In May this year, Zhang Yimou's spy war film "On the Cliff" was released, which earned 1.190 billion yuan at the box office, setting a record for the best film directed by Zhang Yimou (alone) in China.
The film moves the audience and also makes us question: What is the relationship between the movie "On the Cliff" and the TV series "Cliff"?
In fact, both works are written by the same screenwriter Quan Yongxian.
9 years ago, when Quan Yong first wrote the script of "Cliff", he arranged a very nestful death method for the protagonist Zhou Yi at the end, which caused dissatisfaction among the audience.
For this reason, he specially issued an apology, saying that "this is a new year's drama, but I can only present a crippled story in front of the audience", he said that "Cliff" is an unfinished story, Zhou Yi died too nestled, too worthless.
Nine years later, when Zhang Yimou was ready to shoot the first spy film and found Quan Yongxian, he knew that the opportunity to make up for his regrets came.
In the TV series, Zhou Yi has died and cannot be revived, so the movie will tell the story of Zhou Yi's life, and it can be said that the movie "On the Cliff" is an extension of the original story of the TV series "Cliff".
After clarifying the relationship between the film version and the drama version, we will solve another problem that the public discusses more:
In the TV series, Zhou Yi is played by Zhang Jiayi, and the actor of Zhou Yi in the movie is Yu Hewei, who also plays Zhou Yi, and the two perform, what is the difference?
Before answering this question, let's answer another question:
Why didn't Zhang Yimou look for Zhang Jiayi to act in "On the Cliff"?
At first glance, Zhang Jiayi has many advantages over Yu Hewei.
On the one hand, since "On the Cliff" is an extension of "Cliff", wouldn't it be better to directly find the lead actor of the original version, and the drama version has also accumulated a large group of fans.
Moreover, Zhang Jiayi's performance in "Cliff" is also obvious to all, and Zhang Yimou cannot turn a blind eye.
On the other hand, the relationship between Zhang Yimou and Zhang Jiayi is also very good.
The two are Fellows of Shaanxi Province, and they are also the family, and they have cooperated in "Return" in 2014, in which Zhang Jiayi plays a supporting role.
In the PROJECT OF THE TV SERIES "Protagonist" that Zhang Yimou plans to shoot, Zhang Jiayi, as the copyright holder of the novel, will inevitably cooperate, and Zhang Jiayi is also very likely to play the male number one Hu Sanyuan.
Another point is that Qin Hailu participated in "On the Cliff", and she and Zhang Jiayi played husband and wife in the TV series "White Deer Plain", and they have a tacit understanding with each other.
Therefore, letting Zhang Jiayi play Zhou Yi again is ostensibly a good move.
So why did Zhang Yimou still choose Yu Hewei?
In May 2019, the movie "Rock Solid" was launched in Chongqing, which was the first time Zhang Yimou cooperated with Yu Hewei.
The scene was only filmed for one-third, and Zhang Yimou asked his assistant to find Yu Hewei and ask him if he would like to be the lead actor in the next movie, and Yu Hewei agreed without saying a word.
The lead actor of "On the Cliff" was thus finalized.
It can be seen that after the cooperation of "Rock Solid", Lao Mouzi directly determined that Zhou Yi, the protagonist of "On the Cliff", was none other than Yu Hewei.
Just like Zhang Yimou's continuous cooperation with Zhang Yi, a good actor with tacit cooperation will be "addictive" to use.
In addition, Yu Hewei also has many irreplaceable advantages.
The biggest advantage is the performance status.
The peak period of different actors is not the same, although Yu Hewei and Zhang Jiayi are also in their early 50s, but the performance status of the two is still very different.
Zhang Jiayi's peak was ten years ago.
At that time, he was the spirited Song Siming and the stoic and resolute Zhou Yi, and these roles made him a brother in the TV series, but later Zhang Jiayi was plagued by ankylosing spondylitis, and his back gradually became rickety, and he also grew a lot older.
Over the years, most of the TV dramas he played in "White Deer Plain", "Loading Stage", and "Mountains and Seas" are the image of the old master, which is far from the secret agent, and for the sake of health, he also changed his name from "Zhang Jiayi" to "Zhang Jiayi".
Therefore, this physical state is limited to the role, the type of scene, and the shooting environment.
And the filming of the movie "On the Cliff" was very arduous.
The main creator went to Harbin, Beijing, Datong, lasted more than 150 days of shooting, the intensity is very large, Qin Hailu said in an interview, after filming in Harbin, the whole body was bruised, she soaked in the bathtub for 3 days before the pain was relieved.
Another point, as we said earlier, "On the Cliff" is a branch line of "Cliff", the role should be younger, but Zhang Jiayi's age has increased by 9 years, and it is not appropriate for him to star.
On the other hand, Yu Hewei's peak period has just arrived.
Ten years ago, he also played Liu Bei in the TV series "Three Kingdoms", and his fate was the same as that of Uncle Liu Huang, but later after successfully starring in Cao Cao in "The League of Military Teachers", Yu Hewei ushered in the peak of his career.
Let's look at the role he's playing now.
Chen Duxiu, who shouted with his arms raised in "The Age of Awakening", the leader of the procuratorial group with a distinct personality in "Circuit Procuratorial Group", Lin Biao, who had a suspicious personality in "Armageddon", and the domineering president in "Ideal City".
The characters are different, the personalities are different, but they are all full of spirits.
Purely from the temperament state, Yu Hewei is more suitable.
