author | Fig
editor | Mingming
If there is one sentence to describe the TV series " bottom line ", it is "law is the bottom line of morality, and judges guard the bottom line of society."
The familiar themes of public security and prosecutors have increased year by year, and this time, the court theme has finally ushered in its own "explosive style". On September 19th, the TV series "Bottom Line" was broadcast on Hunan Satellite TV , and immediately achieved good results on both ends of the station network. When the theme of the rule of law and the Internet era collide, the sparks generated are no trivial matter.
"Bottom Line" fully grasps the characteristics of cases in the new era and new scenes, and digs out themes and contradictions that are more resonant with the public. The purpose of vigilance and reflection. From the embarrassing "Lei Xingyu case" at the beginning, to the "Mu Ziqi case" and "Tang Xiaoyun case" that made the audience angry, and then to the "female judge's cross-border divorce case" that made the screenwriter devote his thoughts and thoughts, each Behind this dossier, there are joys and sorrows. The origin of the story of
is that Supreme Court wants to make a court-themed TV series that the common people love to watch and can go out of the circle, Xiaoxiang Film Group Dangran Pictures is the producer, hoping to find a screenwriter who expresses youthful expression, such an opportunity Next, the couple screenwriters Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang became attached to "The Bottom Line".
has worked together to create TV drama scripts for many times. It was the first time that they came into contact with court themes. After the drama was broadcast, the screenwriter CP let go of their concerns about the "high threshold for watching dramas" and that the audience could not understand them. Everyone did not accept the relatively serious court themes. What an obstacle, it was a bit unexpected for them. But at the same time, Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang also have absolute confidence in the professionalism and execution of the producer Dangran Films, and believe that this is a pleasant creative experience of 1+1>2. How did
's addictive courtroom drama come about?
brought the timeline back to the beginning of the production of the series. Li Xiaoliang admitted that the biggest difficulty in the creation of "The Bottom Line" was the professional characteristics of the judges. Among them, "thinking" is that is difficult to show in film and television, and film and television must be visual , audible. On the one hand, the "sit and talk" part of the judge in reality is far more than the immersive detective, so the "suspense" that is very popular with the audience will no longer exist. Therefore, whether the audience can watch it and adapt to such a rhythm of expression is a problem that the screenwriters are more worried about before collecting the wind.
Li Xiaoliang said, "The judge's play is different from the play of the public security and prosecutors. It is equivalent to 'waiting for the case to come' and filing the case first. The judge judges whether the legal facts are established based on some information submitted by the public security and the procuratorate, and what should be used. Their work is very static, rarely going out to investigate or wrestling, it is an invisible 'brainstorming' ." There are layers of rules and regulations, each judge is responsible for his own judgment results for life, and even leaders cannot interfere with the results. The attributes of the independent trial of the group of judges, the isolated and rigorous work status, and the entanglement of characters can lead to dramatic conflicts It also increases the difficulty for TV series. "From the perspective of drama, we need to make all the protagonists intersect as much as possible, so that the drama will look good, but in reality, when a case is going on, judges try independently, and non-collegiate panel members cannot interfere, and they cannot meet with lawyers in private. This is very troublesome for us to write a play, so we are constantly trying to find a balance and ask the judges, although they cannot meet, but I must complete this play task, what should I do." Li Xiaoliang said.
Fei Huijun believes that, compared to character building, the hardest part this time is writing the case. On the whole, we must grasp to reflect the new era, new journey, and new contradictions, a case closely related to the lives of contemporary audiences. The specific case should be expressed in three levels. The first is the popularization of the law, which must be considered at the legal level; the second is the expression at the social level, which will resonate with the audience; the third is to look good at . "Most cases have a very lengthy trial process, so how to make it look good through dramatic processing is what we have to consider." Enjoy the story before thinking about the legal or social issues in it.
