Released in 2016, "Going Through Fire and Water" was directly nominated by the Cannes Film Festival for its hard-core style. It was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards at the beginning of the year, and was nominated for four awards at the 89th Academy Awards this year. awards.
If "Border Slayer" is more inclined to an infernal undercover gangster movie, then this "Going through fire and water" is definitely not that simple, a simple and rude western police and bandit action movie. Screenwriter Sheridan's cousin was once a police chief in Texas. After 30 years of policing for the locality, he was forced to retire. In order to force him to retire, he was directly dragged out of the office.
Sheridan's cousin has since fallen into darkness, because the police department is everything to him, and during the drought in Texas during that time, many people in small Texas towns have a sense of desperation that they have been abandoned by society.
It was this feeling that made Sheridan decide to create "Going Through Fire and Water". In the story, the two brothers jointly planned a series of bank robbery activities in order to redeem their farm, but their actions that they thought were seamless had already been rejected by a senior old man. The police see through the mystery.
The narrative of "Going Through Water and Fire" is not fancy. The two narrative lines, one police and one bandit, are very clear, intertwined in the climax part to promote the final shootout. This narrative style is quite the realm of the sweeping old monk in "Dragon Babu". The plot of "Going Through Water and Fire" is extremely simple, but the complexity of each character is intertwined, which brings torture and shock to people's hearts.
The movie opens with a very simple robbery, where two robbers, an older brother with an ex-con and a divorced younger brother lead the audience into the story. We gradually discovered that both older brothers and younger brothers faced their own life problems, which were real and cold, just as cruel as in real life. The madness of the older brother and the forbearance of the younger brother gradually drew a clear boundary for the later paths of the two. However, the desperate relationship between the two brothers was like the scene where they were drinking together under the sunset, which was a gloomy movie for the whole film. Spread a touch of warmth.
On the police narrative line, two apparently unsuitable police officers investigate this series of bank robbery cases together. From the beginning of embarrassment between the two, they gradually become sympathetic to each other, but they end abruptly in the final battle between the police and the bandits. The only thing below is a desolate sense of brokenness. If you think it's over here, then you're wrong. It is precisely because of the great efforts to shape the character details that Sheridan's reversal plot at the end creates a great consternation and emptiness in people's hearts. .
"A big challenge for screenwriters today is that the audience fully understands where the story is going, and what you've designed just doesn't work. So that means the screenwriter needs to take out all the complicated stuff and keep the simplest parts. ."
Sheridan has spoken about his understanding of a "good script" in several interviews.
"So, my approach is to let my characters generate their own plot, whether it's good or bad. In TV dramas, the characters are the most important part, I'm not interested in the plot, I want to use the simplest The plot tells the story, allowing oneself to experience the world and the characters in the story. There are two kinds of good scripts, one with an extremely complicated plot, and the other with an extremely simple plot. The characters are very interesting, so interesting that they are in the original story. Play with the structure. And I like to tell the story the second way.”
Taylor Sheridan is definitely a wayward actor. He once starred in the American drama "Sons of Chaos" because he wanted to spend more time with his family, so he directly switched to become a screenwriter. As a result, his debut "Border Slayer" won three awards. Academy Award nomination.
"I'm not interested in telling stories that can neither reflect one side nor one person. However, I use "genre" to define my films, although no one called it that way in the 1970s. At that time, no People call 'The Deer Hunter' a 'genre', but now people keep calling it that, and I don't know why." Sheridan said in an interview with Collider, "I write about the things I want to see, Or write the stories that the directors, screenwriters and novelists who influenced me would write."
What makes Sheridan laugh even more is that since his script has become more and more popular, there have been more and more opportunities for him to go back to acting. Of course, as a willful screenwriter, Sheridan refused one by one, but he also often sighed whether he, who once lived in a small apartment and dreamed of being an actor, would have thought that such a situation would one day occur.
This article was originally published in "Film" magazine, author Cheng Cheng, public account: dianying2001
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