This director needs to apologize

Chapter 182 Love Line Female Lead

After recovering from the second problem that troubled him, Chen Yiming raised his head and looked around, and found that he was almost home.

Looking at his watch again, it was already past 4 o'clock, good guy, and he actually walked for more than 3 hours at a stretch.

Only when his mind was separated from his brain could he truly feel the fatigue of his body.

He simply found a small restaurant nearby, finished dinner, and then returned home and connected to the Internet to continue his work.

The third unavoidable question in the script is whether there should be a love line.

There is no love plot in Mulan's poem itself. Mulan's female identity is revealed at the end of the poem. Before that, no one in the army could tell that Mulan was a woman.

So if there is love, it is probably same-sex love.

The idea of ​​a woman disguising herself as a man and having sex with men is so advanced that it is too early to even be used in Hollywood at this stage.

As for most film and television adaptations of Mulan, Mulan will be exposed early to add a love line. Chen Yiming feels that this cannot be blamed on the audience, but that the screenwriter's pattern follows industry experience and subconsciousness, and has never thought of treating Mulan as a soldier. , or it could be shaped by a heroine.

In the case of the former, the main line of the plot is naturally about fighting and making achievements, while the theme is about family, country and the world, exploring the reasons for war, the meaning of life and death, and the impermanence of fate.

For the latter, the main plot line is that women can hold up half the sky. Who says women are inferior to men? Love is not completely impossible, but it is just a small embellishment, serving as a catalyst and small twists and turns in the growth process.

For movies with female protagonists, the first route has never been seen before. The second route is mainly biographical dramas, such as "Elizabeth" or "Wu Zetian". As for heroines who are born as ordinary girls, they usually only appear in TV series. inside.

If the love line is weakened or even eliminated, then the only option is to significantly expand the career line and upgrade Mulan's 12-year passive border guarding career to a proactive and enterprising legend of feudal princes and generals.

From the main plot line, Chen Yiming then thought of the character's motivation.

As a civilian girl, in a strange military camp, what kind of mental journey will she go through before she can expand her horizons from the corner of her eyes to her family, country, and the world?
If the protagonist is male, this motivation is almost self-explanatory.Princes, generals, and ministers have a certain kind of love. This is a famous saying that has been spread all over the world since the pre-Qin Dynasty. Every Chinese can understand the original intention of the hero to achieve success.

But in ancient China, where men were superior to women, why would a commoner female general who disguised herself as a man be so keen on waging war?

There is no way to enjoy fame and wealth, and to leave a name in history. Is it possible to use a narration to explain to the audience that Mulan is a war madman with a wild heart?
The more Chen Yiming thought about it, the more he became confused, because he gave himself a third problem in "development".

War itself is an anti-human thing. As the saying goes, a general's battlefield legend is bound to be accompanied by a lot of bloodshed and killing.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Mulan Ci's 12-year military career only uses three lines and thirty words, which can be said to be extremely simple.

Because of this experience, I really can’t dwell on it.

Whether it is the chirping Weaver Girl, the filial daughter who only hears her sighs, or the lady with yellow decals on the mirror, they are all incompatible with the image of the decisive female general.

Mulan's military service, killing enemies and meritorious deeds are completely legitimate in the value system of ancient people who are not my race. However, even so, Mulan Ci chose to brush it off. Apparently the folk song writers at that time also felt that these were not worth publicizing.

Now Chen Yiming's contemporary adaptation not only wants to visualize Mulan's battlefield behavior, but also uses it as a main line to enlarge and depict it.

Then he had to give the audience a legitimate explanation for this anti-human behavior.

It is obviously not possible to directly apply the behavioral logic of ancient male generals.

Hollywood commercial movies have a common formula for this, which is to design a villain who is so bad that he oozes pus and does all kinds of evil things, as the opposite of Mulan's camp.

Mulan beats a bad person, so Mulan is naturally a good person, and the act of beating people is just.

The Disney animation adaptation, as well as the first version of the script from Ma Erye, are all handled in this way.

By analogy, whether the Xiongnu or Rouran invaded was bad, and whether the Han Dynasty or the Northern Wei fought back was good. When Chen Yiming put himself in the situation and thought about it, he felt that it was not very reliable.

Because the current mainstream audience has long since broken away from this simple binary opposition thinking.

It is okay to use the external environment as the motivation for the protagonist's behavior at the beginning, but if it continues throughout, it will appear that the protagonist lacks initiative, greatly reducing the protagonist's personal charm, or at least not fully meeting the audience's expectations of the protagonist.

In short, it is not high-end.

Chen Yiming wrote down his concerns one by one in his notebook. Looking at the three problems listed at the top, he sighed heavily.

Sometimes, he felt that he was really asking for trouble. This was just a commercial movie, so why bother thinking about so many things?

It embarrasses myself and the audience.

However, he decided to follow his heart and give the movies he produced something other than box office.

