This director needs to apologize

Chapter 387 The meaning lies here
The two scripts that Chen Yiming took out were two classic "one big and one small" dual male lead stories from his previous life. The first one was Xiao Rizi's "Kikujiro's Summer", and the second one was Hollywood's "Good Will Hunting".

Just as Chen Yiming expected, after careful consideration, Shen Ming still prefers to take small steps and move forward quickly. The idle Kikujiro is too far away from Shen's comfort zone. Even if he wants to make things difficult for himself, he has to consider his own and the audience's acceptance.

From wise to stupid in a second, this decision itself is not serious enough.

Relatively speaking, the second-hand psychologist is more in line with Shen Ming's temperament.

"Good Will Hunting" was released in 1997, starring Matt Damon and Robin Williams. Matt Damon won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this movie and made his mark in Hollywood, while Robin won the Best Supporting Actor award.

The movie title "Good Will Hunting" is a pun on the original name "Good Will Hunting". Will Hunting is the name of the male protagonist, which means looking for hope. Adding the word "good" in front of it expresses the theme of the movie - redeeming the soul.

The movie tells the story of a widowed psychology teacher guiding a rebellious genius boy. The protagonist Will, played by Dai Meng, is a young man with a broken childhood. He lives alone in a slum and hangs out with a few bad friends all day, going to bars, drinking, fighting, and causing trouble.

He makes a living by doing odd jobs, most recently as a janitor at MIT.

Just across the wall from where Will worked, mathematics professor Gerard gave his students a difficult math problem and wrote it on the blackboard outside the classroom in order to find good students. Naturally, no one could solve it.

The subsequent development is in line with the logic of the movie. The cleaner Will easily solved the math problem and left, hiding his merit and fame.

Gerald couldn't find the best horse, so he left a more difficult problem on the blackboard for fishing. Will spent a little more time on it this time, just like looking in the mirror before going to bed.

The next day, Will was caught by Gerald who was waiting for him while writing the solution on the blackboard. After a chase, Will successfully escaped, and then continued to go to bars and fight with his bad friends. This time he was even more serious and directly sent himself to a juvenile detention center.

On the other side, Gerard searched for him many times and finally tracked him down to the juvenile detention center. For the sake of this future "good assistant", he reached an agreement with Will that he could be released on bail if he helped him with research, on the condition that he would honestly receive psychological counseling.

As a rebellious genius, he can still cause trouble when facing a psychiatrist. Although Will has never been to school, he is very good at acquiring knowledge and experience through books. This time, by studying the papers and writings of those doctors, he not only analyzed the other party, but also accurately found out their privacy and scars. This trick has been tried and tested, and it has driven away four doctors in a row.

In desperation, Gerard turned to his college classmate Sean, who was a "loser" who never attended class reunions. He had poor professional skills and joined the army after graduation. He is currently a psychology teacher at a community college.

Strictly speaking, Sean is not a psychiatrist, and he himself suffers from mental illness due to the demise of his spouse, and has been unable to embrace a new life.

Will and Sean's first meeting was naturally not a pleasant one. Will hit Sean's sore spot through a painting in the office and spoke ill of Sean's deceased wife. The former soldier got furious and almost strangled the young man to death.

At this point, the script has laid out all the necessary groundwork and officially entered the main storyline. Sean begins to use his own knowledge, vision and sincerity to fully manipulate the inexperienced Will, and little by little correct his psychological prejudices and cynicism.

Will's love story and the brotherhood between Will and his bad friend are also interspersed in the film. Movies are movies after all. Although Will had an unfortunate and poor childhood, it did not prevent the screenwriter from arranging a few good brothers from the bottom of society but with good hearts for him, nor did it prevent the cleaner from falling in love with the rich second-generation female college student.

The ending of the story is very nutty. Will breaks free from his spiritual bondage, refuses the high-paying job arranged by Gerald, and goes to California to join his ex-girlfriend. Sean also finds himself in the process of "treating" Will, and plans to restart his life with a trip.

"Good Will Hunting" is an authentic Nuts story. Chen Yiming certainly cannot copy it to China. It must undergo major changes.

First of all, Will's setting is a big problem. In the movie, Will was fostered many times and suffered various abuses, which constituted the cause of his psychological problems. This background is obviously not in line with China's national conditions. Although it is not impossible to force it, such as putting the male protagonist in Qidian Orphanage, it is too extreme and it is difficult for Chinese audiences to empathize with and empathize with him.

Therefore, in Chen Yiming's script, the male protagonist is a third-generation left-behind child in a small county town. His parents are not around all year round, and he depends on his grandfather for life.

Will in the original film is a self-taught genius with high IQ. This is not possible in China because of the Compulsory Education Law, which requires one to graduate from junior high school even if he wants to work in society.

Chen Yiming had to upgrade and add special skills to the male protagonist, so he set his bad friends as a small group of scavengers, whose main job was to serve the scrap collection station, and their side jobs were idleness and petty theft.

After all, in China, if you want to become a self-taught person through reading, you can only be a rag-and-bone person if you don’t go to the library. These two places have the most books.

