The birth of the Bona-style "Chinese blockbuster" and the heroism of the new era.
Author | Zhang Yitong
Yu Dong only left Liu Weiqiang for one year, 11 months to be exact.
In September 2018, he called Liu Weiqiang and invited him to film the Sichuan Airlines 5.14 incident. Yu Dong also made another request that the movie will be shown on the National Day file next year.
For such a demanding film, this is almost an impossible task, which also reflects Bona or Yu Dong's usual toughness on schedule issues. In 2014, Bona invested in Han Han’s debut work "Afternoon", Yu Dong demanded that "Afternoon" must be released in the summer file with Guo Jingming's "Little Era 3". He put down his harsh words, "The guarantee of 350 million yuan, One hundred million less a week later.”
The most important thing is that the National Day file in 2019 is a period of great commercial value and publicity. The 70th birthday of New China means that the overall public’s sense of identity with the motherland and mainstream ideology will reach the highest level. Level, especially for young Chinese, this year will be an important punctuation of their home and country feelings.
not only has a tight preparation time for "Captain China", the rest of the blockbuster movies in this period also experienced such a production rhythm, "My Motherland and Me" took a whole year from receiving the task to the official release. The entire cycle of "The Climber" is only 15 months.
and Yu Dong have been working together for a long time. Liu Weiqiang knows the maneuvering leeway of this mainland producer, as well as his judgment on the schedule. From the 2016 Mekong Operation to 2018 Wushuang, Bona has created Two National Day box office champions.
Liu Weiqiang agreed without hesitation, and quickly invested in the creation of the film. During the three months of shooting, the crew only had one day off. In order to further compress the production cycle, the post-editing of "Captain China" was almost synchronized with the shooting. On September 30, as the finale of Bona's "Chinese Pride Trilogy", "Captain of China" was screened in theaters nationwide.
This is a standard Bona-style "Chinese blockbuster". Strong production management capabilities not only allow Bona to have stable output in both large and small periods, but also allow it to show clearer ideas on the product line compared to other film and television companies.
After 2006, Bona was transformed from a distribution company to produce, and Yu Dong's name began to appear more in the production and production columns. The first decade after the millennium was a decade in which the commercial film market in Mainland China grew out of nothing and gradually looked for its own direction. Bona’s exploration was based on Hong Kong films.
From 2007's "Fame" to 2011's "Flying Dragon Gate", Bona filmed a series of heroic stories overhead on the historical background, and established a commercial film in a large number of co-productions between China and Hong Kong. Understanding of the industrial system.
The shadow of the past can be seen in "Take the Tiger Mountain out of Wisdom" released in 2014. Although it is based on classic model dramas, it is full of "joking". The end of the airplane chase drama was finally criticized as "fictional history". The egg form appears.
is also after "Take the Tiger Mountain out of the sky", Yu Dong's understanding of Chinese commercial blockbusters has a more iconic expression, not only using Hollywood-style film language and technology, but also the core of "the big picture of shooting, showing new The Image of China in the Times". The actual formation of
methodology was after the 2016 "Mekong River Action". Based on the creation of genre films, Bona turned to realistic themes and main theme expressions, and maintained close cooperation with the upper-level organization. There are also some more specific changes in the process of , such as the continuous improvement of technical and industrial levels, the expansion of more types from police and bandits, warfare, and the involvement of more occupations and more spiritual values. What
ultimately points to is, in the new cultural context, what kind of hero do young Chinese audiences want to see? What kind of hero do you need to see? Where do they come from? Where are you heading? is at the intersection of film expression, market sentiment and upper-level appeals, Yu Dong's Chinese blockbuster and his hero with a thousand faces.
01 | When the Chinese blockbuster
officially started scripting, Liu Weiqiang really realized what kind of problem he was facing. The core and most difficult problem of
is how to use commercial film language to recreateShow the prototype story. After 2006, in the long-term cooperation with Hong Kong directors and teams, Bona gradually established an understanding of the production process and expression methods of the commercial film industry, and applied it to the narration of Chinese themed stories. This was later summarized by Yu Dong as a breakthrough in the aesthetic value of Bona’s "Chinese blockbuster", "We must use the film context and creative context that young people accept." After "Action Mekong"
, Bona commented The realization of this young creative context breaks through the individual director's personal label and style, and is clearly the direction of "genre film". Yu Dong prefers to use Hong Kong directors. They are experienced in genre filming. As one of the private film companies that produce the most Hong Kong movies, Bona also has rich director resources. The cooperation between Liu Weiqiang and Yu Dong has been in the period of "Infernal Affairs" and was invited to film "The Great Cause of Army Building" in 2014.
