The popular New Year movie "Hello, Li Huanying" in the past few days is undoubtedly a dark horse killed by the Spring Festival file, which has won 4.3 billion yuan at the box office since its release in 13 days, and currently ranks fourth in the domestic film history box office. Director Jia Ling, in order to miss her mother who died unexpectedly, spent four years to elaborate this film.
She integrated the regret of her mother in reality into the art of film to "make up", and the warmth and sincerity conveyed by the film touched the hearts of countless audiences. In addition to being moved, there is a "other person's child" in the movie that is impressive - "UCLA directing department", "good English", "Hollywood work", "monthly income of 80,000".
In recent years, as the popularity of movies continues to heat up, more and more young people go overseas to pursue film dreams, Ang Lee and Lee Fangfang graduated from New York University, Xu Anhua graduated from the London Film School, these directors have long become the mainstay of the Chinese film industry, in addition to them there are more young directors who work in Hollywood or return to China after completing their studies, so how are they developing now
Zhang Shaofu
Zhang Shaofu is a young director and producer, born in Wuhan in 1984, and settled in the United States at the age of 5. He studied film directing at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he received systematic directing studies at the university known as Southern Hollywood.
After graduating from undergraduate, Zhang Shaofu successfully entered Warner Bros. Pictures after layers of assessments. Out of interest in animation, after finishing his work at Warner, Zhang Shaofu successfully entered the character animation major of San Francisco School of art through several months of hard work.
After three years of graduate school, Zhang Shaofu spent a lot of time every day on animation learning and creation, and began to try the production of short films. Together with his two partners, he spent 15 months creating a 5-minute anime short film as a graduation work, and this movie called "Dragon Boy" won the 38th Student Academy Award for Animation Short Film.
With the creativity shown in "Dragon Boy", Zhang Shaofu successfully entered Disney as an animator after graduating from graduate school. There, Zhang Shaofu came into contact with world-class animation teams and participated in the production of many animation films, including "Zootopia", "Super Marines", "Delicious Feast" and so on, of which 3 won the Oscars, and he himself was nominated for the Annie Award, the highest award in the animation industry twice.
These achievements did not make Zhang Shaofu complacent, in the past few years at Disney, he has been fully familiar with the production process of animation movies, but he is not willing to be in the production of animation on the assembly line, and wants to be an independent animation creator and do the animation he wants to do.
In 2015, Zhang Shaofu returned to China to participate in the "Maker World 2015 Hangzhou Overseas High-level Talents Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition", standing out among hundreds of overseas elite participants and winning the third place. The excellent performance of this competition has made many domestic entrepreneurs begin to pay attention to him and throw olive branches to him, and the Wuhan government has also actively supported him to return to his hometown to start a business, inviting him to join the "Wuhan City Partner" program. Out of his hometown feelings in Wuhan and his optimism about the Wuhan entrepreneurial market, Zhang Shaofu chose to resign and set up an animation company in Wuhan.
In December 2016, TAIKO Taiko Animation was officially established in Wuhan and set up a studio in Los Angeles at the same time. Zhang Shaofu has gathered world-class animation talents such as Bobby Pontillas, Andrew Chesworth, Joy Johnson, Andrew Jennings and other experienced artists to combine Hollywood creativity and technology with domestic production methods in an effort to bring a Chinese animation that the world has never seen before.
Taiko's first animation, Breaking Through the Sky, was a blockbuster and was nominated for best animated short film at the 91st Academy Awards. The anime tells the story of a little girl born into a single-parent family of newly immigrated immigrants in the United States who dreams of becoming an astronaut. "Breaking Through the Sky" is not only TAIKO's first work, but also zhang Shaofu's first step towards the goal of making an international first-class Chinese animation.
Luo Qirui & Zhang Wanting
Lo Kai-rui and Cheung Wanting are well-known golden partners in the Hong Kong film industry, they are university alumni and partners in life. Graduated from the English Department of the University of Hong Kong, Lo Qirui directed "Farewell to the King" written by Li Bihua at the age of 28. Later, he was admitted to the Film School of New York University in the United States. Zhang Wanting graduated from the Department of Psychology of the University of Hong Kong, but she naturally loved drama and film, and she went to the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom to study drama, and then was admitted to the Film School of New York University in the United States.
In the 1980s, there were only a handful of Chinese students at NYU, and before that there was only one Ang Lee. And Zhang Wanting and Luo Qirui this session, there are only three people in total, two from Hong Kong and one from Taiwan.
