From the map, Los Angeles is a low- and mid-latitude city, and its location is very close to Hangzhou, China. Therefore, even in winter, the sun here should hang above forty-five degrees most of the time. But in Drive, whether it is outdoors or indoors, the viewers are very strangely able to see a kind of penetrating flat light that penetrates all the way through, almost all of them are flat on the front and the objects of people and objects at an angle of less than ten degrees. side. If you have seen David Lynch’s "Mulholland Road", I believe the large area of bright sun light modeling inside is really close to the real illuminance and light angle of Los Angeles. Compared with the strong contrast between the local highlight and the large area shadow under the strong light of Drive at a small angle, it gave me a strong visual perception. This story does not happen in Los Angeles at all. where is it? If you happen to have seen the light styling in Aki Kaurismaki's "Twilight", you can only shoot your thighs and say, isn't this TM somewhere in Northern Europe? Only in this kind of place can there be a glare from the sun hanging a little above the horizon all day long. This is precisely one of the important starting points for all environmental modeling designs in Aki Kaurismaki’s films. The strong contrast between the cool and strong low-angle light and the dark shadows restores the visual experience of the Finnish director of his familiar living environment. And memory, but also constructed his strongest personal geographical characteristics (even at night, he is also using a single artificial light source to seek a sense of unity of light modeling, and Nicholas Winding Refn is almost intact. This has been reproduced in Drive, and in the usual Hollywood action movies, the night scene top light as the main light source is a popular trend in the last ten years). This may be the advantage of Nicholas Winding Refn as an outsider. He can easily break through the outdated technical specifications of an action film that should take place in Los Angeles, and he naturally fucks himself. A more familiar and cordial visual shaping experience, without taking into account its closeness to the audience's sense of identity or its compatibility with traditional routines.
In fact, it’s not just that. When the high commander sits at the bar table with a dull look, when the characters in Drive participate in the dispatch with a strong sense of withdrawal with minimalist movements, expressions and gestures, I Can’t help but feel like watching a certain scene in Aki Kaurismaki’s movie again, but the latter has never tried to combine his own visual style with a simple action genre, nor has it ever been I have tried to use Wu Yusen's style of lens editing and combination with the cool and strong contrast of light to outline a kind of "cold violence" that is bloody enough but at the same time sufficiently removed.
I think this is where Drive’s unique excitement makes me watch: every fifteen to twenty years, the visual style, editing logic and scheduling ideas of commercial genre films will undergo a qualitative change, from classics. Hollywood's continuous editing and complex scene scheduling, to the montage influenced by technological development and new wave style in the 1960s, the regular and steady pros and cons in the 1970s and 1980s, and the strong influence of Hong Kong film style in the 1990s Multi-camera multi-angle fast high-frequency lens group switching. Every qualitative change in style brings about an all-round impact on the genre itself, even including the actors' performance and the writing angle of the script, as well as a comprehensive innovation in the audience's perception. The emergence of Drive is a clear signal for change brought about by the changes in the visual style of genre films in the past two decades: it inherits the violent display tendency of the Wu Yusen-Rodriguez model, but it joins the former only in the so-called "art The exquisite light shaping and the aesthetic choices independent of traditional elements (such as the opening car chase lens, there is almost no panoramic view of the outside of the car, all of which are composed of subjective and close-up shots inside the car. I have seen a very special method of car chasing shooting); it has simplified scene conversion to the extreme, which has changed the routine of narration and deepening of characters in genre dramas. ); He has the methodology of directing the actors’ performance with special scene scheduling methods learned from the author’s movies, and gives genre movies a new look and feel by making it popular. It also has the ingenious courage to break the indispensable and indispensable genre movies. The connection of "reality", and the use of wild light shaping, picture texture and lens combination, and the nostalgic 80s disco dance floor music will take the audience not only from the core but also from the external form of the film. Pursue a new kind of emotional expression based on the "realistic basis" of survival (for example, the overall light modeling and the blurring of regional differences to take the audience away from the popular identity psychology in the genre). All of this can be revealed in Drive. And so all these are not separated from the genre film's theoretical basis, personal heroism, punishment of evil and righteousness (righteousness), and the lingering feelings of men and women.
I think it was this cross-border attempt, that kind of bold fusion consciousness, that won Nicolas Winding Refn's favor in Cannes. It also gave us a new expectation for genre movies.
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