The movie "Zhu Tong Lost His Super Powers in the Third Grade" has become a dark horse in recent theater reviews. (Photo provided by interviewee) From 2009 until he switched to the film industry in 2020, Oji Chuan has been immersed in the theater. Almost all of his works are small

The movie "Zhu Tong Lost His Super Powers in the Third Grade" has become a dark horse in recent theater reviews. (Photo provided by interviewee)

From 2009 until he switched to the film industry in 2020, Oji Chuan has been immersed in the theater. Almost all of his works are small theater plays, written, directed and performed by himself, with minimalist choreography and using performances to output most of the energy.

At the beginning of 2022, after the filming of "Zhu Tong Lost His Super Powers in the Third Grade" was completed, Wang Zichuan returned to the theater to re-interpret the one-man show "Jacob and the Thunder Slug". Xi Wang, the performance director of this play, watched his second performance at the Wuzhen Theater Festival that year and felt that Wang Zichuan had transformed. In the past, fun and relaxation were like a mask wrapped around him, but now he reveals a deeper life experience. "I must have experienced a lot and thought a lot about acting in other plays and making movies." Xi Wang told a reporter from Southern Weekend in an interview at the time.

"Zhu Tong Lost His Super Powers in the Third Grade" will be officially released on May 25, 2024. It has previously won the Best Director, Best Artistic Exploration, and Audience Choice Honors at the 17th First Youth Film Festival. First class awards. The movie

tells the story of the ordinary day of Zhu Tong, a naughty primary school student, and the bizarre fantasy world in his little mind. The original motivation of the story was an image that appeared in Wang Zichuan's mind: a child was doing crazy dance on the playground, and the physical education teacher hit him. The child thought that he was selected to participate in the broadcast competition, so this One day becomes a little different.

Initially, Wang Zichuan habitually set the protagonist as a physical education teacher, because in the past when he wrote drama scripts, he would play the leading role himself. But as he wrote, he felt it was "particularly hypocritical and cheap." He didn't really understand the inner world of the physical education teacher. Instead, the children's content thrived and eventually occupied the center of the story.

In the opinion of some industry insiders, in the current film market environment, a new director is lucky and luxurious to be able to produce a work like "Zhu Tong Lost His Super Powers in the Third Grade". Children's themes are inherently niche, and the narrative style of the film also deviates somewhat from typical commercial films. From the beginning of the conception, Wang Zichuan set the film's temperament to be "a leisurely story without a core incident." When talking about investment in the early stage, when most people first saw the script, they felt that it was not a script at all, like a primary school student's diary. However, the film's producer Rao Xiaozhi has always stood by Wang Zichuan and promoted cooperation with the producer Emperor Film.

Just as Zhu Tong is finding his place between fantasy and reality, the film jumps between reality and fiction, projecting the creator's personal taste in every detail. The birdman who steals things on the bus, the alien who fights with the teacher outside the classroom, and the poop monster who eats paper in the toilet are not special effects, but real puppet models, played by real people. There is a scene of a walk by the lake. The little girl He Na talks about the book she is reading, "The Green-Haired Water Monster by Kadaev". Audiences who are familiar with Wang Xiaobo's works will naturally accept it - "The Green-Haired Water Monster" by Wang Xiaobo The hero and heroine in it are reading Kadayev's "A Sailing in the Sea of ​​Fog".

"I don't really want that world to become very real." Wang Zichuan told Southern Weekend reporters that he deliberately pieced together the fragments in his memory into new symbols, "as if they were in another parallel world, not in our world. "

Wang Zichuan's original title was "Time is Calling", which was later changed to "The Long Days". After it was turned on, it was once called "Happy Childhood". Before the release, the publicity staff proposed more than 100 names, voted at each stage, and finally selected "Zhu Tong lost his superpowers in the third grade." Wang Zichuan himself did not participate in the vote. He explained, "There are specialties in the art. It feels like when you give birth to a child, you give it a name yourself. Then the master comes over and does the math and says that the child will not survive the full moon. If it is called this Name, the five elements are short of gold. I gave you a name, and I don’t know if I have survived the full moon. But in my opinion, it doesn’t matter what it is called. "

