Lying across the big bed in his hotel room, Jude begins to seriously consider how to turn his crazy ideas into reality.

$20,000 to make a science fiction film sounds incredible, but it's actually someone who made a really good movie out of $20,000, and the movie was made more than a decade later, when $20,000 was not as purchasing power as it is now.

Of course, low cost does not mean shoddy, the most fundamental reason is that the structure of this film, called "This Man is from Earth", is very simple, and several university professors have a discussion meeting around the hut, and the film is completed in less than 90 minutes.

Such a film that advances in the form of pure dialogue has almost no plot to speak of, but the film has successfully jumped out of the traditional Hollywood science fiction routine of "laser plus metal", and truly conquered the audience with the script.

In Jude's impression, it is not for nothing that there is a film that is cheaper to make than "This Man is from Earth", but there is definitely no second film that is easier to shoot than it.

A cottage with a fireplace is the entire set for the film, and the main activity of the main actors in the whole film is to sit on the couch and chat, which is almost not difficult in acting, which is perfect for Jude's career as a director.

After clearing his thoughts, Jude sat up and began to write the image data in his head into a script.

After so many years of development, the Hollywood film industry has formed a set of relatively fixed models, including script creation with specific format requirements, among which Hollywood screenwriters most often use three-stage structured narratives.

A standard three-part script would have two plot points that divide the story into three parts, and the plot point is an event that 'hooks' the plot and turns it in the other direction, and it moves the story forward.

After replaying "This Man is from Earth" in his head, Jude successfully found the two plot points of the movie.

The first plot point is that the male protagonist confesses to several friends that he is a caveman who has lived for 14,000 years, and the second plot point is that the male protagonist tells everyone that he is the historical prototype of Jesus.

In this way, the whole movie is divided into three parts.

In the first paragraph, the hero, as a history professor at Harvard University, suddenly resigned for no reason after ten years of work, and several friends and colleagues gathered in the hero's cabin to see him off, and everyone curiously asked the actor why he left;

In the second paragraph, several friends start from their respective disciplines and try to prove that the male protagonist is lying, but in the end they are persuaded by the male protagonist in turn;

In the third paragraph, the religious views raised by the male protagonist caused a fierce reaction from everyone, a colleague who devoutly believes in Christ said that he could not accept the male protagonist's point of view, another colleague who studies psychology began to question the male protagonist's mental problems, and finally forced to admit that all this was a lie made up by himself, which reassured everyone.

For a normal screenwriter, the establishment of the three-stage structure is only the beginning of script writing, but for Jude, there is not much technical work left for him, which is nothing more than to compare the plot of the movie in his head and fill it into the framework of the script one by one.

After following these steps to complete the script, Jude checked his memories again to make sure he hadn't missed anything, but he was still not satisfied with all of this.

"This Man is from Earth" is undoubtedly a classic soft science fiction movie, the film is in the form of a discussion, covering astronomy, geography, history, biology, literature, art, religion and other elements, it is completely an oral history of human development, but it is a pity that the hero's experience does not have any intersection with ancient China.

In the past, Jude could only regret a little after watching the movie, but now he has the opportunity to change the movie with his own hands.

Of course, Jude is not an arrogant person, although he has the advantage of being a "time-traveler", but he knows very well that every small change will bring a lot of unknowable effects to the whole movie, so he is very cautious on this issue.

"Tony, our plans have changed...... No, no, it's not the script, it's the actors, and one of the three actors I asked you to help find should be Chinese, I know it's hard to find such people, but there is a character in the film who has to be Chinese, which is very important for the whole film. ”

After putting down the phone, Jude began pacing back and forth in the room with his hands crossed.

In the original film, there are a total of eight leading actors involved in the "Fireside Night Chat", seven are professors and one female student, one of whom is black, and the rest are all white.

Now Jude has replaced one of the professors with a Chinese, partly to better introduce the discussion about ancient China, and on the other hand, to make this great debate about the origin and development of mankind more convincing.

Involving all three of the world's races in the discussion will undoubtedly add to the logic of the whole story.

Of course, Jude still needs to find a suitable topic.

This topic should not be disconnected from the discussions in the original film, but at the same time it must be relevant to the theme - to prove that the protagonist has indeed lived on Earth for more than 14,000 years, and that he knows many untold historical truths.