What's interesting is that many people mistakenly think that the cases in the play are real, but the logic of literary and artistic creation and the work of the court is exactly the opposite: the court can make a judgment before there is a case, and creation is to have a goal first and then choose a path— - First establish what theme you want to express, and then work backwards. All the cases in the play are recreated to express the theme and have no direct relationship with real cases. In the show, the judge simply makes a fictional decision based on a fictional plot. Of course, it is based on the internal logic of the work of Chinese courts in reality - people-oriented, the case is closed, and the righteousness is corrected.
took the case of Mu Ziqi, which received a lot of attention from the Internet, as an example. While doing their homework, Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang found that there were similar cases in China, Thailand, and the United States. In the face of the heated discussion about the case on the Internet, when the screenwriter created and conceived of this case, focused on the defendant's "dangerous escalation obligation to inform".
Li Xiaoliang said, "From the perspective of screenwriters, it is easy to conclude a purely vicious incident. We will choose a case that has a certain room for legal discussion. As for how the family will discuss the deceased, that is not our focus, we are this story. The core point of view is the legal issue between girlfriends. Has the girlfriend fulfilled her duty to inform about the danger and the escalation of the danger? Mu Ziqi's assistance to Ge Qingqing caused Mu Ziqi's death. Does Ge Qingqing have any laws in it? Responsibility? We want to tell the public through this case, what is the standard of this law, not to create a hilarious point for everyone to discuss."
In "Bottom Line", the results of each case are almost on the surface Yes, but in the process of the court reaching the result, the different voices of all parties are chaotic and complicated, and there is no absolute right or wrong. This is the characteristic of court drama. While the law cannot judge morality, the judge also told the screenwriters a point of view: The formulation of the law itself is morally inclined, and it is difficult for you to completely separate the law and the morality.
As for how to distinguish the three dramas of the public security, procuratorate and law, Fei Huijun said that the logic has been straightened out in the early stage, "If the drama point, plot point and setting point of this story are suitable for both court drama and public security and procuratorate drama, it must not be us. I want it. Once a case enters the court, basically who the criminal murderer is, there is a high probability that it will not be wrong, and the audience will know it. So our focus will not be on strong plot and suspense, court drama The focus must be on the three aspects of law, reason, and emotion."
adds some fireworks to the drama about the rule of law
Because of the epidemic in Shanghai, Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang and the actors spent more than three months in the crew, and had a meeting with the main actors and actresses. Lots of collisions. In Fei Huijun's words, the entire crew of "The Bottom Line" is a detail freak.
At the beginning, Fei Huijun's impression of Jin Dong was " He Han ", the representative of the urban elite. Later, she found that Jin Dong in life is very similar to Fang Yuan in the play, is not cold, good at Zhang Luo , love to worry, very "far away". The "Changsha accent" of the protagonist in the drama is what Jin Dong decided to join after he went to Changsha to collect wind. This is an unprecedented attempt by Jin Dong, which has driven the "dialect craze" of the entire crew, improvisations created by interacting with some "old partners" of Wang Jinsong and , and it has also become a hot search. The rustic intimacy of .
"I don't know if you have noticed, Fang Yuan always bows his back slightly when he inspects work on weekdays, but when he puts on the robe in court, he is straight. When I see the finished film, I also Very surprised, it is very different from his previous character image, I saw his breakthrough, I asked the people around, and they felt the same way, which proved that it was not my own filter." Fei Huijun said with a smile.
Cheng Yi of the younger generation also talked with the screenwriters about the idea of Zhou Yi'an's role, and what acting method to use, everyone discussed for a long time. Those tongue-in-cheek legal lines, Cheng Yi unscripted and recited with the screenwriter before joining the group. Later, when looking at the material, Fei Huijun found out that he played Zhou Yi'an, who belonged to him alone, a Zhou Yi'an that she liked. "Sometimes Cheng Yi is very eager to ask us to discuss the role, and I can feel his heart that wants to collide with us. Later, when I watched a crying scene of Cheng Yi, I felt that this actor had a 'real' character in him. 'The thing is, he can impress me."
Usually, in serious realistic themes, there is an impulsive young man who has the courage to "block the gun" and find the truth. In "The Bottom Line", this role is assumed by the heroine Ye Xin. Yes, and as always, it suffers from the controversy of character design. Fei Huijun had asked the actor Cai Wenjing earlier, if she was afraid of playing such an unpleasant role in the early stage, Cai Wenjing answered with a persistent energy, "I'm not afraid, I just want to play her cute." So even though the heroine is currently in controversy, Fei Huijun still thinks that Cai Wenjing, who "has that fire in her heart", is adding points to this role.
