Pu Cunxin shares his craftsmanship in portraying Lu Xun, where Lu Xun left his footprints

How can a face that is familiar to the audience become another face that is familiar to the audience? On August 18th, Pu Cunxin shared his creative insights at a reader meeting from drama to the movie "Pu Cunxin: Me and My Character". At the 1927 Lu Xun and Neishan Memorial Book Company, he particularly focused on telling the behind the scenes story of the movie "Lu Xun".

Li Bai and Lu Xun are the two most important roles in Pu Cunxin's performance career. Faced with numerous mountains and hardships, Li Bai elegantly recited, "A light boat has crossed countless mountains.". On a long journey, when bidding farewell to his loved ones, Lu Xun also gave a farewell message: "Farewell to a passenger ship with a thousand miles of wind.". On stage, accompanied by Li Bai for thirty years, Pu Cunxin said that it was this play and the character of Li Bai that nurtured his life. "The same lines, performed every day, emotions come from intuition, I live on stage, perform on stage."

Lu Xun is also one of Pu Cunxin's "dream characters", who created a real and unique Lu Xun. Pu Cunxin candidly said, "Lu Xun is a summary of my performance and an exam to see what level of ability I have reached in creating characters while growing up at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. It is not a drama, but in terms of character creation, I am improving the actors' methods of creating characters."

Shooting biographical films of Lu Xun has always been a hot topic in the industry. In the early 1960s, Shanghai Tianma Film Studio made "Lu Xun" a key project and decided to have Zhao Dan play Lu Xun, but it was not implemented. In 2005, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chinese cinema, Shanghai Film Group invited Ding Yinnan to direct and shoot the film, with Pu Cunxin playing the role of Lu Xun. The film selects the last three years of Lu Xun's life, with his friendship with Qu Qiubai as the main theme. It has both reality and dreams, and was screened as the opening film of the Shanghai International Film Festival that year.

When filming "Lu Xun" began, director Ding Yinnan reminded Pu Cunxin, "The audience is too familiar with you. You need to make the audience forget you as soon as possible in the first shot of the film, thinking that you are the character. This is very important. When playing Lu Xun, you should have a relaxed face and calm down."

Pu Cunxin is trying to lose weight in order to get closer to the image of Lu Xun. He is unforgettable for the makeup artist Shen Dongsheng's skillful hands. He transformed him into Lu Xun using the shaping glue on his eyebrows and eye bags. "I really want to praise Teacher Shen Dongsheng, who has made great contributions to my appearance approaching the character. From the first styling to the start of filming, it only took me twenty days, with only three opportunities to try on makeup. Teacher Shen Dongsheng carefully made eye bags and eyebrow bone shapes using the shaping glue based on the plaster shape of a face he flipped over for me. This is the technique he specially studied and studied in Hollywood, USA to make the movie" Journey to the West ". As a result, the" Journey to the West "project was discontinued, and Monkey King, Bajie, and Sha Monk, as well as many others, were also included." The shape of the divine demon was not made, I used it this time

During the filming of the movie "Lu Xun", Pu Cunxin spent three hours putting on makeup every day. "The eye bags were glued on, slowly glued with latex and a very fine makeup powder. He used a hair dryer to blow dry bit by bit, then glued and blew again until there were no more seams, and then made wrinkles to connect those areas with my wrinkles. It took three hours to get a pair of eyebrows and eye bags."

Three hours of makeup, no less than a minute. Pu Cunxin remembers, "There was a time when I wanted to hurry up and spent two and a half hours completing special effects makeup. However, at the filming site, the edges of the shaping parts and the skin always cracked. Therefore, no matter how much pressure was on site, makeup must take three hours."

The familiar Lu Xun to the audience has been smoking non-stop. The movie "Lu Xun" selects the last three years of Lu Xun's life, which cannot be separated from smoking and coughing. How to perform a good cough, challenge Pu Cunxin. "The cause of Lu Xun's death is directly related to his lungs. I don't have lung disease, how can I make the noise of a lung disease patient?" He thought of a solution - drink a little water, chew half a biscuit, make his throat and eyes sticky, so that when coughing, there will be a sound of bubbles. The recording engineer of "Lu Xun" praised it endlessly: How could one cough so well?

The coughing scene took place when Lu Xun watched as Xiao Hong walked away. "This scene was filmed three times, and all three times I coughed. At the same time, I had to speak in response to the noisy" Ming Dynasty Meeting "of Hai Ying downstairs, blending the emotions of bidding farewell to Xiao Hong. This scene performance had multiple meanings." The seemingly simple cough, with so much effort behind the scenes, made the on-site readers praise it.

In "Pu Cunxin: Me and My Characters", Pu Cunxin takes the roles he has played as the main storyline, sharing his years of experience, exploration, innovation, and thinking on the path of acting. It also reflects the development process of the performance industry in New China from one side, resonating with readers.