In the movie poster, the cg character Red Armor Samurai and the live-action character fight across dimensions.
From George Lucas's fulcrum in the 1970s to open the door to a new world of imagination with Star Wars, to American fantasy blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia that have constantly refreshed our visual experience since the beginning of this century, a new generation of young people has called for the art of cinema spanning three centuries, bringing them fantastic stories, transcendental feelings, and metaphysical expressions to satisfy their cultural imaginations outside the material real world.
However, while Chinese films have repeatedly set box office records, we have to face the fact that due to factors such as imagination and industrialization, the fantasy exploration of the East is faltering. How to anchor the coordinates for Chinese fantasy blockbusters and how to find the cultural genes of Chinese fantasy themes are all roads that few people have traveled.
Today, that is about to change. At the time when the Spring Festival of the Year of the Ox once again broke the record of Chinese film history, "Assassination of a Novelist" provided a new value yardstick for Chinese fantasy films in many aspects such as the excavation of imagination and the exploration of the road of industrialization.
Where is the imagination
"Assassination of a Novelist" tells a fantasy story of "mortals killing gods". "When the whole world doesn't agree with your beliefs, do you want to stick with them, and whether you firmly believe that if you stick to them, something will eventually change." The film's director Lu Yang introduced.
"Although the nucleus of the story is not new, how to place this nucleus in two parallel worlds entangled with each other and hold up this nucleus with the shell of a fantasy movie is an experimental exploration without a frame of reference." Fu Binxing, vice president of Huace Film and Television, the film's producer, said.
Fantasy is an authentic import. Throughout the history of the development of Western literature, fantasy literature belongs to the more ancient literary tradition - fantasy literature. The British writer Tolkien defined "fantasy" this way: it is necessary to create another world that is independent of the real world, a fantasy world, but a complete, rich and real world.
Lu Yang said that the original uses a novelist and a lonely father as mirror images of each other, conveying the power of faith. "That's what particularly struck me, and that's why I wanted to turn it into a fantasy movie."
However, turning serious literature into imaginative images is harder than imagined. The normal film script writing time is about 1 year, while the script adaptation of "The Assassination of the Novelist" took 21 months.
"From novel to movie, that gully is particularly huge." Lu Yang said that the very stylized things in the novel, those fantasy descriptions, and the "garden where the path is bifurcated" style of writing, transplanted into the movie, must be re-outlined. Whether it is to bring the audience an unprecedented freshness, or to build a believable otherworld, it requires a thin imagination. In fact, the lack of imagination is a prominent problem that Chinese films have long been criticized for.
"We need to use enough details to solidly support the character, including his demands, desires, actions, and emotions." In Lu Yang's view, the gaps in the details of the novel to the film must be filled with imagination and creativity. What does Palace Hill look like in Cloud City? How is the style of the ferry port determined? What kind of atmosphere is the street? Both imagination and re-creation are required. Later, the team used the different animals in the Classic of Mountains and Seas to classify each workshop.
After 21 months of setting, deducing, designing, writing, pushing down, and repeating, "Assassination of a Novelist" takes a bold step — different from the conventions constructed in the West, the fantasy world that explores within the established rule order, this time, Chinese fantasy has found its own unique genes in challenging the order and breaking the rules.
A key
How to present this imaginative world?
When scientific progress led to technological leaps, the film industry was the force that loosened the shackles of imagination. For the movie "Assassination of a Novelist", the key to opening up a higher and farther space for imagination depends on visual effects.
2,000 concept designs, 2,095 storyboards; more than 20 studios with an area of up to 170,000 square meters; 100 cameras, 20 computers, 120 motion-capture cameras...
"In the director's setting, the red-haired ghost was originally a human being, wanting to become a god, but became a demon because of desire." Xu Jian, a visual effects director, said that this is a big villain and needs to present the audience with a "feeling of making all thoughts gray".
In order to accurately represent this digital role, Xu Jian and his team spent three years before and after. The red-haired ghost is 15 meters tall, has 4 arms, and has a red hair and blue face – which is something that the audience can see clearly. Those who really create a sense of realism and immersion are the ultimate details such as 400,000 hairs, 900,000 pores, muscle deformation when making expressions, and expansion of blood vessels.
"To what extent are we going to go? I think that if such a creature really came to you in reality, you wouldn't even have the idea of running away. ”
To achieve this goal, Xu Jian successively studied the bone and muscle distribution of the red-haired ghost, its expression, breathing, sweat and even the curvature of its eyelashes. "There are sweat hairs in the pores, and when you look back on the light, you will see a small layer of fluff, otherwise the skin will become rubber." The direction in which the eyelashes grow will have an effect on the mental state of the red-haired ghost. ”
In order to make the technology accurately support the world in the story, the visual effects team also solved a world-class puzzle: to make the red-haired ghost's pores "move" with the skin and muscles.
Need more "adventures"
Walking out of the theater, some fantasy fans and anime fans directly called for "two brushes", and some fans wrote in the Douban short review: "Shocking! No film gives me such freshness. ”
Behind this shock is a five-year adventure. When Lu Yang took over this project, he was still full of black hair, and now his hair was half white. "It's boiling, but it's worth it." Lu Yang said that here is a problem that I have never faced before: how to convince the audience to believe in the fantasy world we give them, and follow the protagonist to adventure, to see his adventures on the adventure road, the laws of physics he believes in have collapsed, and he is still insisting - we want to express that there are other possibilities in this world, waiting for the adventurers to confirm and create.
Just as the value conveyed by "Assassination of a Novelist", the creative team of "Assassination of a Novelist" embarks on a journey full of adventures, and it is also a long and obstructed road compared to the flat land under their feet.
"When I was discussing with the action director, my request was, don't show me what I've seen, let's get something new." In Lu Yang's view, every film has a new breakthrough, which is what Chinese films should do.
When Guo Fan filmed "The Wandering Earth", he lamented that the gap between Chinese fantasy films and Hollywood is more than 20 years. Shortening the gap requires one adventurer after another to face the difficulties. On the way of Chinese films from "slash and burn" to industrialization, "Assassination of a Novelist" took over the torch of "The Wandering Earth" and optimized industrial processes such as action, art, and virtual shooting to the greatest extent in a collaborative mode, shortening this gap again.
The end of the interview is the end of the Spring Festival in the Year of the Ox, during which there are constantly pop-up messages for apps: the box office has reached a new high. This news is exciting and at the same time causes people to wonder: after becoming the "world's largest box office", has it time for Chinese films to dig beyond the box office?
"In this film, we always have to run to the far side of art. Sometimes people say that movies are useless, that art is just a distant cry or cry, and what does it have to do with our lives? It is better to seek something real and immediate. But I still believe in the power of art to shape people. Lu Yang said that this is worth our risk, and Chinese films need a spirit of adventure. (Reporter Zhang Manzi)
Source: Xinhua Daily Telegraph