At that time, New York life was really the same as in gangster movies, they dealt with the three religions and nine streams every day, and gradually adapted to this kind of day, and even because they occasionally helped the gangsters who could not understand English to read court summonses, they made friends with a group of underworld.
Naturally, they want to photograph this life experience into student work. Zhang Wanting remembers that when she filmed her first student assignment, Ang Lee had just graduated from New York University. As a senior, Lee generously lent her the basement he rented: a group of students played a drug gang, and when the police broke into the basement to arrest people, they also pretended that the white flour was flour and were making bread dumplings. Ang Lee was also one of those "drug dealers".
None of their group of Chinese students was rich. Even with shy pockets, a group of young people have never been discouraged, and still enthusiastically search for all possibilities for filming.
One year, Shaw's general manager Fang Yihua came to New York to purchase photographic equipment for Shaw and asked a few film students to help guide. Later, Mrs. Shao said, "If you students have any needs in the future, you can come to Hong Kong to find me." This casual polite remark later turned out to be a life-saving straw for Zhang Wanting Luo Qirui's funds.
A few months later, Zhang Wanting took the script of "Illegal Immigration" to Fang Yihua and hoped that she would invest 1 million yuan, Fang Yihua gladly agreed, and asked them to shoot well and go to the theater in the future. In the end, "Illegal Immigration", directed by Zhang Wanting and written by Luo Qirui, achieved a good box office performance of 5 million Hong Kong dollars after its release in 1984, and won awards such as "Best Director" at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
In 1987, the second work of the two was released, "Autumn Fairy Tale", which mainly told the love story of two Chinese living in New York, usa, with Chow Yun-fat and Zhong Chuhong playing male and female protagonists respectively. The film won the Best Film Award and the Best Screenplay Award at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards.
In 1988, Luo Qirui and Zhang Wanting filmed the classic drama film "Seven Little Blessings" based on the apprenticeship experience of Jackie Chan, Hong Jinbao and other "Seven Little Blessings", and Hong Jinbao personally played his master Yu Zhanyuan and dedicated his delicate and vivid acting skills. The film has been nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and has also won many awards such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Golden Horse Awards.
In 1997, the film "Song Dynasty" directed by Zhang Wanting and written by Luo Qirui was released. The film focuses on the story of the Song Charlie family, which influenced the overall political and economic situation in China in the first half of the 20th century, and presents the history of the Republic of China from the Xinhai Revolution to the War of Resistance Against Japan by depicting the different life trajectories of the three sisters of the Song family. The film won the 17th Golden Rooster Awards for Best Co-production Feature Film.
In 2010, Luo Qirui's self-written and self-directed film "The Thief of Time" was released. Set against the backdrop of Hong Kong society in the 1960s, the film tells the story of an ordinary family of four in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong, where couples at the bottom of the society experience the taste of life and realize that only the changes of the years are the real "thieves". The film won the Crystal Bear Best Film Award in the New Generation Section of the 60th Berlin Film Festival and won the Best Screenplay Award at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards.
Lu Ke
Born in 1990, Lu Ke loved theater and movies as a teenager, and began his first intimate contact with the crew by chance, which made him start his vision of movies. After graduating from high school, Lu Ke was successfully admitted to the directing department of the New York University Film School.
After graduation, Lu Ke worked in a production company in Hollywood, during which he participated in the production and planning of films such as "Taiping Wheel", "Flying Tiger", "Youth of the Beast", and "Blood Twin American Edition". His overseas studies and early work experience have familiarized him with the entire production process of the film industry and reshaped his perspective on film.
After returning to China, Lu Ke began to polish his own works. In 2011, his directorial feature film debut "Survival" was released in major theaters, and this small-budget thriller horror film received good reviews from insiders, and fans said after watching it, "This is the best performance of horror films under the strict electronic review system." The film won the "2012 China Film and Television Technology Society" Production Excellence Award that year.
In 2015, Lu Ke's second theatrical film "Mr. High Heels" was released on Valentine's Day that year. This comedy about the male protagonist "unscrupulously" dressing himself up as a beautiful girl to pursue the strange story of the goddess, with fresh themes and funny stories, quickly became the box office dark horse at that time, and finally won 129 million box office, lu Ke also became the first post-90s director in China to break the box office.
In the same year, Lu Ke directed the musical drama micro-film "Who is the Strongest Voice of the End", which alluded to many social issues in the form of a musical, which can be said to be a bold attempt to Chinese mainland the form of a musical drama micro-film. It is worth mentioning that the lyrics of all the songs in the short film are written independently by Lu Ke.
