There is a bar about 100 meters north of the Beijing Film Academy, called No. 50 Huangtingzi.
The name of the bar is nothing special, this road is called Huangtingzi Road, and the house number of the bar is exactly fifty.
Not far from the bar is the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where there is a food stall, especially lively at night, surrounded by people, students and migrant workers, all over the world.
In the sweltering summer, eating food stalls and drinking beer is extremely enjoyable.
The smell of cumin is exuded in the smoke and fire, and the figures of troublemakers and brawlers can be seen in the red stewed mutton.
Jia Zhangke is one of the students who are regular visitors to the film school, and he is drinking and chatting with his acquaintances, all about film-related matters.
After returning from Xiangjiang, he was writing the script for a short film.
According to the funds of 200,000 yuan, the short film he wrote is about thirty or forty minutes long, telling a love story.
The story is very simple, a man and a woman talk about their partners, the two have been in love for a long time, but they have never spent the night together, because there is no house and no opportunity, which is a very real problem at the moment.
One day, the man's friend was on a business trip and rented out a house that he lent to the man and the woman so that they could spend the night.
The short film is about the man and woman who spend the night together and chat, and the love and trust between each other.
Jia Zhangke gave this book a very literary name, called Night Gentleness, this kind of literary short film has no market in China, and domestic theaters will only show 90-minute feature films.
He wanted to take the path of Xiaoshan and go home and enter the international cinema chain through the film company in Xiangjiang.
There are art theaters in Hong Kong, Taiwan and European countries, specializing in screening niche literary films, and can also sell video tapes.
This is a good option in cases where there are not enough funds for filming.
After communicating with Xiangjiang investors in the past few months, they negotiated the shooting plan, made a budget, selected the actors, and waited for the crew to be formed and start filming.
Compared with the roughness of the production process of Koyama's home, this time it is more formal.
Tomorrow, investors from Xiangjiang will come to the capital, and once the investment is in place, the project will be launched.
Thinking of this, Jia Zhangke was a little excited, it felt good to be able to remake the film, he felt that he was a little addicted to the director's profession, so he wanted to shoot the story in his mind.
He thought of the film Lin Xiaoling was making, the film called The Two of Us.
He looked at the footage and felt that it was too warm, and what he wanted to shoot were two things, he liked to observe the world with a cold attitude, put the character in a predicament, and then see how the character reacted to the outside world.
Or the outside world's reaction to the character.
This method of filming originated from European art cinema, especially Italian neorealism.
Jia Zhangke studied film theory in film school, and is very familiar with the major genres in the history of world cinema, and he is keen to express the dilemma between people and between people and society in the real world.
He feels that he and Lin Xiaoling are on different paths, which is normal, and each director has his own style.
For the domestic film industry, Lin Xiaoling's style is more mainstream, while he deviates from the mainstream.
However, in film school, people are actually more inclined to non-mainstream films, advocating European art films, and deviance will bring them a kind of pleasure.
Therefore, they will criticize the works of famous directors such as Zhang Yimou and be proud of it.
On this night, Jia Zhangke drank a lot of wine, and when he returned to the film academy from the food stall, he passed by the Huang Tingzi Bar.
He and the investors in Xiangjiang made an appointment to meet at this bar tomorrow, which was more formal, and the two were not good friends, so it was not appropriate to bring them directly to the dormitory of the film academy to talk about things.
The atmosphere of the bar is nice and cheap.
The next day, Jia Zhangke met Yu Liwei, a photographer, who had arrived from Xiangjiang in the bar.
The two had a good chat and decided to go to Jia Zhangke's hometown to have a look first, and then start filming when they came back.
Fenyang is a small county town, similar to other counties in the land of Huaguo, Jia Zhangke has not been back for more than a year, this time I went back to feel very deeply, the county has changed a lot.
The pace of reform has advanced from large cities to small counties, and society is undergoing transformation.
The old roads are gone, the city has been re-planned, the former markets are gone, all the lights are full of dance halls, and the things in memory are gradually disappearing.
Not only the county is changing, but the people living in the county are also changing.
People returning from working outside the country brought new news, and the entertainment industry flourished in the county.
Everyone no longer lives a monotonous life, and the hot topics of discussion are who made a fortune outside and became a big boss, who got along with the lady in the song hall, whose family couldn't get along and divorced, how much money the county cadres were greedy for, and so on.
In the originally closed small county, interpersonal relationships are undergoing complex changes.
The various realities of conflicting interests are making the human relations between each other in this small county more and more indifferent.
Jia Zhangke came to feel that he wanted to show the imprint of social change in this small city, and to show the impact of this change on people through a story, and how to solve this spiritual dilemma.
He left the night tenderness of the short film he was going to shoot behind and concentrated on the new idea that came to his mind.
Investor and photographer Yu Liwei persuaded him not to do this, the short film is all planned, you get a new book, and you have to start again, it's not cost-effective.
Jia Zhangke was unmoved and began to ponder his story.
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He wanted to write a story about a traditional craftsman, such as a tailor or a pharmacy owner, and one day he was chatting with a classmate who worked in the Public Security Bureau, and mentioned that a classmate in his former class was now a thief and was being locked up in prison.
Jia Zhangke remembered Italian neorealist films, including films about thieves, which were hailed as classics.
He thinks this angle is good, the thief belongs to the marginal people of society, the relationship with the family, the relationship with friends, and the relationship with this society are full of contradictions, and the thief's personal life and thoughts will be very interesting.
Based on this, he wrote a script about a thief in three weeks.
After writing it, he was eager to get Heungjiang's investors to agree to his plan to make this new film.
At this time, Yu Liwei had already returned to Xiangjiang, and Jia Zhangke thought that it was too slow to mail the script to Xiangjiang, so he found a fax machine in the post office in Fenyang and faxed the script to Xiangjiang page by page.
The price of faxing a page is fifteen dollars.
After faxing the script, he called the investors in Xiangjiang and explained that he would still use the investment of 200,000 yuan to make a feature film, and in order to save money, the film would be 16 mm instead of the usual 35 mm. 16mm film is generally used for news and advertising, and is rarely used for film, although it is cheap, but the shooting effect is not good, and the image is very rough.
Jia Zhangke finally persuaded Xiangjiang's investors to agree to make this film called Xiao Wu. t1706231537: