Zhang Yibai: Stephen Chow was the first to encourage me, and I didn't mind being told to pay tribute to him, but I really couldn't imitate it.

It has been 22 years since the first youth idol drama "Love to the End" was broadcast in the Mainland. Xu Jinglei, Li Yapeng and Liao Fan, who were young in those days, have now become a corner. Director Zhang Yibai, who directed TV dramas for the first time in those years, later moved to the film industry and made fruitful achievements, and returned to the field of drama after 22 years. This time, recommended by Xu Jinglei, he teamed up with Li Zelin, a post-9s alumnus writer, to make the growth time of a group of teenagers chasing the wind in the Millennium in Chongqing No.29 Middle School, his alma mater, into 16 episodes of youth drama "The Sky of Wind Dog Teenagers" (hereinafter referred to as "Wind Dog"), which will be broadcast in bilibili on September 24th.

Zhang Yibai

The exaggerated cartoon style and the dialogue style mixed with dialect and Mandarin in Wind Dog are different in Zhang Yibai's youth films/dramas. However, the collision between youthful utopia and cruel reality, as well as the collocation of lines, performances, music and other dramatic elements can be echoed in Zhang Yibai's previous works and even his life experience. To some extent, The Wind Dog is like Zhang Yibai's footnote and answer to the youth-related time of more than 2 years.

youth never leaves: I don't think I should be old-fashioned when I get older.

Looking back, Carry Love to the End was once the memories of youth of a generation. The scene of Yang Zheng (Li Yapeng) calling Wen Hui (Xu Jinglei) at the seaside to listen to the sea is regarded as a classic, and it will still be discussed by netizens. Zhang Yibai, however, failed to "enjoy" the drama, and soon after it was broadcast, he moved to the film circle. "I didn't pretend to be forced. After the filming, it was a mess. I thought it was over, and then I stopped asking questions and turned to filming."

Screenshot of

Several years later, Zhang Yibai was advertising in Shanghai, and someone shouted at him, "Director Zhang, I came to Shanghai because of your drama! ("Will Love" is filmed in Shanghai) "Zhang Yibai said that this guy fooled himself so hard in order to appear in the camera. It was not until he made the film "Will Love" that he realized that the play had been influential. This time filming "Wind Dog", the post-9s screenwriter Li Zelin told him that he would chase "Love" after school that year. Zhang Yibai couldn't help feeling that it was many years before he knew that he had become popular. Perhaps this was his own life.

Zhang Yibai's later films were all related to youth love-Subway to Spring, Night in Shanghai, Secret Shore, Rushing Year, Passing Through Your World ... Some of these films set the trend, some sparked heated discussions, and some led the box office, so he won the title of "godfather of youth films".

After more than 2 years, returning to the drama field, Wind Dog is still a youth theme. Interestingly, in the 13th episode, Zhang Yibai personally played himself in filming "curiosity kills the cat" in Chongqing in 25, and made fun of himself through the role: "One day you will become the godfather of youth films, and one day you will make Chongqing a city of online celebrity-as long as you buy my" Guide to the Names of High-end Movies ",it costs 5 yuan."

Zhang Yibai made a guest appearance in Wind Dog.

If we compare Wind Dog with Love, we will find that there are many similarities between them: for example, they are all youth group images of four boys and two girls; For example, "running" is a very important image in both plays, one is running a marathon and the other is running a relay race. But in Zhang Yibai's view, there are actually many changes from Love to Dog in the Wind. For example, there is no banter in Love, and it is still in the category of youth drama idol drama. "But" Wind Dog "has no idols. I said that it is not a youth idol drama, it is a youth drama."

Stills of Wind Dog

The characters in Wind Dog had to face the impact of life in the last year of high school. "Now you are still under the protection of parents and schools, so you can also have your own way to resolve it. You also know that once you get out of school, everything will be different. This is the last paradise. " Zhang Yibai said that he wanted to show the happiness and pain, banter and heaviness, warmth and cruelty of this "last year". "These things can only be welded together seamlessly at this age. When I saw the barrage, I said, how can I laugh one second and cry the next? This is-we can be free, but we have to face the reality. "

Return to drama series: drama is more suitable for growing up, and people dislike the word

I have been making movies for more than 2 years. Why did you choose to present the story "The Sky of Wind Dog Boys" in the form of drama series? When Zhang Yibai was preparing for the show, he also thought about it. What can the length of the play bring to the creators compared with a movie of one and a half hours or two hours? He concluded that the drama has enough space to describe growth. "What is growth? Growth is an unknown. You don't know what you will look like when you go ashore on the other side after crossing the river of time and life. Therefore, growth must be writing characters. "

In Wind Dog, the four sons of Daxing Village (Tu Jun, Da Li Jiao, Zhu Weijiao, Ding Rongliang, Mimi, and Luo Shenxi, with big mouth) come from a poor but optimistic family. Their parents sell pork, noodles, newspapers and magazines and drive taxis respectively. And Li Anran and Martin, who lived in the upper half of the city with superior family circumstances, were hostile to each other until they became good friends. The fourth son of Daxing Village appeared as a "school scum": sleeping in class and fighting after class, and sometimes bullying classmates. Tu Jun looks like a school scum boss, Zhu Weijiao is a man woman, Ding Rongliang is a silly follower, and Luo Shenxi is a dog head strategist.

