What did director Kong Dashan and screenwriter Wang Yitong talk about at the Vancouver Film Academy in Shanghai?, Dean Jia Zhangke personally invited Kong Dashan | Universe Exploration Editorial Department | Screenwriter
The Space Exploration Editorial Department, released on April 1, 2023, has created more possibilities for Chinese science fiction films with its bold and distinctive visual style, humorous and humorous plot segments, and rich and detached imagination. It has also made many fans curious about the filming techniques and details behind it. On August 21st, at the invitation of Jia Zhangke, the dean and renowned director of Shanghai Vancouver Film Academy, Kong Dashan, the director and screenwriter of "Universe Exploration Editorial Department", and co writer and lead actor Wang Yitong walked into Shanghai Vancouver Film Academy to exchange on stage and behind the scenes views of the film with Executive Dean Cheng Bo and numerous teachers and students.
The establishment of pastoral poetry is based on the improvement of the industrial system
Relaxation, freedom, and curiosity are the unique qualities presented by the Universe Exploration Editorial Department. In Cheng Bo's view, this is a place worth learning from for young creators today.
The Universe Exploration Editorial Department launched a nationwide roadshow on March 18th, which can be considered a marathon. In Wang Yitong's PPT, there is a photo of Kong Dashan holding a "merit box", which is a fun prop that appeared in a movie replicated by fans. Kong Dashan has received at least five or six of them. Wang Yitong described, "When participating in a roadshow, we wake up every day in a strange city, go to a strange underground parking garage, go to a strange hotel, and talk similar things.". A photo captured their mental state during the roadshow - looking bewildered, but Wang Yitong added, "Shanghai was the best performance of our roadshow, with the most people."
Humor is a way of fighting against nothingness and resolving suffering in movies. During the roadshow, an audience asked how to be humorous. Kong Dashan said, "You can go to a humor training class." Unexpectedly, the audience even asked him seriously where he was going. "This matter itself is very humorous," Wang Yitong felt, and humor was more like an intuition to him. "I was already a ridiculous person."
Although they may not appear like lecturers or celebrities, they occasionally offer industry insights while chatting confidently. Some people are curious about how the character Sun Yitong in the movie created his stunning poetry. Wang Yitong, who played Sun Yitong, introduced, "Poetry was written by me, and I didn't think it was very good. Apart from poetic language, the film can only give you such a strong composite feeling through the combined effect of music and dialect separation."
The film encountered many unexpected difficulties during filming, such as the donkeys that appeared in the deep mountains of Sichuan being specially transported from Shandong at a high cost. "After filming for a day, we found a nightmare where there was nothing in the storage card. The donkeys had already been sent back because they were too expensive." Wang Yitong suggested that Kong Dashan use fake donkeys to shoot, and also released two versions of fake donkey photos designed by him but with funny effects. "The director refused."
Kong Dashan revealed that the donkey later took another four hours to drive back to the filming site. After filming, it was sent to the home of a prop master to raise it for filming in the second summer. "It eats more than ten pounds of corn every day, and its owner complains incessantly.". "At the end, the male protagonist Tang Zhijun jumps up to a higher latitude universe, but humans have no way of seeing what the universe is like. We use the analogy of a donkey. In the icy and snowy world, the donkey that faces people with four eyes is holding a carrot, as if wearing a shackle. In the end, it reaches a place with abundant water and grass, and a warm spring breeze. This is the paradise that the donkey pursues, which is the donkey's higher dimensional universe."
The inspiration for the creation of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" comes from a news story about a villager in Shandong catching an alien. The dramatic structure and spiritual core have some similarities with "Journey to the West". Tang Zhijun, who went to the southwest to search for aliens, is like Tang Sanzang, who went west to obtain scriptures. Sun Yitong is like Sun Wukong, a character who "jumped out of the three realms and is not in the five elements.". Kong Dashan candidly stated that the completion of the film was inseparable from the support of producer Wang Hongwei and Guo Fan. "This is why we can act so recklessly, like doing students' homework, to make cinema movies."