He decided to take on the "Mulan" project just to prevent Mulan from becoming a symbol of consumerism.Gaul has Joan of Arc, Britain has Queen Elizabeth, and Nuts have Scarlett O'Hara. Every country should have a typical female image that demonstrates its national spirit and reveals its civilization genes.

Anyway, Chen Yiming never believed that China's most famous female image in the world should be a love brain.

He continued to skip questions that he couldn't figure out at the moment.

Next is another big problem, what kind of actor should I find for the role of Mulan.

Mulan's appearance is not mentioned at all in Mulan Ci, except for the last few sentences, which can be used as a basis for casting.

When I went out to see my companions, they were all surprised: they had been together for 12 years and didn't know Mulan was a girl.

The male rabbit's feet are fluttering, the female rabbit's eyes are blurred; when the two rabbits walk next to the ground, can Anneng tell if I am male or female?
From these two poems, Chen Yiming can draw several rough conclusions.

First of all, after Mulan puts on men's clothing, she is no different from other soldiers, so she has been in hiding for 12 years.

Secondly, after Mulan put on women's clothing, her companions immediately recognized her as a girl, not a cross-dressing person, so in terms of appearance alone, she was definitely not ugly.

Finally, An Neng argued that I am a male and female. The meaning is very obvious. Mulan is neither a boy or a girl, such as those beautiful and feminine men in ancient China, nor is she a girl with a male look. Salt can be sweet, and the attire of men and women is not inconsistent.

To put these clues into the ancient military camp situation, a few restrictions must be added.

First, the height should not be too short, and the figure should not be too thin. A small and skinny man would be too conspicuous among a bunch of men, and it would be almost impossible not to reveal his secrets.

Secondly, your skills should not be too poor, and your temperament should be relatively heroic. Otherwise, you will have no deterrent effect among the frontier troops and it will be difficult to imagine that you can be promoted step by step to become a general.

Third, the facial features must have a certain degree of recognition, because when wearing a helmet and armor, only one face is exposed, without a hairstyle. If you want to leave a deep impression on the audience, you must have three courts and five eyes. Enough to fight.

On this basis, age plasticity must be relatively strong, and one must be able to hold the entire span from a young girl to an adult. Acting skills must also be above the standard. At least one must be able to convey emotions with expressions and eyes. Otherwise, all inner scenes will depend on narration. The whole film fell apart.

Oh, and you also need to be able to ride a horse.

After summarizing all the conditions, Chen Yiming found that even if he relaxed the conditions to the TV drama circle, there would only be a few candidates left.

In fact, Chen Yiming also came to a hidden conclusion, which is that Mulan is most likely not one person, but the literary creation of multiple people combining similar items.

If we get to the bottom of it, even her surname "Hua" is a secondary creation of the Ming Dynasty writer Xu Wei. Before he adapted the Mulan poem into an excerpt of "Female Mulan Joins the Army in Her Father's Place", there was no record of Mulan's surname being Hua. .

Think about the conditions in ancient military camps. Multiple soldiers lived together. Washing, going out, sitting and lying down, etc. were all collective behaviors. Mulan couldn't hide it at all, and her secrets were revealed in minutes.

The only logical explanation that Chen Yiming could think of was that Mulan joined the army with her fellow villagers and belonged to the same Zhechong Mansion. Therefore, her fellow villagers united to help Mulan conceal the fact that she was joining the army for her father.

It wasn't until Mulan was promoted step by step and had her own officer's quarters and camp that she was able to hide her daughter for 12 years.

Thinking of this, Chen Yiming crossed out a few more casting restrictions.

Because if someone helps Mulan hide it, there are friends from the same country below, and there are appreciative officials above. Mulan's appearance is slightly more delicate and soft, and it doesn't seem to be impossible at all.

Although this change is logically smooth, it is very different from the original Mulan Ci. It is not unfair at all to be criticized for making up nonsense.

Chen Yiming thought again, Xu Wei could give Mulan a surname, so what does it matter if he added a background setting for Mulan to join the army?

After the idea came to mind, Chen Yiming felt great and finally solved rather than added another problem. At least the range of heroines to choose from was much wider.

In his mind, he recalled the previous versions of Hua Mulan, Liu Tianxian, Zhao Bafei, Anita Yuan, and Hou Mengyao.

Well, basically none of the four versions of Mulan that he has an impression of meet the conditions he listed, which shows that capital selection of actors is completely inconsistent with his logic.

He erased the four actresses' faces from his mind and opened the web to search for costume movies and TV series and watch them briefly.

Just looking at the stills, she looks quite heroic, but at first glance she looks like a girl, and she can't hide it standing next to the male soldiers.

Although the audience knows from God's perspective that Mulan is disguised as a man, at least the image must stand up and preserve the eyesight and IQ of the unsuspecting colleagues in the film.

Since this method didn't work, he turned to search for military dramas. Since the stills of helmets and armor were not popular, he had to start with temperament.

As long as the military temperament is persuasive enough, one or two things can be remedied by "disfigurement" through makeup, which is also a casting method.

(End of this chapter)