Yu Dong confessed at the premiere that "Captain China" is a story that "cannot be filmed at all". It "has no suspense, the people all over the country know", and the core of the commercial film expression is the setting of suspense and conflict. Liu Weiqiang doesn’t even have any reference. Films with empty puzzles are limited globally. There is only one "Emergency Landing" filmed 19 years ago in China. However, Yu Dong and Liu Weiqiang reached a consensus from the beginning, "Captain of China." It must not be "a copy of "Captain Sally".
Liu Weiqiang kept thinking about how to provide enough excitement to "make the audience happy", finally decided to make "Captain China" an action movie, instead of "Captain Sally"-like characters biography. The main line of the story revolves around the emergence and resolution of the danger, and another problem arises. It took only 34 minutes from the problem of the aircraft to the final safety backup. However, Liu Weiqiang needed to present a two-hour movie and ensure that it continued. Wonderfulness. The
movie reproduces most of the real details, such as the co-pilot being sucked out of the window, and the complex mountain conditions. Liu Weiqiang has expanded part of the content under reasonable imagination, and these details have also become an important factor in the ups and downs of the story, such as passengers who are emotionally out of control in extreme situations.
Although the real incident happened on a clear and cloudless morning, in order to further strengthen the dramatic conflict and increase the visual impact, Liu Weiqiang adapted the original dangerous situation and added thunder clouds. He communicated with American special effects companies and made dozens of impressions to achieve the best visual effects.
In order to restore the turbulence in the air to the greatest extent, Bona invested 30 million yuan and commissioned Xi’an Aircraft Manufacturing Factory to build an Airbus A319 simulator with a 1:1 ratio, and wrote a new program that can realize the three-section cabin with different The frequency was bumped respectively.
These efforts have created a typical Hong Kong movie "spectacle" in the film. The thunder and lightning, accompanied by the panic calls of passengers, the violently turbulent plane passing through the dangerous clouds, the adrenaline of the audience is fully mobilized. .
Bona has always spared no effort to present this kind of "spectacle", and Yu Dong can give enough time and money. From the official reception of Yu Dong's invitation to the final shooting of , Tsui Hark spent three full years preparing for "Take the Tiger Mountain out of the sky", and the production of Tiger CG took more than two years. During this time, Ang Lee’s "Fantastic Drifting of the Youth Pie" was released, and Tsui Hark, who was ready to boot, saw the tiger special effects in the movie, and decided to slow down and make the passage of "Yang Zirong Going Up the Mountain to Fight the Tiger" better. Start again.
"Operation Mekong" originally planned to invest 150 million yuan. After the release of "Fast and Furious", Yu Dong decided to invest another 50 million yuan to ensure that the production level can be pushed to the extreme. The production cost of "Operation Red Sea" reached 1.1 billion yuan, a large number of real shots of the blasting scenes were taken, and a one-minute action scene was filmed in more than ten hours. Director Lin Chaoxian said that since it is the fighting part that makes the audience pay for the movie, it is better to make the fighting part to the extreme and not spend extra effort to set up the clues of the literary play.
02 | The hero with a thousand faces
Liu Weiqiang decided to add some side information to Bi Nan, the flight attendant played by Yuan Quan, and this was the result of Bi Nan’s tired eyes after seeing the couple, and many times in the film, turning the ring finger to marriage The details of the ring.
Yu Dong suggested extending the movie time to two hours and adding more passages of the crew members' daily lives, "this way the audience will feel more comfortable" and also show more of the crew as ordinary people. When he first heard 5.14 He was shocked by the news of the Sichuan Airlines incident, "They are the heroes of contemporary China, and they are also ordinary people around everyone."
heroism has always been the core theme of Bona's "Chinese blockbuster". To a certain extent, this is an objective need for commercial film story expression. The plot often advances with the personal growth and destiny of the characters. It is the usual routine of Hollywood hero movies.
