When Ang Lee himself, wearing a bit of whitewashed blue jeans and a blue shirt the same color as the jeans, walked out of the makeshift stage of an Apple retail store in New York, you can read from his eyes. A little timidity; not timidity: any work of this director is enough to prove that he is not a timid person; the timidity is similar to the pure expression in the eyes of a three-year-old child when he first enters kindergarten; does not understand the surrounding environment The timid eyes that dared to move. During the applause, he picked up the microphone and said "thank you" twice, and the timidity in his eyes was directly conveyed from the voice. I just saw this, and Xin raised his throat all of a sudden, worrying for him for no reason. The progress bar shows that the interview is still forty minutes, and I seem to be afraid that the great director will be too nervous to speak at a certain second.
Before watching the Youth Pie, I didn't know anything about this movie or the previous novels. If you don’t understand, you’re still elevating yourself. The exact statement is that although I heard that this smashing novel had been recommended by many celebrities, I had never heard of this story before. It was the first time I saw the news of Li Ang’s new film on Weibo. There is no poster, no title, no story outline, so I made up my mind to watch it. It is nothing more than the name of the director of the picture. Everyone should think of this name like a thunderbolt. I think too, but it seems to be very strange.
Although I haven’t inquired about comparisons, I always think that among my peers, I’ve watched at least a few Li An’s films: In addition to the few well-known commercial films recently, I have also watched the older men, women and men in full. Lust warnings that are not easy to find. Many directors make a lot of movies, but it's a pity that watching one is worth seeing all of them. Ang Lee seems to be different: there is no similarity between the background of the story of eating, drinking, men and women and Brokeback Mountain, and Lust and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seem to be difficult to categorize. What kind of person Li Ang is, it seems that it is not easy to reveal from his works. Although I have heard of his hard years before, as far as I can remember, he is the well-known Li Ang today. There are reasons why everyone is well-known. Seeing a movie made by a well-known director, even if it is bad, you can at least go out and say that you have seen it.
Another performance of ignorance of Ang Lee is that I have never watched his interviewed video before. This podcast is the first time I have seen Ang Lee stand in front of the screen from behind the movie screen. Without the cover of the screen, I carefully wanted to observe his every expression clearly, for fear of missing any details that would cause the image I sketched to be too far away from his real image. After two "thank you" on the stage, he cautiously sat in the director's chair prepared by the organizer. That’s right, the foldable chair with backrest and armrests that often appears on the set is called "director's chair" in English. I guess this should be a place where his butt is often used, but I saw him as if he had misused others. The position, the back is straight and dare not lean back. Although I have long heard that Ang Lee is easy-going and even shy, it is just a director who directed this atmospheric movie. In my mind, it shouldn't be such an unspeakable appearance.
At the beginning of the interview, we talked about the first acquaintance between Ang Lee and the Youth School. The host is a typical New Yorker in my mind, with a little bookish and quick talk, as if he was immersed in his own business. What's terrible is that he really buried his head and didn't make eye contact with Ang Lee at first. He saw the great director blinking and glanced at the front and then at the back. The host glanced at the audience as if he didn't even know where to put his eyes. Ang Li said that he first met the novel ten years ago; he said that this novel is the type that he would recommend to his friends after reading it. I agree. My first acquaintance with the novel was after watching a movie. I struggled with this for a while.
The movie was screened the night before Thanksgiving. Although I submitted a loan application before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to read the book two days before the holiday and watch the premiere on the same day. But I went to see the premiere. I didn't get it until Christmas. Unexpectedly, the book is not big, but after reading it for a long time, after three weeks of repeated reading, I feel that I have begun to figure out some of the hidden meanings. I wrote an article about the adaptation of literary works to movies. When I was doing research, I had formed the opinion that watching an adapted movie before reading a book would be equivalent to writing a picture on white paper, and it would make the movie a disguised profanity of the original. Bad behavior. But this time I watched the movie first and then read the original work, but I overturned my previous theory: it was Ang Lee who made me rediscover that the film still has the possibility of assisting the understanding of the original work, and even deepening the understanding of the original work.
If I were to evaluate the film juvenile school in one sentence, I would say: "I didn't feel any surprise when I was reading a novel after watching a movie." Mattel's description is extremely detailed. I remember that Chai Jing once commented on this book and said, "It can never be made into a movie." I can’t agree, because Martel wrote this book with the mentality of writing a sub-shot script in a language with a strong sense of picture. (Of course, what Chai Jing said was probably referring to the limitations of film technology at the time, but now everyone knows that technology is developing at the speed of the ground-breaking bamboo. There is nothing impossible, but I don't want to do it). Every word in the book is very elegant, especially verbs and adjectives. Foreigners like me should learn with textbooks. The words and sentences are like graduate thesis of English majors. What surprised me most was the author's unique insights into 1 zoology 2 sea survival skills and 3 religions. After I started to write some small articles, I had such a feeling: Assuming that the author has 100% research on something, at most 40% of it can be presented on paper. For this, I can't imagine how much work the author has put in to present a 120% novel in my eyes. For this reason, I have doubted the fictionality of the novel several times. In my opinion, if Mattel had not completely experienced the adventures of the juvenile school, he would never be able to portray the eyes of the Bengal tiger in such a microscopic way, the blending of Hinduism and Christianity, but also There is the whole process of brine distillation. Ang Lee’s success lies in the fact that he presented 100% of the most exciting novels in these 120% novels, so that I knew what I was expecting when I read novels so I didn’t feel the slightest surprise. The audience (such as my friends who went to watch this film with me) in the movie theater can also be amazed from time to time.