Further reasoning, the two countries have very different regulations on legal penalties. It is impossible for Chen Yiming to set the male protagonist as a juvenile offender, as that would be purely asking for trouble. But if it was an adult in his twenties, it would be even more impossible for a university professor to serve his sentence outside prison by acting as bail.

Therefore, in Chen Yiming's script, the male protagonist can only be a probationer who needs to report regularly and undergo community correction.

Then the bug came again. How could a famous university come from a small county town in the 18th tier? It didn't make sense that a cleaner slapped a university elite in the face. After thinking about it, Chen Yiming suddenly had an idea. He thought of a unique city in China, a city that was built out of thin air after the reform and opening up, a city that mixed the world and could explain all kinds of weirdness and strangeness, a city where 18th tier and super first tier cities live side by side.

This city is Shenzhen.

Both Imperial University and Tsinghua University have branches here. The university town is built in the suburbs. If you turn left when you go out of the door, you will find the urban village. It’s complete.

The patch for the No. 1 male lead has been completed, and the No. 2 male lead played by Shen Ming also needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Community corrections in China do not focus on psychological treatment, and social workers who do this do not need to have psychologist qualifications.

Therefore, Chen Yiming arranged Shen Ming directly to the university town to be an amateur psychological counselor who was bored to death on weekdays. He was commissioned by a mathematics professor to train an off-campus genius with a bad temper.

At first glance, this role does not seem to be a transformation at all. Shen Ming has played countless similar intellectual roles in the past, and characters with unhappy marriages are also commonplace, because there are only so many role templates. For middle-aged men in movies, unhappy marriages are a high probability event, and a happy family is only an accidental phenomenon. Otherwise, where do the conflicts come from?

But in fact, Chen Yiming added a DEBUFF to Shen Ming's character. In the modified story, he, a psychological counselor, has never studied psychology. It is even hard to say whether he can be considered an intellectual, because he is actually a part-time physical education teacher.

Chen Yiming really has no intention of smearing. China just ignores psychological problems so much that patients themselves are reluctant to talk about their mental illnesses, and many people still equate psychologists with psychiatrists.

Chen Yiming transferred the battle of wits and courage between Will and the previous psychologists in the original film to Shen Ming alone. There is a scene in the script where the male protagonist recites in front of Shen Ming a psychology paper that the latter copied and pasted to cope with the job, and then discusses Freud's "Psychoanalysis" with Shen Ming based on a footnote in the paper.

The patient talked eloquently while the doctor looked confused, the contrast was overwhelming.

In Chen Yiming's story, the counselor never used theoretical weapons from beginning to end. He had only one way to deal with it, which was sincere communication.

During the communication process, I use my own life experience to tell young people how they should view themselves, others, and society.

Even though the counselor was able to get rid of the longing for his deceased wife and move towards a new life under the influence of the young man, he was still a middle-aged lazy man who lived a day-to-day life by nature.

At the end of the script, the university town issued regulations to standardize the positions of psychological counselors, requiring that a practicing license must have a relevant professional background or qualifications. Faced with the fact that the counselors' side income was about to be gone, they did not even think about furthering their studies to make their part-time jobs legitimate.

Chen Yiming's arrangement is naturally to patch up the reality reflected in the movie, but another intention is to highlight the counselor's attitude towards things. He does not have any elitist thinking in his heart and disdains formalism.

Shen Ming needs to show his reckless inner self under his elegant appearance. In Chen Yiming's opinion, this role is no easier than that of the old gangster Kikujiro.

In "Good Will Hunting", Robin's character Sean only appeared in the middle of the movie and his role was not that big, so it was justified for him to be reported as a supporting role.

In the cute original script, Will's redemption is actually the combined efforts of many parties. In addition to Sean's guidance, Gerald's persistence, his girlfriend's comfort, and his best friend's encouragement all have their own highlights. As for why Sean won the supporting actor award, we can only say that Robin's acting skills are so overwhelming that he single-handedly made the role of "Pacesetter" stand out from the crowd.

Now that Chen Yiming has tailored a script for Mr. Shen, he naturally won't make his role a supporting one. The configuration of two male protagonists, one old and one young, is the minimum.

This does not mean that the counselor is simply given a lot of roles. The underlying framework of the story has not changed much. The mathematics professor, the college girlfriend, and the enthusiastic best friend are all there. Chen Yiming even adds new characters such as the protagonist's grandfather and the correctional social worker.

However, the actual role played by these people is either one-way concern of "I'm doing this for your own good" or reverse stimulation of being disappointed in his character. None of them has ever put themselves in the protagonist's shoes and delved into his inner world to find the root cause of his rebelliousness and bad behavior.

Only the always indifferent counselor, who never paid much attention to the so-called genius of the male protagonist, has always been honest with him.

The core of the story has not actually changed. It explores the psychological problem of human beings being afraid of change. This is true for young people, counselors, and even professors, girlfriends, and bad friends.

In Nut, this requires psychological intervention, but in China, no one thinks it is a mental illness. Chen Yiming feels that this may be the significance of making this movie.

(End of this chapter)