"The movie is to be a hero. Because the audience needs to see heroes, they need to see heroes who can come out in the face of difficulties." Lin Chaoxian once said in an interview. The question of
is what should heroism in the context of Chinese culture look like? Continuing the idea of a series of Hong Kong hero movies such as "Huang Feihong", Bona’s early films often used historical characters as prototypes, but the story is completely original and original outside of the historical background, full of depictions of heroes. The director's personal artistic imagination.
It was the first time that Yu Dong saw the story of "Seeing the Dragon Resurrection" in the form of a novel. This story director Li Rengang created it for three years and has even published it as a book. He also designed all the art images himself, and the story is full of An unofficial and personal imagination of the elderly Zhao Yun and the Three Kingdoms. In 2008, before the movie was released, Yu Dong made a poster slogan for "Seeing the Dragon Resurrection", which read "Reshape Zhao Yun and look at the Three Kingdoms". In an interview, the lead actor Andy Lau said, "This is a film for the Three Kingdoms, but Movies watched by people who don’t study history.”
, released in 2009, is also a fictional story based on historical background. Director Chen Desen used the historical fact of "Sun Yat-sen could not go to Hong Kong for 5 years" and some related rumors to fabricate the story of a group of unknown heroes protecting Sun Yat-sen. The boundaries of the reinterpretation of history continued to tighten afterwards. At the end of 2014, "Take the Tiger Mountain out of Wisdom" was released. Bona had to release the plane chase scene that was the climax of the whole film in the easter egg, because the censorship department believed that the plot of Zuoshan Eagle owning the plane was suspected of "fictional history."
2016's "Operation Mekong" was a turning point. After that, with realism as the core, Bona found a new direction in the creation of heroes.
Some basic hero shaping methods are retained. That is what Yu Dong said, in addition to the breakthrough of aesthetic value, Bona's breakthrough in the ideological dimension of the "main theme" of the film refers to the details of the heroes' lives beyond the feelings of the home country.
Lin Chaoxian designed a character like Fang Xinwu when filming "Operation Mekong". As an intelligence officer, he wandered in a gray area. In order to obtain information, he could use a helicopter to hang upside down. In the end, he failed to overcome his inner feelings in the confrontation with the prisoner. Hatred, chose to shoot. This is a character with a strong Lin Chaoxian color. In his past works, he is good at portraying such a "weak mortal", wandering on the edge, in self-contradiction.
We began to allow a non-"Gao Daquan" hero image to appear on the screen, and began to allow the hero to have a "weak" side . In "Operation Red Sea", the machine gunner stone left the sentence "It hurts." "The captain of the special service squadron played by Huang Xiaoming in "Heroes of Fire" caused his comrades to suffer from PTSD because of command failure. In "Emergency Rescue" being filmed, Peng Yuyan once again played a role in overcoming the shadow of the accident and completing self-salvation.
Another continuation is Bona’s focus on unsung heroes. During the release of "October Besieged City", Chen Desen was interviewed and described it as a movie depicting unknown heroes. "It is not necessarily the 72 martyrs of Huanghuagang who made the revolution. There are many unknown heroes below. These people are very real. "
In the realism theme, this attention is manifested in the excavation and display of unknown true stories, as well as the shaping of the heroic images of anti-drug police, navy soldiers, and firefighters.
"Chinese Captain" spends a lot of space on a series of operations inside the airport before the plane takes off, as well as the rapid cooperation of various underground departments after the plane accident. Liu Weiqiang believes that what he is shooting is not just a hero crew, but " "Civil aviation people", "the successful alternate flight is not the result of a few people, but the result of the collaboration of various departments of the entire civil aviation system." At the same time, out of the context of confrontation, this value expression is more specific and even meaningful. The above is more personal. uses "Heroes of Fire", "Captain of China", "Emergency RescueThe second-generation Bona-style "Chinese blockbuster" represented by "Aid" puts the topic and perspective on personal responsibility. Yu Dong has repeatedly mentioned the inspiration of Chinese entrepreneur stories, and he intends to use these struggle stories as alternative film materials.