The freedom of "The Universe Exploration Editorial Department" impressed Cheng Bo. "It is a form that has almost never been seen in Chinese film history, especially fresh, that can stack several types of elements such as fake records, science fiction, absurd comedy, and highways to form an organic whole." Wang Yitong has written some genre films, and the freedom and uncertainty of "The Universe Exploration Editorial Department" can bring anxiety to creation, as well as a sense of excitement. "If we insist on classification, I want to classify" The Universe Exploration Editorial Department "as an agricultural film. There should also be industrial films like" The Wandering Earth "that have such agricultural films. We have planted a different seed and watched it grow a different kind." Things can also bring joy like farmers
Shooting a film with pastoral poetry, Kong Dashan described his envisioned filming style as a farmer's workshop. "I was very naive at the time, imagining that there might only be twenty or thirty people on this crew, all of whom were friends, driving a bus on the road like a tour group, and completing the filming very comfortably during the trip. Later, I found it was really too childish. The lesson from reality made him realize that in order to present something that seemed natural, relaxed, and without any trace, it must be established with the precise cooperation of many departments such as a sound production team, art team, costume and makeup department, actors, etc.". "So, our entire production was still completed with a normal standard of theater film crew size and personnel configuration."
The visual spectacle of a group of sparrows flying out at the end of the film was created using special effects, and three production companies were changed in a row. The last visual effects company came from the visual effects director of "Wandering Earth 2", which was the result of Kong Dashan's "fate".
The final box office of the film was 67 million yuan. "In our positioning, it is a commercial film that has been blurred, but in the eyes of many people, it is a literary film that has been earned," Kong Dashan said. It is worth mentioning that the movie will be released in Japan next month.
Pseudo documentary style requires high-intensity training
At the exchange site, a student asked Kong Dashan: What is the ultimate meaning that Tang Zhijun finally understood in the cave? "Many roadshows have people asking this question. Every time I get stuck in words, it's difficult to explain it in meticulous language." He agrees with Cheng Bo's explanation of the Chinese concept of the unity of heaven and man in the universe. "I'll try to memorize it and use it next time I have the opportunity."
The pseudo documentary style is also a distinctive feature of the Universe Exploration Editorial Department. Kong Dashan introduced that the style positioning of fake documentaries predates the story, which brings many doubts and troubles to the filming of the film. "We are very clear that we do not make a conventional plot film. For me, a movie is not just about making a story, it must have a strong visual style. Holding fake records and combining them with the story is the work that fits my view of cinema." The handheld photographer of the film, Matthias Delfu, met Kong Dashan while sunbathing at the Pingyao Film Festival. "We quite hit it off. He is the most bereaved foreigner I have ever seen, and our favorite movies have a lot of overlap. He can understand the points of my story, and the cooperation is also very tacit."
When Kong Dashan was pursuing his postgraduate studies at Beijing Film Academy, his short film "The Future of the Legal System", which was shot using pseudo documentary techniques, once became popular on the internet. The short film uses serious news reporting to tell the story of the police arresting a group of art film filming dens during the resurgence of art films, and jokes about the phenomenon of "making art films suffocating". In the film, Kong Dashan played the role of the arrested artistic film director Kong.
Wang Yitong got to know Kong Dashan because of this short film. "He was a godfather level figure in the Chinese pseudo documentary industry in my heart at the time," he revealed. Before filming, he had not discussed the characters with Kong Dashan, and after the first scene, Kong Dashan's face turned pale with fear. He admitted that the seemingly casual performance in the film is actually highly controlled by the director. The villagers seem to express themselves naturally after the sudden intrusion of a camera, with a performance that has been selected and trained for half a month behind it. Seemingly casual spoken lines are also pre written. Even lead actor Yang Haoyu said that decades of performance experience are ineffective here. "The establishment of a pseudo documentary style requires high-intensity behind the scenes effort. The requirements for shooting a pseudo documentary are different from those for a regular plot film. It can effectively and powerfully create real-life scenes, but it also means a very high risk. A slight performance trace can lead to the collapse of the entire scene," said Wang Yitong.
In a class at Wenying in Shanghai, Kong Dashan shared his thoughts on film shooting - described by Wang Yitong as "two minutes overturning two industries": "In my opinion, the word acting is problematic. Movies are montages, and how actors act depends on the form of the movie. You need to think about the front, back, and scenery, which determine whether your performance is accurate. Writing a script also requires caution. Film creation is not about writing a script, but about writing a worldview. Sometimes the script written by the screenwriter may seem complete, but upon arriving at the scene, there are many blind spots and deficiencies in the three-dimensional space. When writing, we need to explain the worldview and imagine what happens in this space." "How to schedule."
Faced with professional questions from Shanghai Wenying teachers and students, Kong Dashan and Wang Yitong shared the regional characteristics, music, and other aspects of the film. After the exchange, they were hired as mentors for Shanghai's film and television industry.
