofa to answer questions.
More than an hour of dialogue is enough for us to go back to the year 2022 when "Faint Fire" was filmed, and understand that he has an exploration of boundaries, a persistence in the "threshold" and texture, a prolific truth, and a plan for the future. can also understand why Yao Xiaofeng can become a rare person in the industry in the hearts of all colleagues.
How did the faint fire ignite?
"Faint Fire" is not an easy film to make.
An obvious difficulty lies in how to shoot the relationship between Nanya and Zhou Luo cleanly.
The relationship between Zhou Luo and Nanya has caused huge discussions because of the scale since it was broadcast. The audience was amazed by the taboo of juvenile erotic fantasies in the play, and sighed at this proper proportion.
In Yao Xiaofeng's view, between Nanya and Zhou Luo, it should be the mutual redemption of the two souls. "In fact, this kind of theme will inevitably encounter criticism, and the creator must shoot the rare emotions in this kind of suffering life with innocence and present it clean enough."
In "Faint Fire", the relationship between the two is hazy and dreamy, and it is also very tight.
As soon as Zhou Luo's teenage boy fantasy was born, shame, shame, confusion, and entanglement would always appear quickly, making him stop abruptly and fall back into the poems he had read. For example, Zhou Luo read on the swing "There are two paths in the yellow woods", and Françoise Sagan's sentence "This world is absurd, depraved, and inhumane." You are sober, gentle, and spotless." Yao Xiaofeng wants to keep these impulses in fantasy, hoping to show more of the two people as soul friends and realize mutual redemption.
For Zhou Luo, Nanya is the one who gave him the greatest stimulation and enlightenment. Nanya helped him complete the enlightenment of human nature, making him know more about good and evil, good and bad, and know that in addition to science and humanities, there are also poetry and distance. I hope to make the relationship between the two of them more pure, from the physical body to the real soul blending. ”
Such an atypical pair of male and female protagonists is actually not easy to find.
Nanya's image is very complicated, she is criticized, young and beautiful, and has children, these attributes are even contradictory for many actors.
Tong Yao volunteered. "After reading the script, she took the initiative to come to us."
Yao Xiaofeng's favorite point for Tong Yao is very simple, "her temperament is very clean".
"Because I want to achieve a realization. In the play, all the gossip is other people's dirty water poured on her, not true. ”
Zhang Xincheng is a good seedling that Yao Xiaofeng met very early.
Yao Xiaofeng watched a film by Zhang Xincheng many years ago. It was an assignment internship he took for his classmates when he just graduated. After watching it, Yao Xiaofeng was very impressed with him, he asked "who is this child", and went to watch Zhang Xincheng's later plays.
After contact, Yao Xiaofeng also thinks he is a good actor. "Whether it is the exposure of the body, or the expression of desire and love, he is in this role, and he will not have idol baggage because of his image style, and he will purely realize the expression as an actor."
Another difficulty is in the way it is presented.
Yao Xiaofeng realized very early on that this book is relatively simple, if it is just a love story, the capacity is not enough to support a TV series.
"I was looking for a unique format to do it. chose suspense. But this case is too simple, and it is more difficult to do it with conventional peel-off suspense. I think there is an ecological problem behind this, everyone has secrets, so based on this consideration, I want to make a multi-line narrative, which will have a stronger literati style and literary temperament. ”
But such a story, at that time, was difficult, and there was no market model.
Screenwriters are hard to find. Yao Xiaofeng met many people and chatted many times, many people were interested, and many people gave up. In 18 years, he finalized Mao Yunfei, who dared to face difficulties. The two of them grinded for about three years before they wrote the book of "Faint Fire".
And that's not the end of it. After the filming was completed, in order to realize the two-way rush of the case and the characters, Yao Xiaofeng adjusted the story editing structure four times, and it took nearly half a year to cut out two satisfactory episodes.
"This effect is the best expression I've found on this story so far." Yao Xiaofeng sighed.
It's also brutal, but it's also true
The sense of life is also a feature of the presentation of the series.
Qingshui Town in "Faint Fire" seems to be different from Wuyuan in most people's impressions. The blue bricks and white walls are scattered. There are mountains and rivers, nostalgia around the millennium, and the agility of small-town life.
Yao Xiaofeng used the four towns of Wuyuan to spell out Qingshui Town.
Among them, there are originally very primitive villages, as well as relatively mature commercial attractions such as Likeng and Huangling. Before the shooting, the creative team coordinated with the surrounding businesses one by one, hoping to remove the signboards and lanterns and restore the original appearance of the ancient town.
When filming in Huangling, the hotel owner told Yao Xiaofeng several times that if there were a lot of people during the holiday, the team would not be able to shoot. Fortunately, during the months of filming of "Faint Fire", there happened to be relatively few tourists, and the team also successfully completed the communication with the surrounding residents, and built a realistic millennial rural town in the lens.
This sense of life and realism extends to the characters as well. Here, Yao Xiaofeng gives each character the right to be "round".
Yao Xiaofeng likes to use one sentence to describe the characters in the play, "Good people are not good, bad people are not bad".
Liu Xun is the most typical of them. Out of jealousy of Zhou Luo, he posted the gossip of Zhou Luo and the university teacher on the blackboard, played the recording to force Zhou Luo to admit perjury, and walked step by step towards distortion and the point of no return. But looking back at his life, it is full of tragedy that cannot be ignored. His father died tragically, he was also in the abyss of blame for many years, he was beaten badly after being misunderstood, and he was scolded by the girl he had a crush on for "a toad wants to eat swan meat", all of which seemed to promote his blackening.