" With the radio gymnastics background music of "The Times is Calling", Zhu Tong's smile lasted for a long time.Some viewers felt that their individuality was submerged in this long shot, while others interpreted the film's title as a criticism of the shortcomings of the education system. Regarding these interpretations, Wang Zichuan prefers to leave blank without explanation. During the interview with

, Wang Zichuan inevitably talked about his childhood. He said more than once that it was a painful memory that "cannot be reconciled." And this movie is his entire response to the past.

The following is Wang Zichuan’s account:

During my elementary and middle school years, I was just waiting for everything to pass.

My childhood was all about horror movies for me. Now when we look back on it, look for those emotional or memory fragments, and piece it together into such a structural content, the core level of the content itself may be anxious, but its external attitude is good. When you watch this film, you can feel that its posture is very low and it is not really releasing anxiety. You can feel that the creator is showing favor to you all the time.

We shot half of the scenes in Longli, Guizhou. The playground scene was shot in Longli, and the teaching building was shot in Guiyang. It is an abandoned nursing school and a vocational high school. The school in Guiyang only has one bare teaching building, but I like the structure of the building very much, with small windows and a sense of order. In my impression, campus is a space that gives you a sense of solemnity and order.

My actual school is bigger than that. Junior high school, high school, and elementary school are all together. It is a huge school. I still can't go back to my school. Every time I pass by in the car, I feel a little uncomfortable for about five or six minutes. My wife also told me that the filming of the movie happened to be finished and I should go back and maybe we could reconcile with him in the future. But I don't dare.

I went to college in 2005. After graduating from high school, I never really returned to Beijing. When I returned to Beijing, I always performed. I now live in Chengdu, not Beijing. I have always had a resistance to Beijing, and I even think this may be related to my childhood experience.

I transferred to another school specifically. Our family is not in that school district, so we have to pay sponsorship fees. With the money my grandma gave me, it was no joke to pay 10,000 to 20,000 yuan for sponsorship at that time. My parents’ monthly salary was only a few hundred yuan. Not only did I transfer to another school, I also lived on campus since I was very young, starting in the first grade. Others can still go home after school, but I am in school 24 hours a day. In elementary school, I basically went to school six days a week, which means I was in school 24 hours a day. The fifth and sixth graders share a dormitory with me. I think they are like adults. It feels like they live with uncles, not just brothers.

Anxiety, you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know which group you are in. You play with yourself most of the time. Because of that anxiety and insecurity, the behavior becomes a little strange. For example, when everyone else has gone to play, you lie down at the school gate every day, pretending to be sick every day and want to go home. There seems to be something in your personality that is not very popular.

Moreover, my school is really an aristocratic school. The primary school uniform is from Li Ning. This uniform is the most expensive among all my clothes. There are foreign English teachers in the first grade of our school. Those who don’t pay for the class go to self-study. Only 1/5 of the people in our class don’t pay for the class. The rest are a group of children from Chaoyang, Haidian, Dongcheng, and Xicheng, and their families all come to pick them up in their cars. The first time I saw a sports car was in elementary school. They all talked about things that rich people talk about. So since I was a child, I have always disliked the poor and loved the rich. I disliked myself and loved these rich people. They would not let you play with them. When people look at you, you look like a poor kid, and no one cares about you.

School classmates get together and talk about what kind of car our family drives, such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Toyota, and Volkswagen. People also ask what our family drives. I always tell people that our family drives a Sanlu. Because one time, my mother had a friend who was learning to drive with her at a driving school. She came to pick me up with my mother in a car with a deer on the car. I told them that our family drives a Sanlu, but they still believed me and said that I knew whether this car was British or somewhere else. Hahaha, nonsense.

My elementary school and junior high school are connected together, so I can only go to school with this group of people. Our elementary school is really good, the junior high school is average, and the high school is average.There are many celebrities' children who go to our school for elementary school, but they may have transferred away after junior high school. By a strange combination of circumstances, I went to high school in one go and stayed in the same school for more than ten years.

