Chapter 439 Modify the Script of "The Orphan of Zhao"?

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Wu Yuan, who had a good sleep with his fiancée in his arms, had not yet woken up to relax for long when he received another call from Chen Kaige.

After Director Kaige said that he had sent the script to his email, Wu Yuan, who originally planned to take a vacation and not deal with any work, just to accompany his fiancée, cast an apologetic look at Liu Yifei and went to the study.

It is better to say that it is an office than a study. In addition to a bookshelf, there are a pile of scattered documents, scripts, and a top-of-the-line desktop computer on the desk.

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

"The Orphan of Zhao" - Final Draft

It is indeed this movie.

Sighing in his heart, Wu Yuan curiously clicked on the email attachment and read it carefully.

"The Orphan of Zhao" is adapted from the Yuan Dynasty playwright Ji Junxiang's drama "The Orphan of Zhao".

This story itself is adapted from a rebellion in which the Zhao family, a noble family of the Jin State, was exterminated during the Spring and Autumn Period.

Compared with Ji Junxiang's Yuan Zaju, Chen Kaige's script of "The Orphan of Zhao" 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 person falling into a big whirlpool.

This is also a common way of film interpretation.

However, director Kaige's script abandoned the compact three-part performance of the original work, which was simple and clear at the beginning, passed by in the middle, and was happy to repay and enmity at the end.

Logically speaking, as a commercial film, this three-part performance is the most suitable and the most acceptable way of interpretation for the audience.

Almost most commercial blockbusters follow this routine.

Take "Iron Man 1" as an example. The first act is Tony Stark's appearance and pretending to be cool. The second act is kidnapped and trapped in trouble, struggling to survive. The third act is to create a steel mecha to fight back quickly, and kill the terrorists with sparks and lightning, completing the birth of Iron Man.

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

If applied to "The Orphan of Zhao", it should be that in the first act, something happened to the Zhao family, and only one baby was left in the family. In the second act, Cheng Ying went through thousands of hardships and difficulties, overcame all difficulties, raised the orphan of the Zhao family, and trained him into a qualified official. Then in the final act, the Zhao family returned like lightning and killed all those who had led the Zhao family tragedy.

Well, it's a typical plot of the prince's revenge.

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

With an investment of 100 or 200 million, it is not wrong to take this safe route, at least the final box office performance will not be surprising.

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.

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

But he still made his old mistake. Like "The Promise", the theme and clues thrown out are a bit too confusing.

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

But the bad thing is that Chen Kaige only changed half of it. The first half interprets this story of the Spring and Autumn Period from the perspective of contemporary people, which is full of humanized interpretation.

But in the second half, he returned to the plot of the original Yuan Zaju. The theme of the Yuan Zaju is loyalty, while the theme of the first half of the film adapted by Chen Kaige is humanity or revenge.

This makes the character and emotional changes of the protagonist Cheng Ying in the first and second half of the script very different. The plot of the movie and the plot of the Yuan Zaju are stiffly spliced ​​and do not fit, which has disrupted the theme to a certain extent.

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

In terms of the adaptation of the traditional plot, it is not only not brilliant, but also clumsy. The story development is tight at the beginning and loose at the end, and it can only be regarded as half an excellent work.

Can I say, is it worthy of Chen Kaige?

Wu Yuan sighed in his heart.

Chen Kaige's problem of "half of the god" is indeed not so easy to change.

"Search" and "Legend of the Demon Cat" are not occasional, but inevitable.

Even after experiencing the influence of "Painted Skin 2", Chen Kaige has made a lot of optimizations in the script rhythm and story framework of "The Orphan of Zhao", but his literary temperament that cannot be changed still makes him unable to avoid contradictions and affectation when writing his own script.

"This script is about 20% different from what I remember." Wu Yuan said to himself: "But even if this 20% is changed, it doesn't feel like it will become a big-selling movie."

"At best, it can only recover the cost."

Wu Yuan hesitated.

He actually has a choice, which is to provide Chen Kaige with some script modification suggestions.

Having worked in the film industry for so many years, even though he copied scripts most of the time, he has gained a lot of experience.

At least in the shooting and design of commercial films, Wu Yuan really thinks he is better than Chen Kaige.

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

After thinking for a while, Wu Yuan opened a blank document separately and tried to sort out the second half of the script of "The Orphan of Zhao".

According to Chen Kaige's temperament, he must retain the theme of humanity and amplify it, and integrate it into the original plot for adaptation.

"Da Da Da Da..."

The crisp keyboard tapping sounded rhythmically in the study.

Under Wu Yuan's modification, the second half of the story continued the first half adapted by Chen Kaige.

After the modification, Cheng Ying was a mediocre and tragic character, and he couldn't even control his own destiny. All his choices were caused by circumstances.

But he was kind, forbearing, and loving, and he was also contagious.

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

At the end of the story, Tu Anjia's death was inevitable. This way was a redemption for his past sins, and it was also in line with Han Jue's simple revenge psychology.

In short, unlike the theme of loyalty in Yuan Dynasty drama, Wu Yuan continued the contradiction 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 interlaced performance.

As long as the separation and confusion between the first and second half of the story are sorted out, and it is simply made as a story of a prince's revenge who endures humiliation, then "The Orphan of Zhao" is still quite interesting!

It took Wu Yuan an entire afternoon to sort out and revise the script and send it back to Chen Kaige.

"I hope Director Kaige can accept it." Leaning back on the boss chair, Wu Yuan breathed a sigh of relief. (End of this chapter)