Four sons of Daxing Village

This kind of "personal design" is not very pleasing, and some netizens gave a bad review after the first two episodes were broadcast. However, with the change and growth of the role, many people changed their views, and the douban score of the play rose from 7. to 7.8. Zhang Yibai said that the word he disliked most in his plays was "artificial". "I don't like people, like people. The person's design is that I set a sweet pet or a soft cute person's design. I know that this person's design will please many people, so it is the same. I am nothing more than repeating it in ten or twenty episodes. " Although he doesn't think there is anything wrong with the creative methodology of "human design", he wants to show the changes of the characters-after more than ten or twenty episodes, he may change from a scum to a bully and become mature from ignorance.

As revealed in the trailer of "Wind Dog", three of Daxing Village's four children who started their third year of high school or were still poor students were admitted to the university. Some viewers think this is too idealistic and impossible in reality. In fact, this is Zhang Yibai's personal experience. "I have such a classmate in high school. His mother cleaned in Jie Fangbei and lived in a very shabby attic. He worked hard in the last semester, studying under the street lamp every day, and finally he was admitted to the university. And that school, that grade, that class is considered to be the most suitable for college, I didn't get in. Everyone has graduated from college, and I was admitted to the university later. "

Four sons in Daxing Village

Father and son: Touching the topic of father for the first time, I realized my wish

One of the most touching scenes in The Sky of Wind Dog Boys is the farewell of "old dog" Tu Jun (Peng Yuchang) and his father Tu Fu (Huang Jue). On a rainy night, Tu Jun struggled to go to the hospital with his badly injured father on his back. Tu Fu tried to tell his son a joke: "Is it spring now?" In case I leave, you can bury me in the spring, so that you can harvest many (many) old men (fathers) in autumn. " After this episode aired, Zhang Yibai sent two Weibo about his father. One of them wrote: "From filming to cutting to soundtrack to synthesis to filming, I always shed tears here. I miss my dad too. "

Tu Jun went to the hospital with his badly injured father on his back.

This is the first time that Zhang Yibai portrays his father in his film and television works. He admits that there is indeed a projection of personal feelings. "When I saw TuJun carrying his father, I really remembered the night when my brother and I carried my father home more than 3 years ago. My father also died very early, when I was a freshman, so I have been reluctant to touch the topic about my father. You see, my father never appeared in my film. " Zhang Yibai said that this time, he created the image of a father like Tufu in Wind Dog, which is also a wish for himself.

In the play, Tu Fu is fierce to Tu Jun on the surface, and often cries for beating and killing. In fact, he is very concerned about his son. He will be sensitive to know whose "spare tire" he has become, and will quietly tear off the inside pages of the magazine and go to the mall to buy running shoes that he has been interested in for a long time. In Zhang Yibai's time, family members kept each other in their hearts, so they didn't communicate with their father like Tu Jun. "I like the father-son relationship at the bottom of China. They are optimistic under the pressure of life, indulgent under majesty, and show a little warmth inadvertently. This is the Chinese father and son. I believe that the father-son relationship experienced by Tu Jun and his generation is definitely better than our generation in emotional expression. "

Father and son in Wind Dog.

As for how to find Peng Yuchang to play "Old Dog", Zhang Yibai said with a smile that everyone likes to find some traffic when shooting a youth film, but he just wants to find Peng Yuchang. But Peng Yuchang was filming Struggle! Teenager ",and then" Little Wish ". "I will' trick' and say, why don't you shoot me this? The script is so good. He said he had promised. This actually made me like him and told him,' I'll wait for you!'

"Wind Dog" was originally planned to be launched in August 218. Waiting for Peng Yuchang for three months means that it will have to start shooting in December. The filming in New Year's Eve makes the cycle half a year longer, and the budget will increase accordingly. But Zhang Yibai insisted on waiting, because as soon as he saw Peng Yuchang, he thought he was an "old dog". "I have seen his movie" The Flash Girl "before, and he has a kind of civilian spirit, the kind of strength in simplicity."

