Millennium director

at home.

Wu Yuan, who slept with his fiancée Meimei in his arms, received a call from Chen Kaige again not long after he woke up and relaxed.

After Director Kege stated that he had sent the script to his email, Wu Yuan, who originally planned to take a vacation and spend time with his fiancée without doing any work, cast an apologetic look at Liu Yifei and came to the study.

It's more of an office than a study. In addition to a bookshelf, there are a bunch of scattered documents, scripts, and a top-of-the-line desktop computer on the desk.

Sitting on a soft office chair, after turning on the computer, Wu Yuan skillfully logged into his mailbox and found the script file sent by Chen Kaige among a pile of reports and documents from several companies under his command.

The Orphan of Zhao - Final Draft

It is indeed this movie.

Sighing in his heart, Wu Yuan clicked on the email attachment with some curiosity and looked at it carefully.

The Orphan of Zhao is adapted from the drama The Orphan of Zhao by the Yuan Dynasty playwright Ji Junxiang.

The story itself was adapted from a rebellion that destroyed the Zhao family, the family of the Duke of Jin during the Spring and Autumn Period.

Compared with Ji Junxiang's Yuan dramas, Chen Kaige's The Orphan of Zhao script has changed the spiritual core of the story. It is no longer a noble and tragic choice of a hero in the traditional sense, but a story of a small character falling into a maelstrom.

This is also a common method of film interpretation.

However, the script directed by Kego abandoned the original work's compact three-part performance of a simple and lively beginning, a passing middle, and a satisfying finale.

Logically speaking, as a commercial film, this three-part performance method is the most suitable and the most acceptable to the audience.

Almost most commercial blockbusters follow this routine.

Take Iron Man 1 as an example. In the first scene, Tony Stark appears and shows off. In the second scene, he is kidnapped and trapped in a difficult situation, struggling to survive. In the third scene, he builds an iron mecha and fights back happily, killing him with a burst of sparks and lightning. defeated the terrorists and completed the birth of Iron Man.

This is the most common three-part interpretation of commercial movies, old-fashioned but useful.

Applying it to The Orphan of Zhao, it should be that in the first scene something happened to the Zhao family, leaving only an infant in the family. In the second scene, Cheng Ying went through many difficulties and dangers, overcame all difficulties, and brought this Zhao family into the world. The orphans were raised and trained into qualified ministers, and then in the end, the Zhao family returned like lightning and killed all those who had led the Zhao family's tragedy.

Well, a very typical Prince's Revenge-style plot.

Again, although the story is very cliché, in the field of commercial films, such stories have been tested by the market and are safe.

With an investment of 100 to 200 million yuan, it is not wrong to take this safe route, at least the final box office performance will not fall below the glasses.

However, Chen Kaige did not do this.

In other words, he added a lot of plots full of his personal ideas to this three-part structure.

Wu Yuan could tell from the script that Chen Kaige tried to make the characters highly humane and three-dimensional, and to interpret historical events from a realistic perspective.

But he still committed his old habits. Like The Promise, the themes and clues thrown out were a little too confusing.

It's still an old problem. The plot in the first half of the film is smooth. Chen Kaige changed the important plot in the first half of the Yuan drama.

But the bad thing is that Chen Kaige only changed half of it. The first half is an interpretation of this Spring and Autumn Period story from a contemporary perspective, full of humanistic interpretations.

But in the second half, he returned to the plot of the original Yuan drama. The theme of the Yuan drama was loyalty, but the theme of the first half of the film adapted by Chen Kaige was human nature or revenge.

This makes the main character Cheng Ying's personality and emotional changes in the first half and second half of the script very disconnected. The plot of the movie and the plot of the Yuan drama are stiffly spliced ​​together and do not fit together, which has disrupted the theme to a certain extent.

Brother Kaizi, who got rid of the absurdity of The Promise and the invisible shackles of Mei Lanfang, still did not dance to his heart's content.

The adaptation of the traditional plot not only fails to shine, but also seems clumsy. The story develops in a tight and loose manner, and it can only be regarded as half an excellent work.

All I can say is, is he worthy of being Chen Kaige?

Wu Yuan sighed secretly in his heart.

Chen Kaige's problem of being half a god is indeed not easy to change.

Search and The Legend of the Demon Cat are not accidental, but inevitable.

Even after experiencing the influence of Painted Skin 2, Chen Kaige made a lot of optimizations in the script rhythm and story frame of The Orphan of Zhao, but his unchangeable literary temperament still made him, when writing the script, Problems of inconsistency and pretentiousness cannot be avoided.

This script is about 20% different from what I remember. Wu Yuan said to himself: But even if I change 20%, I don't think it will become a big-selling movie.

If you hold on until you die, you can recoup the cost.

Wu Yuan hesitated.

He actually had a choice, which was to provide Chen Kaige with some script revision suggestions.

Having been making movies for so many years, even though he copied scripts most of the time, he already has a lot of experience.

At least in terms of shooting and design of commercial films, Wu Yuan really feels that he is better than Chen Kaige, not to brag.

In the field of commercial film script writing, Chen Kaige can get a maximum of three points. If Wu Yuan writes the script himself, he can get six or seven points. The difference here is huge.

After thinking about it, Wu Yuan opened a blank document alone and tried to straighten out the second half of the Orphan of Zhao script.

According to Chen Kaige's temperament, he must retain the theme of human nature, amplify it, and adapt it by integrating the original plot.

Da da da da da...

The crisp sound of keyboard tapping sounded rhythmically in the study room.

With Wu Yuan's changes, the second half of the story continues the first half adapted by Chen Kaige.

After the changes, Cheng Ying is a mediocre and tragic character who cannot even control his own destiny. All his choices are dictated by circumstances.

But he is kind, forbearing, loving, and equally contagious.

Tu Anjia was ruthless in his work, but he also had a soft side in his heart. When the truth was in doubt, he did not kill the two children at the same time, and now he has let Cheng Ying and his son go.

At the end of the story, Tu Anjia's death is inevitable. This method is a redemption for his sins and is also in line with Han Jue's simple revenge mentality.

In short, unlike the theme of loyalty in Yuan dramas, Wu Yuan continued the contradictions of human nature shown by Chen Kaige in the first half of the script, continued the characters shown in the first half and developed the plot to avoid the confusion of intertwined performances. feeling.

As long as the sense of separation and confusion between the first half and the second half of the story is clarified, and it is simply treated as a story of the revenge of a prince who endures humiliation, then The Orphan of Zhao is quite interesting!

After spending an entire afternoon, Wu Yuan almost sorted out and revised the script and sent it back to Chen Kaige.

I hope Director Kege can accept it. Leaning on the boss's chair, Wu Yuan let out a long sigh of relief. (End of chapter)