In addition, Piggott checked it out, "On the Cliff" was mainly filmed in the northeast, and the starring actors such as Qin Hailu, Ni Dahong, Zhang Yi, Liu Haocun and so on were all northeast actors, and the breath and rhythm of everyone's speech when filming were consistent.
Then Zhang Jiayi from Shaanxi and Yu Hewei from Liaoning, who are more suitable for starring, it is self-evident.
On the whole, Yu Hewei is the first choice for Zhou Yi to play the role in "On the Cliff", and Zhang Yimou's choice is not wrong.
With that said, let's return to the question at the beginning of the article:
Zhang Jiayi in "Cliff" and Yu Hewei in "On the Cliff", where is the difference in performance methods?
"Cliff" and "On the Cliff", although they have the same roots, are very different.
One is a "spy war drama" and one is a "spy war movie", which seems to be a word difference, but in fact, the difference is 108,000 miles, movies and TV series, the rhythm of the narrative of the two is different, the actors perform differently, and the audience is moved by the point is also different.
Let's talk about "Cliff" first, for Zhang Jiayi, this is a process of continuous addition.
"Cliff" is a 2012 drama, Zhang Jiayi in 2011 filmed another spy drama "Borrowing a Gun", which is known as the "sister article of "Latent", but because the spy war drama was filmed too lifelike, the audience did not buy it after broadcasting, but Zhang Jiayi still won the best actor of Magnolia with this drama.
After winning the award, Zhang Jiayi took "Borrowing a Gun" as a model and found screenwriter Quan Yong to write the script of "Cliff" first.
Quan Yong first transplanted the story to Harbin, and ran to Harbin to "lurk" for three months before creation, flipped through a large number of historical materials, and wrote mysterious organizations such as "Ussuri Tiger", the MinshengTuan Incident, and the "Comintern Section" into the script.
In the end, "Cliff" began filming, Zhang Jiayi not only played Zhou Yi, but also the artistic director of the play, and Quan Yongxian also gave full play to his creative talent.
The whole drama has 40 episodes, and a lot of space is used to enrich the role of Zhou Yi, such as a large number of long shots to show his inner entanglements, such as doing experiments, setting up a control group of true and false couples to show the special friendship between revolutionaries.
Even the final trick scene is portrayed in great detail.
Zhou Yi began to pretend to be calm, and later when he saw his daughter Sasha, he was embarrassed, these plots left Zhang Jiayi with enough sufficient performance space, and he also gave back to the audience in front of the TV set with his excellent performance.
The prototype of Zhou Yi's role is Xiong Kuohai in "Borrowing a Gun", and after repeated additions, he has become a three-dimensional and vivid revolutionary image on the screen.
In contrast, "On the Cliff", for Yu Hewei, this is a process of subtraction.
The difficulty of spy war films is that the space is limited, and it is difficult to fully express the spy war scenes in 2 hours.
Even the well-recognized spy film ceiling "The Sound of the Wind" is a success in grafting the "Blizzard Mountain Villa Model" into a spy movie, and it is difficult to copy.
The story of "On the Cliff" is set in Harbin in the 1930s, and a group of 4 people from our party returned from the Soviet Union to carry out the "Utra Mission", and Zhou Yi, who has penetrated into the enemy, will also face a severe test.
It is not difficult to see that with the addition of Zhou Yi, the main role has 5 people, and 2 hours to explain their ending, the difficulty can be imagined, which requires the screenwriter to delete the complexity and simplify, and use the most concise lines and shots to shape the role.
And Zhang Yimou's film also has a characteristic, that is, heavy picture and light story, in the film he also spent a lot of space to show the snow scene of Harbin to show the unique color aesthetics in his film, then the narrative space is further compressed, leaving Yu Hewei's performance space is very small.
Screenwriter Quan Yongxian made it clear when talking about the creation of the two works that "Cliff" is the art of screenwriting, while "On the Cliff" is more of a director's art.
Yu Hewei also said in an interview that he often discussed with other actors in the crew how to use the simplest lines to represent the characters.
Yu Hewei's performance in the film can be summed up simply as: forbearance and outburst.
Hidden forbearance is mainly reflected in the scene where he witnessed Zhang Xianchen's torture.
As a secret agent, he originally did not need to start the task, but witnessing the torture of his comrades-in-arms, he could not bear it in his heart, Zhou Yi privately started the task, Yu Hewei used a simple eye play to pinch the character of Zhou Yi, and more blank space allowed the audience to fill it himself.
The outbreak is mainly reflected in the scene where he hangs Lei Jiayin with a rope at the end.
Comrade-in-arms sacrificed, he could do nothing, only to vent his anger on the traitor, only to see him strangle the traitor with a wire in the back seat of the car, the whole process did not make a sound, but we were thrilled to see it, and Yu Hewei accumulated a whole scene of emotions and was also cathartic.
Comprehensive comparison, we found that Yu Hewei and Zhang Jiayi's performances have their own characteristics.
You let Yu Hewei use this kind of performance to act in a TV series is definitely not OK, TV dramas are popular art, the audience at home to go to the bathroom may miss your carefully prepared micro-expressions, the characters can not stand.
You let Zhang Jiayi use this kind of performance to act in the movie is not successful, the movie is so two hours, the actor must pay attention to every second of the shot, the audience's expectations for the movie are also different, who can wait for you to work slowly.
It can be seen that in the two works, both of them have played "Zhou Yi" in their own way, and as an audience, it is good to quietly enjoy their performances.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: A Chicken
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