I spent most of the time waiting, and my attention was not on campus. For example, in math class, I thought, it’s best to take a nap. If I can’t sleep, I’ll fall asleep. I’ll see if I can get through it in English. , Chemistry right away, after school is over, okay, that’s it, wait until you go home. When I entered junior high school, I no longer lived on campus. I also had to wait for the bus after school. My entire childhood, including my teenage years, etc., waited for it all to pass.

You are also waiting in prison, waiting to be released, counting down the time. What can you do? Write the correct word in your heart. When you are in jail, you just think about when your sentence will end, when your sentence will be commuted, and you can do whatever you want after you get out of jail, as long as you don't stay in jail. You don’t think about me every day after I get out of prison. I want to be a football star or a basketball player. I have no chance. I don’t want it in a regular unit. Don’t even think about it. You are a person who has been released from prison. I have never had that kind of anxiety about the future. I can do anything in the future. I feel that graduating from high school will be better because I am not in this school.

Countries in the Western world that do not have the death penalty often sentence a person to hundreds of years. I estimate that I was sentenced to more than ninety years in my previous life, and then I was in prison for more than eighty years. When I died, it was only ten or twenty years. , I have made up for it in my life. I didn't survive until I graduated from high school when I was 7 years old. I realized what it felt like to be alive, and it was because of these things that everyone was so happy every day.

Most of Wang Zichuan's drama works are written, directed and acted by himself. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

“I suddenly became a little valuable”

The male teachers in our school are very vicious, and they will kick you away at every turn. When I was in junior high school, our teacher really beat people. He would stand in a row and hit you on the back with his fist. The beatings in elementary school were even more severe. I was particularly impressed by one classmate in our class. He was stuffed into the bathroom corner, the door was opened, and he was kicked inside.

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a teacher who was really nice to me. He was a chemistry teacher who wore glasses. She seemed to think I had a mental problem, so she would chat with me for a long time every day after school. No one had ever chatted with me like this, so I started chatting with her and told her everything about me. But I don’t know why. When I went to her class, I just fell asleep and deliberately made her angry, so she ignored me. But every time I think about this, I feel quite uncomfortable. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have to deliberately hurt her, make her feel that everything she did to me is invalid, and prove to her that I am a bad people. She seemed to always want to tell me that I would definitely not be like this in the future, and she felt that I needed to be cared for.

My biggest change was actually my senior year of high school. I basically stopped going to school in my second year of high school and started not wanting to go to school. When I was in my senior year of high school, I went to have dinner with my mother. A bunch of my mother’s classmates were gathering, but there was one more person, and I didn’t know who that person was. This person suddenly said something. He said that your children are quite funny and can live in vain. You can come to our school. He said that he is from the Chinese Opera Library. Only then did I know there was such a place.

He said that our school has a pre-exam tutoring class every year. If you want to take the exam, you can sign up. It costs 10,050 yuan. At that time, I thought to myself, OK, as long as I don’t go to high school, I can go anywhere. I went to sign up. Every time I have something to do, I go to my grandma. My grandma opened a small photo studio, and I ruined all the money I could save. I went to my grandma and took more than 10,000 yuan, and then I signed up and was admitted to 4 The moon is in the middle of the play.

On the first day I entered the Chinese Theater Academy, there were more than 80 students in our class. The teacher was named Song Libo. I still remember her name. She asked everyone to take off their shoes and wipe the floor of the rehearsal hall together. Some brought rags and some brought napkins. In fact, there were more than eighty people in the room and they just wiped it clean with socks. After wiping it, she said, this is the rehearsal hall. Remember, you have to take out your hearts and throw gold on the floor. To be honest, I feel a little numb when I say this now, this sentence hits me.

I always felt that I was a rotten person before, a maggot living in the mud. This kind of thing sounds quite noble, but I have never seen it. I don’t know what happened. Suddenly it seemed that that day in the classroom, I became part of some noble cause.