In 2018, in the Hunan Satellite TV music variety show "City of Illusion", Lu Ke cooperated with Yin Zheng to create an eight-minute musical sitcom "Mr. X's Dream". The bold narrative style, dazzling but not obsessed with the dazzling images, let the industry and outside the industry once again see Lu Ke's talent.
In 2020, Lu Ke's latest film project "Sound for Dreams" was officially launched, which tells the hilarious experience of a group of young people with musical dreams. Lu Dao said that he saw a lot of his own shadow from it, and the process of people chasing dreams in the play coincided with many of his own experiences, and he hoped to tell this story to more people and pass on this blood to more people.
Jiang Wei
Wei Jiang is a returnee director who studied film at the American Art Center School of Design, a world-class art school that has trained Michael Bay ("Transformers", "Pearl Harbor"), Zach Schneider ("Superman: Man of Steel", "300 Spartan Warriors") and many other Hollywood commercial directors.
During his time at the school, Jiang Wei studied with a number of Oscar and Emmy winners, as well as bobby Ross, director of the American drama "Prison Break", and Victoria Haukberg, director of "Sex and the City", and participated in the production of police, war, and action films as executive director and screenwriter. Therefore, compared with the "Qiong Yao style" narrative method, Jiang Wei prefers and is more adept at the expression of "home country style" great love. Years of experience in Hollywood filming and production have also made him more aware of how to convey the concept of the work to the audience.
In 2015, Jiang Wei's action war film Call of Duty attracted the attention of the jury and the media at the 39th Montreal International Film Festival. The short film became the only Chinese short film shortlisted for the main competition unit of the Montreal International Film Festival that year.
The short film is a concept video of the feature film "War Fury Mountain", which is set in the Iraq War and based on real events, telling the story of the reckless second-class jack and his conservative superior Goldman, while on an air raid ground guidance mission, Goldman accidentally stepped on an old anti-tank mine that could detonate at any time, reflecting the collision of human nature and rules, friendliness and hostility.
In the same year, a Sino-Russian co-production film "Ballet in the Fire of War", which tells the poignant love affair across national borders under the fire of the chaotic world, was released in domestic theaters, and the director of this film was the famous Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, who won the Oscar for the film "Scorching Sun", and Jiang Wei served as the executive director of the film.
In recent years, Jiang Wei has turned to the field of television and created a number of high-rating red works. In 2019, co-directed by him and Dong Yachun, and starring Zhang Duo, Xi Wang, Cao Kenan and Gao Yiwei, "Amnesty 1959" landed on the CCTV comprehensive channel with an average rating of 1.25%, ranking first in the national ratings in the same period and receiving unanimous praise from mainstream media, experts and scholars and the general audience.
This drama tells the story of the major historical event of the first amnesty in the People's Republic of China in 1959, when 12,082 counter-revolutionary criminals and criminal offenders and 33 war criminals were released.
Subsequently, the revolutionary historical drama "Crossing the Yalu River" created by Jiang Wei, Dong Yachun and Huang Nan and others scored 8.8 points on Douban at the beginning, becoming the hottest and highest-rated TV series at the beginning of 2021. This film is brilliantly performed by Tang Guoqiang, Ding Yongdai, Sun Weimin, Wang Zhifei, Liu Zhibing, Yao Gang, Wang Ting and other drama bones, which vividly shows the far-sighted vision of the national leaders and the spirit of the Chinese volunteers who are not afraid of hardships and brave struggle.
Dai Rui
Director Dai Rui began his life of studying abroad at the age of 18, graduating from the New York Film Academy with a major in directing. His film works have been selected for overseas film festivals such as the Busan Film Festival in South Korea and the Sundance Film Festival in the United States, and he has directed many well-known advertisements and MVs.
The short film "Continue to Miss" directed by him was invited to participate in the wide-angle section of the Busan Film Festival in South Korea, and the short film "Six Gods and No Master" was specially recommended by the JVC Tokyo International Video Festival. In 2008, Dai Rui's Sichuan earthquake documentary "Starting from the Heart" won the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's award. Self-written and self-directed, and edited and composed and sung by himself, he was evaluated by the Busan Film Committee as "the most talented and potential new director among the seventh generation of Chinese directors".
After returning from studying abroad, Dai Rui became the youngest contracted director of Huayi Brothers. In 2010, he served as the screenwriter of the Chinese version of "Song and Dance Youth" co-produced by Disney and Huayi Brothers in the United States.
