Text/Mo Yan
Since I won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature , a photo has been circulating on the Internet.
There are four people in this photo: three men and one woman. The three men are Zhang Yimou, Jiang Wen , Mo Yan ; one woman is Gong Li .
This photo was taken in the yard of our home in Gaomi, Shandong, twenty-five years ago.
We were all very young at that time. Zhang Yimou is the oldest, only 34 or 35 years old, while Gong Li is a third-year student in college, only 22 or 23 years old.
I think twenty-five years have passed and we have grown old. We didn’t have a name at that time, and now we all have a name, but unfortunately we are old. If I were asked to abandon all the awards and honors I received and return to my youthful years, I would go back without hesitation.
" Red Sorghum " was filmed at that time, we didn't expect it to have such a big impact.
The total investment in this video is only 600,000 yuan.
Now Zhang Yimou needs hundreds of millions of yuan to make a movie.
The movie he made with 600,000 yuan has become a classic. I think, why did the movie "Red Sorghum" achieve such a great success? Then I can say proudly because my novel "Red Sorghum" is well written.
The novel was published in " People's Literature " in March 1986. About four months later, Zhang Yimou found me.
At that time, Zhang Yimou was shirtless and was almost as dark as coal. He was wearing a shoe on his left foot and a shoe on his right hand. Because the shoelaces he carried were trampled on the bus.
As soon as I saw him, I immediately remembered the captain of our production team.
Later, Zhang Yimou said, as soon as I saw Mo Yan, I remembered the accountant of our production team.
So, a team leader and an accountant cooperated successfully.
At that time, Zhang Yimou said, I may have made great changes to your novel.
I said, please change whatever you want, because I trust you.
I said, in the novel, my grandfather and grandma fell in love in the sorghum field, you can let grandpa and grandma experiment with secret weapons in the sorghum field.
But in the end, grandpa and grandma fell in love in the sorghum field.
At that time, many people thought that my novel was adapted into a movie by Zhang Yimou, and I made a lot of money.
When I returned to my hometown, a fellow villager asked me, I heard that Zhang Yimou gave you one million?
The one million yuan in the 1980s, I think it is more surprising than the current one hundred million yuan, but in fact, Zhang Yimou only spent 800 yuan on the copyright of my novel.
But this 800 yuan made me feel that I had become a rich man at that time. Because I can buy a large scalper in my hometown for 800 yuan! The copyright of a novel can be exchanged for a scalper. Do you think it won’t make me happy?
I am also one of the screenwriters of this movie. The earliest script we wrote was divided into three episodes, with about 60,000 words.
Wait until the fall of the next year I returned to my hometown, and Zhang Yimou's crew also arrived. He took out the final script for me to read, only a thin dozen pages of paper.
I said, our script was so thick, why are you so thin now? Zhang Yimou said that these are enough! After the movie
was made, I realized that a movie script really doesn’t require much text.
I remember that there are two paragraphs in his script, each paragraph has only two words. The two words in the paragraph
are "彩格". This part took five minutes to make the movie.
There is another two words called "Wild He". You will see how long it takes for this "wild collaboration".
So later I wrote the script for them very short. The director thought the script was short, so I said, "You go and watch "Red Sorghum"!
Later there was a lot of publicity, saying that Zhang Yimou planted thousands of acres of sorghum in our Gaomi in order to make this movie, but in fact, less than forty acres of sorghum were planted in total.
The endless sorghum field that appears in the movie camera is actually a lie.
In my novel, sorghum is red, but in the movie, sorghum is green.
At that time, I was very dissatisfied with Zhang Yimou's change, and I said: Why do you want to shoot green sorghum?
Zhang Yimou said that when sorghum is red, the limbs of sorghum are stiff; only when sorghum is not mature, its limbs are soft, and they are as soft as a woman's body. The metaphor of
is indeed a bit inexplicable.
This is the first time that a Chinese film won a grand prize at an international film festival in the West. The sensation caused was no less than that of my Nobel Prize in Literature.
At that time, the rough and bold songs of "Sister, go forward boldly..." were heard from south to north in China.
I remember when I returned to Beijing from Gaomi, I saw a young man holding a beer bottle in his hand as soon as he left the train station. He was shaking while walking, swaying and singing: "Sister, go forward boldly..."
At that time, I thought, why does such a movie cause such a strong response? Is it just because it won the International Film Festival award? Later I thought it was not. Because in the 1980s, it was the time for China's thought to be liberated. After a long period of repression, there are many things to be released deep in our hearts. In the movie "Red Sorghum", both men and women are people who dare to speak and do, drink and love.
Of course, they all carry a lot of vulgar things, rude, and even a bit savage.
However, this kind of spirit of pursuing freedom, fearlessness, and personal liberation meets everyone's spiritual needs.
In addition, "Red Sorghum" is a new way of telling a story, whether it is a novel or a movie. In the past, when describing such subjects, the protagonists often all were heroes. But the main characters and positive characters in this movie are actually a group of bandits. What they did in peacetime was bad things like killing, setting fires, and robbery. However, when foreign enemies invade and the country and nation face the fate of destruction, their national pride and national self-esteem are mobilized. It was refreshing to tell such a story in this way at the time.
This movie also has a lot of innovations in other art aspects.
For example, in the use of music, it uses a lot of local and folk melodies; in the use of colors, it also uses a lot of strong contrast of folk art.
Of course, if we look at this movie now, we will definitely find many unsatisfactory aspects of it. This movie also carries many limitations caused by the history of the time.
But just like I can’t write another movie "Red Sorghum", I can’t write another movie "Red Sorghum". If you ask Zhang Yimou to shoot another movie "Red Sorghum", I guess he can’t even shoot it.
(excerpted from "Northern Man" 2022 Issue 1 )