Then she started to leave homework. I could basically answer five or six homework assignments in one class, and I answered them blindly. She said she would observe life, but I didn’t even observe it, so I just acted it out for her. Sometimes I don't act myself, so I ask a group of classmates to rehearse a play. For example, I went to see "The Soul Refuses to Be Buried". After watching it, I rehearsed a play for the class called "The Cell Phone Refuses to Be Buried" because Sharp became popular at that time. , Nokia-type smartphones, which can just take pictures, but have limited functions, so I made up a story at random, and asked a dozen classmates from our class to arrange the report together. It didn’t take long to finish the report, maybe forty or fifty minutes.

After reading it, she said, eh, it’s fine for kids. She said you can try to take the directing major. To be honest, I didn’t even know what the directing department was about before. I just thought that my score in the acting department was low and I wasn’t good at studying. It would be great to go to this department. It said here that you can take the directing major. I thought at that time that I was so capable. Including my freshman year, when I had to answer three or four assignments in class, I could answer twenty-seven or eight in one semester.

Basically starting from the pre-examination tutoring class in the third year of high school, I have come back to life, or in other words, I have changed my attitude. I feel that I suddenly have some value and know what I can do, instead of waiting there every day to know when the day will end. .

Many of the fantasy species in the movie are not made with special effects, but are actual puppet models, played by real people. (Photo courtesy of interviewee)

“On set, I felt like I was just a contractor.”

Our film only has daytime scenes, there is no night scene, and we can only shoot during the day from 8 o’clock until about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. We can no longer shoot because the sun goes down and we stop taking scenes. Children are difficult to manage. There are only three people in the director's team and me. At the most, there were four to five hundred children on set. Calling them to go to the toilet every day is a huge workload. Basically, after a week of turning on the phone, everyone's voice is hoarse.

As soon as a child goes to the toilet, everyone has to go, and there is no time to go to the toilet. Halfway through the filming, one person suddenly raised his hand to the camera. Also, as soon as we finish eating at noon, some of them may not be found. You face a lot of this kind of thing every day, so you are very irritable and anxious, including all kinds of different problems or troubles in every shot.

At the scene, I felt like a contractor. I never yell at the actors during stage play rehearsals; I get particularly irritable in front of the monitor. I'm really afraid that I won't be able to finish the filming, because I don't understand or know what the final result of these materials will be, and I don't have that much confidence.

The greatest joy in the post-production period was during editing. I didn’t expect that a large part of film creation was in editing. There was a scene where Zhu Tong was slapped on the butt by the physical education teacher, and many small screens were cut. That one was played on the editing table. In my opinion, these interests are a kind of interest in film creation in the true sense. When the

stage play is being synthesized, the performance will basically look like this the next day. Not the movie. After the movie was shot, I felt a bit like buying vegetables at the wet market. You finish filming, you buy the vegetables, the seasonings, the fish and the meat, and then you actually go back to cook. Actually it’s during editing.

The young actor who plays He Na has a mouthful of words. I quite like this. I think performance is also part of the aesthetic output of a film, including narrative structure, themes, and image style, which ultimately form the art form called film. Although it is not meant to show some kind of performance interest, in my opinion it is quite interesting and lively, so I will keep it. The falling shot was also an accident. I saved that shot just for the fall. That shot was originally dispensable. I didn't like the fact that the little girl fell, I just thought it was funny. The camera suddenly recorded a really, very vivid moment. Before

, the movie was a little duller, or scattered, and slower than it is now.But in the end, communication in all aspects, I hope we can be a little sweeter. Some things that tend to be good, things that make you find interesting, things that are more pleasing, there will be a little less in the past. I think there is nothing wrong with

. It is just a matter of degree, because after all, this film, frankly speaking, has given me a lot of personal space from production to production, because it is not a genre film in the mainstream sense. Most of the time I am providing a personal aesthetic taste and sharing my personal life experience, so I don’t think there is a problem with these small adjustments.

The little actor's mouthfuls and accidental falls have been preserved, recording real and vivid moments. (Photo provided by interviewee)

Isn’t that exactly the fun of making movies?

