In December, Jia Zhangke returned to Beijing from his hometown with his new feature film. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

This is his first feature film "Xiao Wu", and he and a group of people filmed it in his hometown of Fenyang for more than a month, and the process was not easy.

The 200,000 yuan investment from Xiangjiang was mainly spent on the purchase of film and equipment rental, and after the shooting, there was no money, so I had to find a local company to sponsor more than 100,000 yuan.

The total cost of this film is about 380,000 yuan, and the crew members are not paid.

In order to save money, he bought 16mm film and kept the tape ratio to a strict three-to-one range.

The situation of the crew was once extremely poor, and even the money for staying in the hotel had to be owed on credit, and the heroine was clamoring to boycott, and there were constant troubles.

In the past month or so, Jia Zhangke has experienced too many difficulties, but he still completed the shooting.

This is actually the general situation of young directors in China, and the filming conditions are quite difficult when there are not enough funds.

You can't afford to hire actors, you can only use non-professional actors, you can't afford to waste film, you can only control the film consumption ratio as much as possible, and even beg people to raise money during the filming process.

Moreover, you don't know if the photographed thing will be recognized and thus recoup the investment.

In this case, it really takes conviction to stick to it.

The photographer from Xiangjiang was very anxious, he was worried that the film would not be completed, and the investment would be wasted, Jia Zhangke felt that he would do things first, and then solve the problems one by one.

Most of the actors he uses are non-professional actors, some of whom are found from the crowd of onlookers in the village.

For such an extra, you can't ask him to follow the script, it's definitely not okay to ask him to memorize a lot of lines, you can only tell him a general situation and let him play freely according to his own experience.

It looks very life-like when filmed like this, which also leads to the dialogue in the film being in the local dialect.

Back in the capital, Jia Zhangke began to edit the filmed footage in the post-production, and he had to get a rough cut version first.

After the rough cut was completed, he wanted to show it at the film school to see what his classmates thought of the film, and he himself was more confident in the film and felt that he had made what he wanted.

If "Little Mountain Goes Home" is a practice, then this "Xiao Wu" should be relatively mature in creation.

He found the screening room of the directing department and organized a small-scale screening.

Since there are no subtitles yet, the people in the film speak dialects, and Jia Zhangke, as the director, stands aside to translate.

"Xiao Wu" is the story of a thief, revolving around the character's family, friendship, love, and social relationships.

Liang Xiaowu is a habitual thief who wanders in society.

He had a friend named Xiao Yong, who used to be a thief but later changed careers and made a fortune by reselling cigarettes and opening a song hall, and was reported by TV and became a well-known local entrepreneur.

Xiao Yong was about to get married, but Xiao Wu was not invited to the wedding.

The reason is very simple, he is afraid that Xiao Wu's bad reputation will discredit him, he is unwilling to associate with Xiao Wu anymore, not only finding an excuse to refuse Xiao Wu to attend the wedding, but also refusing to accept the gift money sent by Xiao Wu.

Xiao Yong felt that Xiao Wu's money was not coming from the right way and was too dirty.

Xiao Wu, who was in a gloomy mood, went to the song hall to sing and met Hu Meimei, the singer of the song hall, and after that, Xiao Wu often came to find Hu Meimei, called her, and accompanied her to go shopping or just sing.

It's not so much that Xiao Wu is in love with Hu Meimei, it's better to say that Xiao Wu needs to have a relaxing time and needs someone to accompany him.

He needs to have a spiritual sustenance so that he will not feel abandoned by the whole society.

However, even Hu Meimei didn't say goodbye, she didn't take Xiao Wu to heart, who would really fall in love with a thief.

In the end, it's just a chance encounter between two lonely people.

Xiao Wu returned home, but no one in the family was willing to accept him, and he was kicked out of the house by his father.

In the end, Xiao Wu was caught by the public security police while stealing, and he took Xiao Wu to walk on the streets of the county seat.

Halfway through, the public security officers casually handcuffed Xiao Wu to a steel cable on the side of the road to fix the electric pole for doing something along the way, and the handcuffed Xiao Wu was watched by the surrounding crowd.

During the screening of the film, many students left the screening.

One is that the picture is rough, and there are unintelligible dialects, even with Jia Zhangke's explanation, it is still difficult to watch.

Among the students who insisted on watching it, they were divided into two factions, one group thought that this was a movie that I didn't know what to call it, that is, it told the life of a pickpocket, and I didn't know what the director wanted to express.

Is it sympathy for the thief, or does it want to show the interpersonal relationships in society through this character?

There is also a faction that thinks that this film is great, it is very real, and it is different from the current domestic films, and it is not so fake.

At the same time, some people feel that the director has embellished the story of the thief, or that the thief is too literary.

Liang Xiaowu wears thick black-framed glasses, doesn't like to laugh, doesn't talk much, is very silent, and will have a spiritual love with the singer, this is not a thief, but a literary youth.

In everyone's impression, thieves should be the kind of thieves with eyebrows, bad guys and gangsters.

Of course, only the thief himself knows what the thief's mentality should look like, but this film obviously wants to show the inner world of a thief, trying to maintain his survival and dignity in the cracks of life.

Jia Zhangke explained that he wanted to document the gradual disintegration of human relationships in a period of social transformation from the perspective of a thief.

For example, the character of Xiao Yong, from a thief to a nouveau riche, constantly changes his social status, he befriends the powerful, abandons his old friends, and finally accuses Xiao Wu of stealing.

The singer Hu Meimei is also a product of social transformation, because of each other's identities, her relationship with Xiao Wu is far and near, if it is about to leave, it is unstable.

Instability is a reflection of the relationship between young men and women today.

In the past, men and women fell in love and interacted with each other, and the relationship was easy to settle, but once settled, it was not easy to disperse.

Others have suggested that the film is too rough and blurry, and the sound is too noisy, with the noise of bicycles, trucks and motorcycles, the cries of street vendors, the singing of song halls, and so on.

Jia Zhangke said that he wanted the audience to feel the real scene of a small northern county.

As for the problem of the picture, one is limited by funds, and at the same time, it is deliberately filmed like this, so that the film is not so good-looking and has a rough feeling, because the reality is originally very dirty and not so beautiful, and the images shot in this way have a more life-like texture.

This screening has increased Jia Zhangke's confidence.

Compared with the lack of interest in "Little Mountain Comes Home", some classmates are now willing to communicate with him, which has been recognized by some people. (To be continued.) )