How does a director create the "cinematic universe"? Niu Xiaoyu couldn't answer for a moment.
She remembered that in "My Genius Girlfriend", Lenon also asked Lila how she wrote the novel "Blue Fairy", "Lila said 'I don't know either, I just opened my brain', and those words kept jumping out."
Like Lila, young director Niu Xiaoyu used her unique intuition and language to build a "fish pond universe" that belongs to her:
In 2013, feeling the death of a grandfather in the same community, Niu Xiaoyu, born in the 1990s from Hefei, Anhui Province, filmed the short film "Fish pond", trying to explore in the film how to face the theme of the departure of relatives and personal growth, and continuously extend it in the works in the following years.
In 2022, Niu Xiaoyu released her own long-form debut "Don't Goodbye, Fish Flower Pond". It is one of the most popular domestic new films this year -
. This film was not only shortlisted for the 74th Locarno International Film Festival, but also won the "One Stand" award at the 16th FIRST Youth Film Festival and became the highest-rated film in FIRST media magazines.
At the end of November this year, "Don't See You Goodbye, Fish Flower Pond" was officially released in the cinema, with Douban scored 7.2 points, making it the highest-rated domestic new film in November. Before the movie was released, we contacted Xiaoyu and talked about her story with the movie.
Don’t see you again, Yuhuatang
In the Ringcheng Park in Hefei, Anhui Province, there is a rain flower pond, which is the birthplace of many urban legends. Since the first grade of elementary school, Niu Xiaoyu has to set off from home every day and spend 20 minutes passing through Yuhuatang and reaching the school opposite.
When she passes by the Yuhuatang alone during the day, she always feels nervous because the groves in this area are particularly dense. "Some people have met fugitives, bird walkers here, and people who fall into the water - it seems that there will be such urban legends in the lakeside or jungle of every city."
When I returned home, my grandmother and the neighbors "made up" neighborhood anecdotes also opened up Xiaoyu's mind: a child was abducted by a human trafficker and performed acrobatics in a circus in a bear skin; the daughter of a barber ran away from home, and her father closed the shop and searched for people; in the rain pond in the late night, a werewolf was hiding from the bushes...
Niu Xiaoyu, who grew up, moved them into her own story: In "Don't See Goodbye, Fish Pond", the protagonist Ye Zi's grandfather passed away, and she returned home to spend the summer vacation with her grandmother, and had a very long dream.
In this dream, she not only returned to her childhood and reunited with her grandfather in her memory, but also met all kinds of monsters she had imagined in the Yuhuatang (pseudonym), and finally completed a grand farewell to them.
Leaf's dream dream was performed one afternoon: the background music of "Boys and Girls Go Forward" on an old TV is still playing repeatedly, and several mottled tree shadows and light shine into the living room. The lazy people always fall asleep unconsciously. The scenes and settings of
seem to make people return to the old house where they lived when they were childhood. "Then you will dream several floors. The more layers of dreams are superimposed, the longer the time will be. Sometimes you feel that you have spent a day, but when you wake up, you find that only 10 minutes have passed."
is different from the dream dream created by director Nolan and others in classic movies. There is no clear anchor point between the dream and reality woven by Niu Xiaoyu for the audience: she designed 4 layers of dreams in the script, and the characters in each layer of dreams have subtle differences, but there is no clear shot of entering and exiting the dream -
"Everyone usually dreams are blurred. Only when the boundaries between dreams and reality are blurred, you will believe that this dream is true, and those fake things look more like real."
In Ye Zi's dream, grandpa sometimes turns into a light spot floating on the ceiling of the living room, and sometimes turns into a taciturn werewolf by the fish pond. He has never really gone away and has always been by his family.
In "Don't Goodbye, Fish Pond", another clip that makes the audience feel like déjà vu is the singing and dancing element in the dream of leaves -
On the side of the fish pond in the middle of the night, a glowing moon ball quietly surfaced, and a group of children with red dots on their eyebrows and wearing fluffy skirts stood aside and sang old songs such as "Stars" and "Fisherman's Girl", which looked like the June 1st Children's Show in the 1990s.
Xiaoyu feels that the song and dance clips in the film can not only convey emotions better, but also avoid an overly sad atmosphere: "I like to watch song and dance films like "La La City" and "Mama Mia". At the same time, it is a relatively heavy story (faced with the departure of relatives). I hope that such emotional passages can comfort myself and the audience." The end of the film
also ends with a song "Please Stay" by singer Huang Beiling. The lyrics sing: "Please don't leave /Please stay /Please stay for me." Why do you have to say goodbye to the past? Why do you have to say goodbye? Why do people have to grow up? Xiaoyu used this movie to tell everyone the answer:
"Some things you may never accept, but this is not necessarily a pessimistic thing. We can not say goodbye (to our relatives). Occasionally healing ourselves in dreams is also a kind of 'positive resistance'."
