At the beginning of 2024, the youth group period drama "Long Time Love" brought the passionate youth story of a generation to the screen. Six high-spirited young people, from school to society, healed each other's pain in life with pure and beautiful friendship and love, and became better selves. During the broadcast, the audience had a variety of comments about the love between childhood sweethearts Huang Yingzi and Jiang Yi, the friendship between the "Group of Six", and the impact of beautiful ideals and cruel reality. As of now, the show has a Douban rating of 7.2 and a Weibo topic of over 4.8 billion, breaking the lack of high-profile youth dramas in recent years.
"It seems like a youthful dream is about to awaken..." After the play ended, director Niu Chao accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from the Beijing News, telling the behind-the-scenes story of "Long Time Love" and his experience in emotions after twelve years in the industry. Express persistence. Compared with explaining the expression of the play to the outside world, Niu Chao enjoys the creative process more: "Until every play is broadcast, I have completed my mission as a director and turned it into a complete life. And how will the audience Understand it, agree with it or have deviations, it is all (normal) feedback to me. Just leave it all to the audience."
"Long Time Love" stars Yang Zi and Fan Chengcheng .
"Easter Egg" Stefanie Sun
From just wanting to sing to being invited to star in
"Love for a Long Time" focuses on six young people: the cheerful and smart Huang Yingzi, the aloof and affectionate Jiang Yi, the gentle and brave Lan Yifei, and the quiet and rational Fang Mingyu , the hard-working Zhuang Yuan and Guan Chao. They were once a well-known "Group of Six" in Hangtian City, but because of a heart-wrenching experience, several of them went their separate ways as adults, and then reunited because of friendship, guarding a common secret together. Let's face the helplessness and challenges brought about by growth together...
Director Niu Chao is a post-85s generation, and "Love for a Long Time" is also about the green years he has experienced to a certain extent. However, in the interview, Niu Chao did not explain too much about his understanding of youth - in his opinion, the director does not need to leave too many so-called "personal imprints" in the film. What is more important is to actively understand every character in the film. A character that brings everyone in their world to life.
The first step in making the characters vivid is to restore the true story background with excellence. "Long Time Love" begins in 2008 and spans two time and space until the present day. Niu Chao led his team to collect a large amount of data, ranging from a mobile phone and a computer in 2008 to what kind of building structure a family home was. In the play, the "stealing food" game, QQ show, and even the popular "shamate" hairstyle of that era were praised by many viewers as "era memory killing". Niu Chao added them based on his true memories of that era. of.
There is also the "Easter Egg" Stefanie Sun in the play. Stefanie Sun is the youthful memory of those born in the 80s and 90s, and is also a singer that Niu Chao likes very much. So during the script creation stage, Niu Chao proposed to add her to the script, and gradually he just wanted to play her song "Good Youth" as a BGM. (Background music), later it became the theme song, and in the end it became a direct invitation to Stefanie Sun to make a special appearance. "I will be more strict about the chronology. Even in the year when this bgm was broadcast, did Stefanie Sun release this song? Did she release this album? We all have to verify."
Beyond the story, " "New" and "challenge" are also important criteria for Niu Chao to select scripts. Different from the traditional youth drama, "Long Time Love" adopts a two-line narrative, and each character has to constantly "flashback" between the ages of 17 and 30. Niu Chao has been exposed to many works with similar themes, but most of the dual-line narratives are proportional, and "Love for a Long Time" is rarely a dual-time and space ratio of half and half.
The biggest challenge brought about by the interweaving of time and space is the transition. How to reasonably jump between two different time and space without leaving the audience separated? "The director must do his work first," Niu Chao said.During the preparation period, Niu Chao and the creative team conducted many script readings, including how to transition in each time and space, what objects should be used to transition, and how to design the camera movement, such as using a basketball, a narration, for example, the previous time and space was a Pushing the door, and opening it is another time and space... Dozens of transitions, every detail must be planned in detail before shooting. In Niu Chao's view, "Long Time Love" may not have adopted the so-called innovative transition method, but every transition must be reasonable and understandable to the audience.
Yang Zi always brings surprises, and Fan Chengcheng is close to Jiang Yi
"Don't frame the actors and others."