In May 2015, Dai Rui founded Beijing Si Rui Yinghua Culture Media Co., Ltd., focusing on the research and development and production of film projects. He positioned himself to stick to the original, do the good content to survive. Dai Rui has always had a dream, that is, to make Chinese localization song and dance film films, he believes that for song and dance films, pre-rehearsal is very important, and the time and energy spent will even exceed the film shooting itself. In this era when the modern theme of Chinese song and dance films is not yet mature, Dai Rui hopes to explore with the audience and discover the beauty of song and dance films.
In the same year, Dai Rui's debut film "Young and Crazy" landed in theaters nationwide, and this film gathered Zheng Kai, Chen Yanxi, Bao Bell, Sun Jian and other actors with great box office appeal, telling the hot blood and youth of young people at present. Although "Young And Crazy" is a comedy film with a youth theme, unlike previous youth films, the director also revealed that due to his professional background of studying in the United States, "Young And Crazy" also borrows from the commonly used methods of American youth films, including multi-line narrative and song and dance elements.
Deng Chuwei
Deng Chuwei, born in Hunan in 1988, has a wide range of hobbies and interests, and his parents have high expectations of him, his family expects him to become a journalist or a lawyer, but he has a special love for film art.
I remember when I was 15 years old, Deng Chuwei and his classmates lay in bed and thought about it after watching "The Pianist on the Sea" together, and did not fall asleep all night; at the age of 16, he was excited to run circles in the playground after watching "The Godfather". Later, he finally understood that the most important thing he wanted to do in his life was to become a director.
In order to realize his dream of directing, he has made a lot of efforts. During his time at a foreign university, he was free to choose the class time, four classes a week, he would arrange to finish two full days - in the remaining five days, in addition to eating and sleeping, it was to watch movies on a continuous basis, and he could watch seven or eight movies a day. At first, I looked at it in a disorderly way, but then I looked at it according to the system of countries, actors, directors, and screenwriters, recorded systematically, and wrote down my own feelings. After a few years of perseverance, I gradually realized something.
After completing his undergraduate studies in Australia, he entered the postgraduate refresher course of the Beijing Film Academy. After graduation, he participated in the production of a TV series with a major historical theme, from field notes to executive directors to post-directors to releases... After that, he worked as a live director of reality TV shows, executive director of TV movies, live producer of animal documentary drama films, and a year went to Hengdian to join the Screen Actors Guild, in order to steal how other directors told actors how he acted, he acted on the set for half a year.
These works made Deng Chuwei see his own shortcomings, and with the idea of learning the most advanced film production technology and getting close to the world's first-class filmmakers, he came to the University of California, Los Angeles.
After returning to China after completing his studies, Deng Chuwei independently directed film works such as "A Generation of Female Soul Tang Qunying", "Dreams are Blooming", "Diving Bar Teenager" and set up a personal studio. Interpreting the historical theme film of China's feminist movement, "A Generation of Female Soul Tang Qunying", the sports-themed movie "Diving Bar Boy", which tells the inspirational story of diving athletes, and the rural theme film "Dreams are Blooming", which reflects rural revitalization and accurate poverty alleviation, these three works respectively aim the lens at Chinese history, Chinese children and Rural China, with different themes, but there is a distinct personal style and expression, and the series of works has laid a deep imprint on China's local culture.
Although the overseas study experience has broadened his horizons and honed his skills, it will also give him more opportunities and face more challenges. "As a young returnee director, being young means it is difficult to convince the public, and returnees are easy to be dissatisfied." In order to overcome these difficulties, Deng Chuwei chose to lead by example, be personal in everything, humbly ask for advice, and not forget his original intention.
On set, he was always the first to be on the scene and the last to leave. At the time of shooting, he could only sleep 3 to 4 hours a day, but he promised that the crew must have 7 to 8 hours of sleep. After each day, check the preparation of the next day's fu hua dao, and then go to the editing room to see the material of the day.
In the early stages of filming "A Generation of Female Souls Tang Qunying", he revised 13 drafts of the film script, conducted more than 10 surveys before starting, and organized a team of 13 people to produce 670 sub-shot charts in two weeks.
The film has won various awards at major film festivals, such as Best Actress at the Nordic International Film Festival and Best Newcomer Director at the Nice International Film Festival in France. For the honors and achievements that seem to come and go, Deng Chuwei looks very bland. As he said when he received the award: "This recognition will be placed on my desk, inspiring me to work harder, more carefully, and more refined to do the next, next, and next work." ”