Movies and stage plays are two completely different interests in my opinion. Both started out with their own functions and attributes, but eventually became powerful narrative weapons. In Shakespeare's time, drama was the Netflix of today, and the movies of our time are the pinnacle of narrative. Of course, the real ultimate weapon may always be novels, but the mass media or the lowest threshold is definitely movies. Because movies are very powerful, they can make your imagination come true without leaving any openings. Everything can be visualized to you instantly, and its power of communication is also amazing. Anyway, they are all telling stories. I told them before and I tell them now. I might as well use more advanced weapons.

But after I finished filming the movie, I realized what my core interest was in the stage play, which was to share a time and space with the audience. Basically, in all my plays, I still want the audience to know that I am in the theater, who I am, that I share the same time and space with you, that I am the actor himself, and that the actor is playing this role. I have done several plays before that were all related to theater. I told the audience that this is theater, but that is the limit of how you can restore the material world. The stage play is hypothetical. I said I entered the coffee shop, and as soon as I turned around I entered the coffee shop. I said I turned into a cat. As long as I lay down on the ground, I would become a cat.

movies are not good. They seem to be responsible for restoring the material world, but they are not in the same time and space as the audience. What the audience sees is in the past tense, or in other words, they are looking at a two-dimensional plane in a four-dimensional world. The world is purely false, but it must be restored to be so real. Most of its fun is no longer performance fun, it becomes a kind of high-level restoration of things at the level of your imagination through the efforts of a group of people. To put it bluntly, it means you turn a particularly abstract interest into an extremely concrete, product-like thing with strong industrial support.

All the signals I emit are what everyone sees in this movie. As for what the receiver can receive, he vibrates with it, or he thinks it is a noise, or even a completely meaningless and worthless band, then Just a matter of opinion. If some people find it interesting after watching it, then it is an interesting work; if some people find it sad to watch, then it can be a sad work; if some people find it boring after watching it, then it is a very boring work. work, but it can only target a certain individual audience.

I don't have the right to elaborate more on this matter itself, or what I originally thought. This is what I originally imagined, and this picture is all I imagined. The emotion this scene brings to everyone, isn’t that exactly the fun of making movies?

The same goes for my drama works. When I act, I never do post-performance talks. There are many theater workers who do it. I feel that what I present is everything, and I don’t go beyond what I do in theaters and movies. content or expression.

For the next movie, I want to stay away from the subject matter and make a fairy tale, a story with monsters and gods. Because the box office of this movie was average, I felt that I still lost money by producing it. I still have to think of some clever ways to make a movie that will sell well at the box office so that I can still have the opportunity to continue making movies.

I originally thought I would make money by making movies, but I didn’t expect that after finishing the movie, I would make money by doing stage plays.But no matter what, we have all come here, and if you go back, this person will look quite boring.

I will only try to find things that I find interesting on a perceptual level, but a creator cannot avoid his growing environment and his own metaphysical things. Even the most commercial and mechanical works can still be viewed To the author's three views, aesthetics and some of his ideological things. This is certainly the case for any work, but for me, those are not the top priority, those are revealed inadvertently.

I am definitely not the kind of person who goes to movies after being an author. The first attribute of creation for me is work. First of all, I hope it is something that can be sold. This is my work attitude, including my communication with management and various departments. In this way, I can correct my own mentality.

I am just a person who makes and sells flower baskets. If you say that you make and sell flower baskets, who are you criticizing? It’s not necessary, it’s just a small business, which is just a living for me. I haven't graduated from college, and I'm not an elite. Our family is a working-class family. My parents work from dawn to dusk just to make money. Moreover, the kind of financial pressure and anxiety has always existed in the environment where you grew up. . My background does not allow me to have such extravagant behavior, not only in behavior, but also in height.

I have to think of various ways to feed myself and wear warm clothes. Doing theater and making movies is the top priority for me.

Southern Weekend reporter Zhu Yuan

editor-in-chief Li Muyan