I didn't intend to find the original author Jan Martel's evaluation of the film before. I know that the Internet will be full of similar and beautiful words, but I believe that the original author is at least basically satisfied with the movie in his heart. Only from the perspective of novel readers and movie viewers, I can read Ang Lee's sincerity to the words in every frame of the movie. The director basically did not make any changes to the content of the original work; he cast the scenes carefully described by Martel on the screen and engraved them in the hearts of the audience. I say "cut" here by no means a hasty evaluation; I only watched the movie more than a month ago, but the beginning of the movie has some European style but obviously full of Indian style bright and colorful zoo scene I can still remember when I close my eyes. Get up: Giraffes gnaw on young leaves, sloths breathe together when they hang upside down branches, and a group of flamingoes wading across the river, raising their hind legs gracefully like a ballerina. It is precisely these that the gibbons flick a leaf, the squad horse shakes a pectoral muscle, the dust that the warthog throws when it runs, and the branch that shakes when the birds rest make people smell that kind of vitality. Sitting in the theater and watching such a scene takes only five minutes to forget about his life, and let the movie bring himself into that world. The photography director of the Junior School is the famous Chilean Claudio Miranda in Hollywood. At the time of writing this article, I knew that the completely different style of the pictures in Benjamin Button's Curious Case was also made by him. As his new fan worshipping idols, he was not surprised to find that the original New York Times special invitation film critic, Ao Scott, who is famous for his pickiness, never said "No" to Miranda's pictures. "Character.
In fact, by the time the story ends, it is not an exaggeration to say that Ang Lee made a good film. However, the protagonist of the movie that does not exist in reality has not appeared yet. The interview kept going deep, the host naturally asked the director about the ins and outs of making the Bengal tiger image. At this time, the interview time has passed halfway, and both the interviewer and the interviewee seem to have finally relaxed a little. Ang Lee also dropped the initial "cowardly" in his eyes bit by bit; when talking about CG and 3D production, he finally seemed to adapt to everyone's attention. He stopped stammering when answering, and his speech speed also began to accelerate, occasionally saying A joke, it seems that he is finally willing to take off his coat and begin to show the real Ang Lee who exudes the charm of a director. About 15 minutes before the interview, the audience began to ask questions. The first question guessed what I thought: the audience who asked the question obviously watched too many works by Ang Lee, and at the same time wondered how many unique films have been made. The producer of Ang Lee, what kind of filmmaker is Ang Lee?
Ang Lee's answer was very long and slow. It's so long and slow that I seem to understand the answer to the question. He started from shooting family feature films about men and women when he first entered the film industry, and to the most recent youth school, he tells about his excitement, blow and accomplishment every time he yearns for or is entrusted by others to try new things. During the period, he often used a word, that is, learn. Ang Lee is a learning-type shadow man. The "cowardly" in his eyes is actually like the light in the eyes of a newborn: you go to see that children’s eyes are always brighter than adults’ because they are curious and they want to think about it. Biting wanted to understand the world, and when they grew up a little bit to understand the world, the light in their eyes gradually disappeared, because they were no longer curious. As for the Ang Lee during the interview, the 60-year-old with gray hair, the light in his eyes was as bright as that of a newborn, because he was still curious and eager to learn. He said that he was shooting a cowboy story, a story that was too far apart from the background he grew up in. He could ask and learn it; he watched the water for the juvenile school, and took the diving license; when he came into contact with 3D, it was like filming. Cross the river by feeling the stones, but you can still feel his excitement while talking. He said that he tried it once and found it interesting, and he wanted to take another shot. The movies he makes are always about a group of people who seem to be unable to get together but learn to get together to do things: from the father and daughter who are in harmony with each other and finally understand each other, to the female student’s love for the ruthless traitor leader, to being a male The two western cowboys represented depend on each other, and until now, one person and one tiger can share adversity. In fact, Ang Lee’s own life is most suitable for him to make a movie: he dealt with his hometown, filming a corner of a campus in Taiwan; the actors he worked with were handsome guys envied by everyone in Hollywood; he finished talking about the American Big West. The story suddenly ran back to South Asia. It took a group of Indians like an Indian, a Chilean photographer and a bunch of guys from all over the world. It took four years to tell a story about faith and the sea. Ang Lee is such a filmmaker: his eyes are shining like a newborn, learning to do things that others can't do.
(podcast address: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ang-lee-life-pi-meet-filmmaker/id587024089?mt=2 is worth seeing)
View more about Life of Pi reviews