Peng Yuchang stills

Form changes: using dialects to show classes and express more freely

Wind Dog is also the first time that Zhang Yibai has used Chongqing dialect dialogues extensively in film and television dramas. Although the local accent hasn't changed for decades, and he teased himself in the play that "Chongqing has been made into a city of online celebrity", his previous works rarely used dialects, even the Chongqing Trilogy (curiosity kills the cat, Secret Coast and Passing Through Your World) was written in Mandarin. In "Wind Dog", Li Anran and Martin, who are well-born, speak Mandarin to each other; The four sons of Daxing Village, who grew up at the bottom of society, speak Chongqing dialect to each other, and they also speak Chongqing Putonghua at school. At the beginning of the broadcast, some viewers said that they "didn't understand", but they found it interesting with the broadcast of the series. Zhang Yibai said: "I want to create a sense of class through different languages in different environments. But maybe I didn't do well enough to hit others in the first place. "

Wind Dog uses Chongqing dialect.

In Zhang Yibai's view, the dialect mixed with Mandarin dialogue is the inevitable result of setting the story background in his alma mater with Li Zelin. No.29 Middle School is located in Jie Fangbei, the center of Chongqing. "There are public security bureaus, Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and hospitals in this area. The children of the families of these units will come here to go to school, and the children who serve the Jie Fangbei business circle also come here to go to school. The students are very mixed. In fact, everyone's future fate is related to their parents' status, but teenagers don't have the logic of this class, and they usually play together. " Zhang Yibai still clearly remembers that a classmate was a sailor's child. As soon as he arrived at the self-study class, he drove all the boys to the river and forced everyone to learn to swim.

Another feature of Wind Dog is that the characters in it sometimes break the "fourth wall" and jump out of the plot to talk to the audience. For example, tell the audience that "we are a youth film" and spit out that "the director said that this shooting is advanced." Or, Enron said to Martin, "If I say I don't know (the old dog likes me), the national audience can't stand it." This is reminiscent of Zhang Yibai's film debut "Subway to Spring", in which Jianbin (Geng Le) and Xiaohui (Xu Jinglei) often tell their inner monologues to the camera. Zhang Yibai said that the filming of "Subway to Spring" was influenced by drama. Why can't the film break the fourth wall?

Screenshot of Subway to Spring

"When I watched Subway to Spring several years later, I felt how bold I was at that time. ! It's really young, whatever, shoot as you want. " But after that, Zhang Yibai didn't do it again until Wind Dog. "The subway to spring" everyone said that I didn't make it like a movie, so I think it's good, just make it like a movie. But after I was 5 years old, I thought: Why do you want to shoot like this and like that? Why should we be unified by the so-called style and bound by the so-called commandments? " He admits that the filming of "Wind Dog" is more free and willful, and the sad and funny styles sometimes suddenly change. "Some people may not be used to it, but I enjoy this creation."

Don't mind paying tribute: Li Zelin's generation really understands that Stephen Chow's

The Sky of Wind Dog Boys is currently broadcast for more than half. Many viewers said on the barrage that they saw the taste of paying tribute to Stephen Chow from the tragic background behind the joke, lines, soundtrack and other details. The love of my life, the ending song of Stephen Chow's A Chinese Odyssey, is also the important soundtrack of the first half of Wind Dog, and even the name of the seventh episode of the play is called the love of my life. At the end of this episode, Liu Wenqin, who was knocked down by fate, used this song to bid farewell to his first love. A group of teenagers under the stage sang along with their own sentimentality: "Bitter sea, turn over love and hate. In this world, you can't escape fate ... "

Before this episode, Ding Rongliang wanted to dress up as Santa Claus to please her favorite girl Chen Yuanyuan, but she accidentally heard her tell her best friend that she would never like herself anyway. The lost Ding Rongliang quietly packed up the props and left in the music of "Love of Life", leaving only a lonely figure. My best friend said to Chen Yuanyuan, "That man is so strange, like a dog, pathetic."

a conversation between my best friend and Chen Yuanyuan.

The screenwriter Li Zelin likes Stephen Chow very much. He naturally wrote the line "Like a dog" in this scene, but he was worried that this tribute would attract negative comments from the director Zhang Yibai, so he thought about it and took it off. Unexpectedly, when Zhang Yibai was filming, he took the initiative to add this line back and used Love of My Life as the background music. Zhang Yibai thinks that this is a writer's personal expression and should be supported. He doesn't mind others saying that his works pay tribute to Stephen Chow.

tribute to Stephen Chow

as a matter of fact, Zhang Yibai has a good relationship with Stephen Chow. Zhang Yibai's first film, Subway to Spring, was at a low point in his life. At that time, mainstream critics thought it was too petty, and only Stephen Chow told him that it was very good. "I thought to myself, how can you watch" Subway to Spring "by Stephen Chow? But he was the first person who encouraged me and made me feel that it was worthwhile to make this film. Later, he gave me a role in Kung Fu (Detective Chen). "

Zhang Yibai and Stephen Chow are almost of the same age. He first came into contact with Stephen Chow's films when he was an adult. It was on a long trip.