Lin Fanglu is a collection of contradictions.
He feels guilty about Nanya and wants to prove Nanya's innocence, but he must be firm in his duty to find out the truth. At the same time, he also seeks advantages and avoids disadvantages, Zhou Luo is like a mirror for him, he doesn't believe that there are brave people, so he also wants to confirm his cognition. As a result, he had to face his mistakes and remorse.
Yao Xiaofeng is unwilling to let every character be exploited into a tool man, in a logical suspense drama, there is no reason for the character to become the existence without logic. "Everybody has faults, and he has reasons why he has to."
And in such a town where everyone is "alive", the display of humanity is even more tenable.
The word loneliness is taken apart, there are children, melons and fruits, dogs, mosquitoes and flies, which are enough to support the alley mouth of Qingshui Town in midsummer.
But what is loneliness?
Lin Yutang said that children's fruits, cats, dogs, and flies are of course lively, but they have nothing to do with you, which is called loneliness.
Nanya's loneliness and pain are embodied here, the streets that are carried with fruits, the rattan in Xu Yi's hands, the small bed in the factory dormitory, and the woods that are pushed into it when it gets dark.
Yao Xiaofeng also wants to show this corresponding evil. "Clearwater is like the witch of Salem, it is a vehicle of fables, the evil of ignorance. When the mind is not opened, he does not know that what he is doing is hurting a person, and he takes it for granted. I think this kind of unperceived damage is the biggest problem. ”
"Of course, do you say this thing doesn't exist? It also exists. I think that this kind of criticism of human nature should be shown in the work. "For "Faint Fire", the important thing is behind the sense of life.
Shoot what you want to shoot, and shoot what the audience wants to see
Yao Xiaofeng actually doesn't lack films.
's once good results have made him a chased sweetheart in the urban drama track. But he wanted to shoot something he really wanted to shoot.
From "Holiday Warm Ocean Series", to "Faint Dark Fire", "Wind Chaser" and the upcoming "Going North", he has been trying and innovating in recent years. Yao Xiaofeng revealed that he also wants to try costume themes in the future.
In fact, before the broadcast of "Faint Fire", Yao Xiaofeng had anticipated the impact of the "threshold".
The narrative structure of jumping multiple lines, the tragic story tone, the entanglement of human nature and the narration of spring and snow are all more suitable for audiences with certain viewing habits. But he couldn't give up on the challenge. "For us, it's not that if you don't advance, you will retreat, or if you don't advance, you will die."
An undeniable status quo is that the crisis facing the domestic drama market has always been multifaceted, and creators need to continue to attract the attention of the audience from short videos, from increasingly excellent imported works, from offline and other categories of entertainment projects.
For every drama company, how to differentiate and how to survive in this storm has always been an inevitable problem. "Everybody is walking on thin ice. But it is precisely this sense of crisis that ensures that the work can still have vitality. ”
Exploration also brings surprises.
"Wind Chaser" has become iQiyi's first drama to break 10,000 in 24 years, ranking first in prime-time ratings, with a Douban score of 7.8, which can be described as a full bloom. "Faint Fire" also exceeded his expectations and made it to the central eight.
"I actually care about the market myself, and I don't make things purely according to my personal preferences. I think the director should be responsible for the business, and he must effectively control the risk, and of course, you must control the risk and at the same time you have personal expression. ”
In the past, Yao Xiaofeng believed that most of the TV drama shooting did not need to have a particularly strong breakthrough and the director's stylization, because it was difficult for the director to run the expression into the long-form TV series, "it is more like the art of the screenwriter and the art of the actor."
"But it's different now. We can see that whether it is at home or abroad, the director's style is gradually being perceived by the audience and recognized by the market, which also supports this road to go wider and better. In the current market, you don't have to try to test the patience of the audience, if someone likes it, it is valuable, and there should be more self-expression. Yao Xiaofeng hopes to find his own style outside of his preferences, rather than a label.
After the broadcast of "Wind Chaser", "texture" has become one of Yao Xiaofeng's labels.
But he never wanted to stop here. "Imagery is my forte, and I have what it takes to do better. But as a director, you can't indulge in images, you have to present your expression. Image is a prerequisite for quality dramas, but doing a good job of image does not mean that it is a good film. ”
In Yao Xiaofeng, a very clear argument is being confirmed - creators are always unbreakable.
Yao Xiaofeng is the only post-60s generation in the Enlightenment Films.
Because of this, he seems to be more willing to accept new things, more willing to keep learning, and more willing to listen to opinions and suggestions than his peers. In a sense, the two generations have achieved a true two-way journey in the Enlightenment.
Yao Xiaofeng admits that enlightenment in the choice of subject matter actually has a certain personal preference, but fortunately, there are many young people around him who can provide him with fresh perspectives, objective and even mainstream evaluations, and are also responsible for a large part of the work outside the creative periphery.
"Because of them, I can maintain my purity, so that I can maintain a certain creative ability. Now I can judge whether a project is done or not based on my perception. ”
"Faint Fire" is the second drama of Enlightenment Pictures this year, and after that, "Going North" was also put on the agenda. Three dramas a year, while bringing Enlightenment Pictures into the public eye, it has also been labeled as "high-yield".
"Actually, we've been at a steady pace. One film a year or three films in two years, but these films are all coincidentally released this year. Yao Xiaofeng was a little apprehensive about this label, "We will not be productive, and we will not dare to be productive."
Along the way, enlightenment has been very steady, and the goal is simple and clear - "tell good content and good story".