For a youth-themed movie, authenticity is always the first thing to impress the audience. But interpreting the life in the script, regardless of the level of acting skills, is still higher than the reality of life, and Niu Chao prefers to let everything happen naturally. "The text of "Long Time Love" itself has given the characters a different feeling, so I didn't design anything else. I don't like designing. Many (details) in the play were naturally revealed during filming. ."
For example, in the selection of actors, although Niu Chao will require actors to have a natural fit with the characters, he will also try to understand each person as deeply as possible before joining the group - not the past screen image, but them in life. Niu Chao will invite them out to eat, chat, and play, mingle with them, understand their own personality characteristics, and think about how to combine the characteristics of the characters with the characteristics of the actors to bring out a more natural and shining side.
When filming "Long Time Love", Yang Zi and Fan Chengcheng kept bringing surprises to Niu Chao.
This is the second time Fan Chengcheng and Niu Chao have collaborated, and they are also good friends in private. In Niu Chao's observation, Fan Chengcheng is a very cute big boy, but when he plays some scenes where he looks carefree but is forbearing on the inside, he makes people feel a strong sense of empathy and distress. Therefore, after it was confirmed that he would play Jiang Yi, Niu Chao deliberately adjusted some scenes in the script in the direction that Fan Chengcheng's performance would impress the audience more. For example, during the college entrance examination, Jiang Yi studied hard in order to go to the same city as Huang Yingzi, but he found that he was still a few points short of going to Beijing. "At that time, Jiang Yi acted like he didn't care, but in fact he felt really uncomfortable inside. Those two episodes were only added after we confirmed Cheng Cheng." Niu Chao said that knowing the actor himself would make him feel better. It’s easy to figure out which type of play it can perform more in.
In order to pursue nature and authenticity, Niu Chao also has his own methodology in guiding actors. In "With You on My Left Shoulder" and "Long Time to Love", Fan Chengcheng's opposite actors are all "new friends" to him, but they have a very deep emotional bond in the drama, especially Yang Zi and Fan Chengcheng in "Today's Love". "Long Time Love" is still a child, "Then how can they really be as familiar as a child? Including the six-person group, how can they really act out the feeling of friends? This is a very important and difficult subject for me ." Niu Chao wants to capture real things when filming, which may not be presented through "acting".
Niu Chao often attends performance classes at home and abroad, and has accumulated a lot of experience over the years. He would invite the leading actors to play basketball and perform performance training together before filming started, and quickly warmed up these young people through daily interactions. At the same time, Niu Chao will also ask the actors to use their characters in the play to talk to the "other party" in a room without turning on the lights, or ask the actors to cover their eyes with gauze. There may be steps and other obstacles in front of them, but one of them You can only move forward through the guidance of the latter person. "I think we still need to build mutual trust between actors and establish the feeling of trusting each other. If the relationship is relatively familiar, then they can play opposite each other on the set, and they can create sparks without too much guidance."
filmed "Long Time Love" At that time, Yang Zi and Fan Chengcheng kept bringing surprises to Niu Chao. For example, in the scene where Huang Yingzi celebrated her birthday, every friend gave her the same wishing card - this was not a sign of sufficient importance to Huang Yingzi at the time, so she just sulked on her own.Later Jiang Yi joked that as long as I was not allowed to marry you, I would do anything, so the two of them started to quarrel... Niu Chao said that these were not designed by the script, but the improvisation of the actors.
and in the ending, Jiang Yi proposed to Huang Yingzi. Huang Yingzi did not expect that Jiang Yi actually called her favorite Stefanie Sun over and sang a song to Huang Yingzi. Huang Yingzi happily hugged Stefanie and talked incoherently. Many viewers laughed and said that this was the most natural easter egg they had ever seen. "It's such a real reaction. If I saw Stefanie Sun, I would be like this and I wouldn't be able to explain it." Niu Chao said that the script description of this scene was just Jiang Yixian Huang Yingzi proposed, and Stefanie Sun sang a song "Good Youth", but during the filming, Niu Chao, Yang Zi, and Fan Chengcheng discussed how to temporarily add Huang Yingzi's reaction after listening to the song. Niu Chao did not tell them how to perform this scene, nor did he discuss it with Stefanie Sun in advance, so the final effect of the film was improvisation and the most natural expression of emotions on the spot, "I thought that scene was quite cute. "
Compared with "guiding" actors, Niu Chao is more willing to give them relatively free space to perform. In "Long Time Love", Yang Zi will surprise Niu Chao every now and then, "because she often performs content that is not in the script, but that I think is interesting or that I am willing to capture." In Niu Chao's view, filming is not Just shooting things that are expected, some kind of "accident" is more surprising. "I am more responsible for recording and capturing some really cute and real things when the actors enter the role, rather than framing them." Get up."