This is the really nerve-wracking thing, because after the movie is made, it is mainly for Western audiences, so this topic related to ancient China must be a person or thing that is very familiar to Western society.

Eventually, Jude thought of Marco Polo and his famous travelogue.

The first time Westerners had a more comprehensive understanding of China was from "The Travels of Marco Polo", which described the Oriental world as a paradise full of gold, which aroused the enthusiasm of Europeans for the Orient, and even had a huge impact on the opening of new shipping routes in the future.

To this day, the novel and Marco Polo himself still have a lot of fame in Western society, and that's exactly what Jude needs.

The reason for the success of "This Man from Earth" is that in addition to the unusually rich content it covers, more importantly, it throws out several very interesting contrasting topics.

For example, the view that the protagonist claims to be the prototype of Jesus and that he once traveled to India to study Buddhism with Shakyamuni may sound like nonsense, but in fact there has always been a view among Western scholars who study the origins of Christianity that Christianity originated from Buddhism in India, or that some doctrinal views of Christianity were heavily influenced by Buddhism.

And the various bizarre points put forward in the film actually have a theoretical basis in reality.

The story of Marco Polo also meets such conditions.

With more and more historical research in modern times, it is very likely that "The Travels of Marco Polo" was made up by Marco Polo out of thin air, and he himself never went to China at all.

This idea was first put forward by Italian scholars, because they studied the life of Marco Polo and found that he did not leave Europe for a long time, and certainly did not have the time to go to China to do as much as he did in his travelogue.

In the same way, Marco Polo is not found in all Chinese documents about the history of the Yuan Dynasty, and he is not like Matteo Ricci of the Ming Dynasty, who is clearly recorded in various historical books.

Combining the historical research of both sides, it can basically be proved that Marco Polo never went to China.

However, in "Marco Polo's Travels", there is indeed a very detailed and accurate description of some situations in China at that time, especially some commercial situations, so some scholars put forward such a hypothesis, thinking that Marco Polo himself did not really go to China, but he learned about China from some businessmen who had been to China, and then made up some fabrications on this basis, and then "Marco Polo's Travels" was born.

At present, this point of view has not been widely proposed, and in the consciousness of most Westerners, "Marco Polo's Travels" is true, so when the male protagonist in the film tells everyone that Marco Polo is actually a liar, this contrast in views will inevitably make the audience feel refreshed.

Of course, it is not enough to tell everyone that Mark Polo is a liar, Jude must also come up with enough evidence to support this view, just like the male protagonist in the film, in order to prove that he is the historical prototype of Jesus, cites the view of Christian fundamentalism, claiming that the later versions of the New Testament are not actually from him, but redeveloped by later believers according to their own needs.

In Jude's setting, the male protagonist is the one who has really been to China, and after returning to Europe, he was thrown into prison because of a war, and happened to be in the same cell as Mark Polo, and when he was bored, he told Marco Polo what he saw and heard in China, and after he was released from prison, Marco Polo wrote the story he heard from the male protagonist as "Marco Polo's Travels".

This discussion is put into the second part of the play, and along with Columbus's voyage and Van Gogh's paintings, it becomes evidence that the protagonist has lived on Earth for more than 14,000 years.

In this way, the entire script has fully met Jude's expectations in terms of content, but he still has a little entanglement in the ending design of the film.

When the actor said goodbye to all his friends and left, he inadvertently revealed a name he had used before, and the psychology professor who left and was the last to believe the hero's previous words was stunned to find that the hero was his father who disappeared fifty years ago, and died of a heart attack because of excessive excitement.

Such an ending is tantamount to telling everyone unmistakably that everything the actor said is true.

But for the plot that has been constantly surprising and unexpected in the past, the open-ended ending is obviously more attractive to the audience than giving the answer directly, and the real answer is not given at the end of the film, leaving the space for imagination to the audience, such a movie is more worth savoring.

Out of this consideration, Jude finally changed the scene of father and son recognition at the end of the film, and the two did not recognize each other directly, but left some linguistic clues pointing to the real answer.

At this point, the script of the entire "This Man is from Earth" has finally reached the level that Jude is satisfied.