Produced by | Blog World Entertainment Group
Author Guo Tie
Edit solitary pigeon
In director Liu's hometown, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, the funeral is said to be "big"-"le" is "le" for "leaving clothes". How many branches of life end in a funeral?
The word "great event" in the film "great event in life" came from this. The funeral film starring Zhu Yilong was officially released on June 24, and the second-hand rose sang at the top of her lungs in the theme song: "Go to heaven, nothing is important in life except death." In the background, amid the noise of gongs and drums, four "bad children", namely Mo Sanmei, Wu Xiaowen, the fart baby in Sichuan, the rotten king in Guangxi, and Yin Baixue, the prodigal girl in the northeast, are facing a series of human events with vicissitudes of life, laughter and tears.
This is a funeral comedy. Different from the usual sad and serious atmosphere of funeral theme, under the lens of Liu, who was born in a funeral family, the funeral ceremony was filled with the enthusiasm of ordinary people. The protagonists, speaking a hot and crisp dialect, shuttled between ministries, singing and shouting, clamoring for nothing, and approaching the philosophy of life and death contained in it.
Life and death are each other's mirrors. In Liu's view, aiming at death is to "stand at the end of death and return to life how to live". Taking death as a mirror can untie the knot that the living can't untie.
Liu has been familiar with white things since childhood.
His ancestors were related to the funeral industry, and his grandfather and grandfather were carpenters specializing in coffin making. As a child, my yard was always filled with coffins made of fish fillets, mulberries and pines and cypresses. Whenever there is a funeral in Shiliba Township, grandpa will make a coffin for others, and grandma will tell him young, "When a person dies on the ground, there is a star in the sky." People in the funeral industry plant stars in the sky.
In the eyes of children, this ritual around death is not terrible. He followed his grandfather to the funeral and saw "delicious food, fun, opera singers and movies". There were few literary and artistic activities in rural areas at that time. Looking back now, Liu feels that it was White Matter that became his literary enlightenment.
Before becoming a film director, Wei Liu TV Station produced a column drama "This Event in the Village". This program is about rural life, and it tells the real life story of parents who are short of food and clothing, daily necessities. Liu Shoushou 17. Out of his interest in funeral, he came into contact with many things related to funeral during that time and wrote several stories about funeral.
On 20 17, the TV program stopped broadcasting, and Liu switched to the film industry. He has always had a dream in his heart, that is, to make a funeral movie, but he feels that he has not found a grasp-he lacks a core to connect the funeral stories accumulated over the years.
17 years working experience in TV station makes him pursue truth almost by professional instinct. In 20 18, he went to Baiyangdian to collect wind, and a story caught him: one summer, a child accidentally sank into the water, and rescuers went down three people, but unfortunately failed to save the child. Finally, the eldest brother of a body salvage team risked his life, dived into the water and fished up the child's body.
That is, at the moment of hearing the story, Liu's heart sank. He felt that he "suddenly understood the high point of this profession" and he finally found a grip.
I really started writing in March of 20 19. One night after work, Liu saw a truck parked in front of the funeral shroud shop next to the TV station, moving in and out wreaths, urns and other supplies. There is also a little girl sitting next to the coffee table in the shop, doing her homework.
This is a very unusual picture. In Liu's view, "it has the feeling of spring." He found the theme he wanted to write in this painting and immediately finished the first edition. In life events, there is also a funeral shop "Heaven", where there is a little girl. This shop is composed of a "star-planting family", who are several people who "plant stars in the sky" The background of the story is life, warmth and fireworks.
Before the filming of "Life Events", Liu asked many people to read the script, and many of the guiding opinions were to moderately cut children's dramas. "Otherwise, it will be difficult to implement and such children will not be found." But, insist on Liu Qu. He knew that the story needed to be cut from a child's perspective. He must need such an energetic and innocent little girl to face the big problem of life and death.
The theme of his funeral film is "growing up". It is not only the growth of the little girl Wu Xiaowen, but also the growth of all the four.
The "Heaven" group consists of a Wuhan Ya, a Sichuan Wa, a Guangxi Zi and a Northeast Cattle. They are neither related by blood nor by geography. Liu used the word "out of order" to describe their state-they are alien who are excluded from the original social relations, so they dissociate and regroup to find the meaning of life again.
Mo Sanmei, played by Zhu Yilong, was full of anger soon after her release from prison, hiding her softness and fragility with a hard and rough shell; Yin Baixue, played by Liu Lu, is cold in appearance but hot in heart; Wang, played by you, is a nobody with no great ambition.