"When we wrote it, we had a premonition that this character was unpleasant. First, we knew what kind of character would suffer in the early stage; second, this character was the character I wanted, our social environment , especially in the system, there is a very young man, she is immature, but she has always been yearning for fairness and justice, yearning for a higher goal, I hope everyone will give some patience to such a role, because she is the The portrayal of hot-blooded youth in their twenties is also our hope for the future." In the interview with
, Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang have repeatedly emphasized that "The Bottom Line" is a collective achievement project. Under the circumstance that the shooting of each case is equivalent to the volume of a short play, the professional collision and excellence of the writer, director, and actor, and the painstaking and perfect restoration of the art scene are all adding points to the series.
's top-down determination is what Li Xiaoliang believes is the biggest advantage of "Bottom Line" different from other projects. "We can only succeed, not fail. This is the common idea of the leaders of the Supreme Court and all the colleagues in the production team. The mental and material resources that everyone invests in must be different. So the script of this drama has It's difficult, but it's even more difficult in practice."
From romantic dramas to realism, the "180 degrees" of couple screenwriters turned to challenges
Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang worked together as husband and wife in many dramas. Fei Huijun described the two The advantages of people are very complementary. In "The Bottom Line", Li Xiaoliang is responsible for exporting values, and Fei Huijun pays more attention to the emotions in the script. But looking at their past resumes, urban topic dramas and youth idol dramas occupy half of their works. This time, the theme type and writing style have undergone a 180-degree change, so that the audience can feel it: Has this pair of screenwriter CPs been "robbed"?
learned from the interview that in fact, the two first started writing original urban topic dramas such as " Second Child Era ", " Weekend Parents ", etc. For them, it is not a sudden transformation, but more like years of accumulation After reaching a certain level, a new outlet for expression is ushered in. A group of reliable people get together to do the right thing under the fate of fate.
"The job of screenwriting often cannot rely on inspiration or talent. We have been working on emotional dramas and topical dramas before, but as we start a family and have children, there are more things that we want to express as creators, and everyone's match. It has also reached a balance. happened to have the theme "Bottom Line", which can best accommodate all aspects of our life and social observations over the years. No other theme can have such a big expressionIn addition, I met reliable leaders, especially professional production companies and actors. thank you all for feeling that we were 'taken away', that's proof we've made progress. " Fei Huijun said.
talked about the most impressive cases in "Bottom Line". The answers given by Fei Huijun and Li Xiaoliang are not the Mu Ziqi and Tang Xiaoyun cases that are currently the most concerned on the Internet. Li Xiaoliang said, if you want to If you want to pick a case and re-read it, it is actually the "drunk down building case"; and Fei Huijun talked about the divorce case of a female judge with Zuo Xiaoqing as the protagonist, because in this case, she poured out her emotional expression for professional women.
Some people commented that Fei Huijun did not have a gentle woman in her writings, and Fei Huijun also admitted that she was indeed not a gentle woman, and secondly, she proposed that 'tenderness' itself is a kind of male society's gaze. "Although this case is not a collision of multiple viewpoints The strong plot, but because I myself am a career woman, I have poured a lot of my personal confusion into this case, women must give up something in order to do some career. Some say she's ruthless when it comes to dealing with things, but that's the reality we face. So you can see that my script involves divorce, and in the end I let her go. "
does the right thing with the right person, regardless of fate or calamity. Fei Huijun believes that seeing the efforts of the whole group during the filming of was the pinnacle of her excitement , and the subsequent broadcast is to verify "one drama one "Fate" is the truth, "Of course we are very happy if it is broadcast well, and if it is not broadcast well, it will not change my opinion on this project. I still think "The Bottom Line" is very good. "Li Xiaoliang said that after the show was broadcast, the audience thought that many of the good and bad points were unexpected by him, and it was very good for the audience to gain some benefits and start thinking about some problems.
Finally, Fei Huijun added that "Bottom Line" has changed her little ambition in her career, just as the judge hopes to use case by case to change the social atmosphere and make people more beautiful. Everyone understands the court better, and people and people are more tolerant and understanding, then it will be better.”