03 | Guoyujia
"Chinese Captain" needs a producer. Liu Weiqiang has recruited his long-time partner Li Jinwen. He doesn't need Huang Jianxin's help now. In 2016, Liu Weiqiang was invited by Yu Dong to film one of the trilogy of "The Founding of the Army". Because he was not sure how to show the story of the great man, he asked Huang Jianxin to be his own producer. The latter were "The Founding of the Country" and "The Founding of the Party". Co-director of ".
In 1999, Huang Jianxin's film "Tell Your Secret" became the first film released by Bona, which also opened up a close cooperation between him and Yu Dong for two decades. After serving as the president of the Chinese Film Directors Association in 2003, Huang Jianxin’s personal energy gradually shifted from directing to production and production. He successively produced many works such as "Take the Name Certificate" and "Take the Tiger Mountain Out of Wisdom" and filmed again after 2010. A series of historical theme movies. The director system of the current National Day box office champion "My Motherland and Me" is also Huang Jianxin.
Huang Jianxin has a pioneering perspective on history and politics, and at the same time has a good grasp of the censorship system and expression standards. During the production of Operation Mekong, he also used his trial experience to enlighten Lin Chaoxian.
Huang Jianxin is also the producer of "October Besieged City", the film that Chen Kexin called the "private theme" is also Bona's last "active" historical film. Chen Desen hopes to show "a group of heroes who are not all sacrificed for the revolution" in the film. A classic clip is that the night before the departure, the girl she likes asks Ah Si, "Do you know who will protect tomorrow?" He shook his head.
Li Chongguang said in the film that "the whole of China is involved." Under this non-subjective will, the close connection between the destiny of the individual and the country is gloomy and painful, but as Chen Kexin said, " It is shocking to think that such heavy things have happened in these places where we are still going today. "
It may be difficult for us to see such expressions in today's "Chinese blockbusters". From historical events to realism, to a certain extent we have avoided discussing some issues. After "Operation Mekong", Bona maintained close cooperation with the upper-level organizations in the creation of "Chinese blockbuster" and received strong support from the state agencies.
"Captain of China" is jointly produced by China Civil Aviation News Agency and Sichuan Aviation Culture Media Advertising Co., Ltd. Before the filming of the film, all the leading actors received training at the Sichuan Aviation Training Center, and two Sichuan Aviation consultants followed the group throughout the filming. The Civil Aviation Administration of China provided a lot of support. Hundreds of professionals participated in the filming. The Civil Aviation Administration also specially approved some scenes of the film to be filmed at Chengdu Shuangliu Airport and the Southwest Air Traffic Management Bureau of Civil Aviation.
"Operation Mekong" received the support of the Ministry of Public Security when filming, not only called a large number of top-secret files, but also used the real office of the Deputy Minister of Public Security for filming. In "Operation Red Sea", a large number of active naval equipment appeared. At the launching ceremony of "Emergency Rescue", as the representative of the joint producer, Zhu Jialin, President of People's Communications Publishing House, attended the ceremony. The support of
means that the expression of film and television content must be appropriate and measured. Yu Dong believes that "Chinese blockbuster films" should "shoot a big picture and show the image of China in the new era". The image of this new era is the "request for justice for China" in Operation Mekong, the great nationalism and international responsibility under the powerful military force in Operation Red Sea, and the international humanitarianism in Emergency Relief.
But this is not a unilateral value output, but a "collusion", the audience made their own choices with their feet. After a decade of rapid economic development and rising international status, Chinese young people are in an unprecedented "age of self-confidence". They have established new recognition of their nation, country, and even ideology, and hope to be included in the cultural content. Be confirmed. What they want to see may no longer be "the pain of civilization" but "the happiness of civilization".
There is a scene in "Chinese Captain". After the plane is safely prepared for landing, one person asks another person at the gate of the Air Traffic Control Bureau, do you know how many people fly in the sky every day? "It's 500,000, that's amazing." He said, the music rang in due course. This song"I Love the Blue Sky of the Motherland" was selected by Zhang Hanyu, who played the captain in the film, and was created in 1962 by Yan Su, a famous military musician in New China.