Wu Xiaowen, played by Yang Enyou, is the introduction to string everyone together. She always wears two jiaozi with red hair ropes and carries red tassels. She rushed out in the image of Nezha, full of exuberant energy and courage. In order to ask Mo Sanmei for Grandma in a Box, she broke into these people's lives and aroused their life changes.
For a time, Liu was very upset about how to find a little actor to play the role of Wu Xiaowen. But "maybe people in Sri Lanka only know when they meet a rainbow", and the performance of the little actor Yang En far exceeded his imagination. At the shooting scene, Yang En always gave Liu an unexpected performance and praised "Little Genius".
For Zhu Yilong, who plays Mo Sanmei, Liu's comment is "Don't be fooled by his handsome appearance". Many viewers may think that the role of Zhu Yilong is subversive, but in Liu's view, Zhu Yilong has a life experience in Wuhan and can feel Mo Sanmei's "rough, immature and helpless" dimension. When he first decided to cooperate, he thought that the matching degree between Zhu Yilong and Mo Sanmei was 50%-but this figure became 90% in the preview and 100% in the boot.
"When we finished, he was completely beyond our initial imagination. He is a surprise. " Liu told the blogosphere.
Wang, played by Liu, is a clown on the stage of Beijing opera. The verdict designed for this role in the script is "People are timid and short-lived, Li Kui jy is cute, and Zhang Fei is clever inside". The background color under its rough appearance is "Meng", even a little childhood surplus. Wang Ge enriched this role. He always has a lot of small moves at the scene, such as biting his nails, to show the negative emotions such as anxiety of the role.
Yin, played by Liu Lu, appeared many times in the quartet, but most of the plays "don't focus on him, and may even have no lines". Liu knows that this situation is difficult for actors to deal with, but Liu Lu has done this "few words" role well. There is a scene where several people break up with their third brother. Yin also has no lines, but the camera is in front of her. She only uses few body movements and facial expressions to convey that kind of anger and distress. In Liu's view, "she doesn't have to use lines"
Luo Jingmin plays the role of Lao Mo in The Events of Life, and is the father of Mo Sanmei, the protagonist. When he mentioned him, Liu couldn't help feeling, "I can fully afford the title of old artist." He is a person who pays great attention to basic skills: for this role, Luo Jingmin practiced Wuhan dialect word for word with the dialect teacher, and went to the park to observe the elderly with similar conditions, which made the role realistic.
It was Dzhanis who surprised many people in the film. Although there are not many scenes, Liu feels that Janice "presents a precise state in every scene". When shooting the first scene, Janice spoke with tears in her eyes and a sad tone in her cuteness, which made Liu immediately realize, "She can handle that very complicated emotion."
When filming on the set, Liu especially likes to watch Zhu Yilong and Janice collide with each other in Wuhan dialect. "This rhythm is particularly pleasant," he told them at the time. "You two Wuhan dialects must be a system." This familiarity makes the film's life atmosphere more intense-and the life atmosphere is what the funeral story of life events needs most.
"Funeral comedy" is a prominent label of "life events".
Although it happened in a funeral shop, Liu deliberately proposed a "strong contrast" approach. Throughout the film, the funeral shop is next to the wedding dress shop. Funeral shops are black and white, but the stories and characters are colorful and lifelike. In Liu's view, he wants to implant a topic of "maybe everyone doesn't talk much" in a way closer to the audience.
"There are two things in life that are most disgraceful, one is birth, and the other is death." Liu concluded. At these two moments, people lost all their autonomy and relied entirely on the help of others. So "the doctor who delivered your baby is as great as the undertaker who sent you away". It seems unfair to him that funeral practitioners are taboo.
Liu thinks that making a movie is a question of "taking the law, getting the law". "It's not like the water in the sea, which can be scooped away at any time. In fact, we are still creating in a relatively limited time space. " The original version of the film was called "Going to Heaven", and there were many funeral stories he collected during his tour, but in the end they had to be selected and deleted, so they could not all be presented in the film.
One of the stories that impressed him deeply and insisted on keeping was The Funeral of the Living. When collecting wind, Liu learned that there was an old man who had never married and had children in his life. When he arrived, he spent all his money on his funeral. "He was dying to see what his funeral was like."
Liu kept this story because he thought it was related to the theme of the film, that is, "Standing at the end of death, looking back to see how to live more meaningfully and what to cherish."
On the important day of life, the crew had a big drink. Liu feels like a wedding day. It's a long story with mixed feelings, such as "completing a major event in life, but it seems to be standing at another starting line". He felt that he was not as excited as he thought, and even didn't shoot enough.