Yang Zi gave the director many surprises during the filming.
The most tearful director on the set
"Showing pure and beautiful feelings is my persistence in filming"
In 2012, Niu Chao, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, wrote and directed his first micro-movie " I'm in Memory" Waiting for you 》. The film tells the story of a male protagonist whose memory is incomplete due to an accident, but when he meets the girl he once loved again, he suddenly realizes that love is never separated by time and memory. The story of "I'm Waiting for You in Memory" comes from Niu Chao's emotional experience at that time.
If we explore the commonalities in Niu Chao's previous works, from "With You on My Left Shoulder", a story about two boys' mutual "redemption" and "hope", to "Jiang Zhao Liming", in which ordinary women redeem themselves after experiencing emotional betrayal, eight years Watching each other affectionately in "Long Time Love", the purest emotion in human nature, has always been what Niu Chao is most concerned about and most eager to express to the audience since he has been working as a director for 12 years.
"Why film? I have always felt that it is because we try to create something real but higher than life. For example, those extremely beautiful emotions can really happen in our cameras."
's insistence on emotional expression, It also makes him one of the criesiest directors in the industry. If the actors were to perform an emotional scene today, Niu Chao would basically resonate with the character when he was telling the scene, and his eye circles would turn red first. When filming his first movie "I'm Waiting for You in Memory", Niu Chao often burst into tears on the set. "First of all, I am very involved, especially when watching the monitor. Like "Long Time Love", whether it is a crying scene or an emotional scene that the audience sees now, I may silently watch it behind the monitor. I cried once."
"Long Time Love" is the drama in which Niu Chao has cried the most. Among them, Niu Chao cried the most "miserably" in the scene where his grandmother died. He still remembers that the day before the shooting of that scene, he and the screenwriter continued to discuss and adjust every detail and emotional release point of the script. "I fully understand what each of their lines is saying and what they are expressing." Therefore, during the filming , Niu Chao taught Yang Zi and teacher Zhao Shuzhen, who played the grandmother, to sing children's songs while reading the script, and got into the mood with them, "It was really a bit sensational at the time. Then after turning on the camera and watching the two of them perform, and seeing Yang Zi cry, I became even more nervous I couldn't stand it anymore. There was also the scene where Huang Yingzi knew that Jiang Yi was going abroad and chased him. I cried very hard."
In Niu Chao's view, first of all, from the director's perspective, only he can fully embody emotions and fully understand the role, in order to more accurately tell the actors what kind of emotional expression they need at the moment. In addition, the director is also the first audience of a play. , if you feel deeply enough at the moment, it proves that the emotion given by the actor at the moment is correct, and it can also affect the audience in the future. By the later stage of "Love for a Long Time", Niu Chao and the actors have reached a tacit understanding. If the director is moved, it proves that The emotions are inseparable; if the director doesn't respond, everyone will default to a few more.
But after filming so many good stories recognized by the audience, what is the standard of a good story? In Niu Chao's view, In fact, the story is not as important as the characters. A good story must have characters who can be understood or believable. For example, Huang Yingzi has many scars in her heart, but she wraps herself in a very powerful shell. She seems to make these people The leaders who came together from different places helped everyone face the difficulties in life, but in the end it was these friends who helped her face the disaster that year. "They are a mutual healing process. Back to reality, many friends are like this to each other. In fact, I think the current audience is not interested in how novel and exciting your scenes are, but because they can believe in the characters in the play. "
Looking back on the twelve years that Niu Chao has been in the industry, every time he receives a new story, Niu Chao will throw away his past experience; the number of works is not large, but each work is eager to bring hope and touch to the audience "A lot of the things we learned in film school were about how to shoot, including the so-called 'experience' accumulated after filming a few movies, which was all about imaging technology. But I have always believed that what the director wants to shoot is the most important thing compared to how to ‘shoot’ it. This is not based on experience, nor is it accumulated over many years of shooting. My views on people, this world, and my pursuit of emotional expression are in my flesh and blood. ”
Beijing News reporter Zhang He
editor Tong Na
proofreader Liu Jun
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