Goodbye Yuhuatang
Niu Xiaoyu is a director who came out of the film festival. Of course, in her words, "unless it is specially commissioned to create a proposition, a young director seems to be unable to 'get out' through other channels except for (investment) film festivals."
In 2013, a grandfather in the community passed away, which touched Xiaoyu deeply and created the short film "Fish Pond": What is our state after our relatives left? What attitude should we use to face this loss?
Until Xiaoyu's grandfather passed away in 2017, these problems that repeatedly lingered in her mind prompted her to further create a long work. At the end of 2018, Xiaoyu submitted the outline of the newly completed feature film to FIRST Laboratory. When the producer Wenhui first saw the script, she was attracted:
"There is a plot in the dream where grandpa called an old friend and said 'Old Xu, I miss you so much' - an old man expressed his longing for his friends in such a childish and lyrical way. I was particularly touched by me at that time. My colleague and I hugged our heads in the office and cried bitterly."
"At that time, I was still wondering if I wanted to participate in the roadshow of the venture capital club, but the lab supervisor felt that this work was far from the industry. I went (on the stage) and might hurt me, so out of protection for me, I helped me make an appointment with some companies to chat privately. The photography director also met at that time."
Xiaoyu (right) and starring "Don't Goodbye, Fish Flower Pond", one was her little girl Yezi (left), and the other was her true grandmother (middle).
In early 2019, "Don't Goodbye, Fish Pond" was selected into the FIRST laboratory.
For a new director, raising funds is the first problem before him. "And I also hope to turn on the film as soon as possible, because my grandma was in poor health at that time. I wanted to use the image to retain her life earlier, and it was really difficult to raise money in a short period of time."
In order to support her daughter's dream, Xiaoyu's mother sold a house and became an investor with her relatives and neighbors. At the end of 2019, Xiaoyu and her team returned to Yuhuatang, where they were filming. For her, the biggest challenge during the filming period was "money and time" - in other words, time is money:
Due to limited funds, Xiaoyu compressed the shooting cycle to about one month, and at the same time ensured quality. She had the ultimate requirement for light, and it took two hours to clean it every day. "We were really on a round-route basis. We had to shoot sunshine during the day and night scenes at night, and even stayed up for 15 big nights. The assistant director was once sent to the hospital."
As a grandmother who plays an amateur, it is also an "uncontrollable factor" during the filming period: the indoor set carefully arranged by the crew members is often restored to its original state by the hardworking grandmother the next day; when reading the script (about grandpa), grandmother will also think of her sad things and ask Xiaoyu why she asked herself to say these lines. Xiaoyu can only say: "You can't ask me now, I am the director, you have to listen to me, everyone is waiting to finish this. "
Interestingly, my mother, who usually has the right to speak in her family, respects Xiaoyu's directorial work abnormally in the crew, which also surprised Xiaoyu: "You also know that our filming (day and night) is all very bad crew status. I thought my mother would urge me to go and rest as soon as possible, so at the beginning I didn't want her to stay in the group.
But my mother never said anything about me. Whether it is everyone who stayed up late to work, joked, or celebrating when finishing the filming, she was pretending to be invisible. If she had treated me as a daughter at that time, it might not have been that good, so she still held back, and I think this is amazing. "
At night, a moon ball rose in the Yuhuatang. "Although there was a lot of noise during the shooting (at night), everyone watched me grow up and showed a very tolerant attitude."
Due to limited funds and time, Xiaoyu and the team still had some clips that could not be made: there was originally a highlight at the end of the filming, which was a grandfather riding a bicycle carrying leaves all the way home from the Yuhuatang. His childhood memories and the "monsters" in their imagination intersected in time and space like a lantern, and the car The characters on the table also changed from small leaves to big leaves, "(but) in the end, but only the clips of returning home for dinner were left."
For Xiaoyu, this is a process that needs to be slowly accepted: "For example, the script is written according to the idea of 100 points, but there will be some (discounts) when shooting. Maybe it is about 70 points. In the post-production process, the color adjustment, sound, and editing are added back. Although it is not what I imagined at the beginning, with everyone's efforts, it has become another look that I am very satisfied with. "
For a work full of personalized expression, how to make a balance between art and the market is also a difficult problem - in the film, Xiaoyu also puts the footage of the staff and the real daily life of grandma into the film, further creating a sense of chaos and blurring the boundary between emptiness and reality.
producer Wang Zijian kindly reminds Xiaoyu that the result of doing this is likely to be a wall in the market, "The audience who likes it will be very I like it, but most viewers will not buy it."
But Xiaoyu still has her own persistence. Even if most viewers (on Douban) play one star and two stars, only a few of them play four star and five star. She also wants to take a good photo for these people: "I don't want to give up my (creative) language casually. Maybe the voice of this language is still very small and its grammar is not that perfect, but if I don't say it for the first time, I may never be able to say it in the future. "
This is Xiaoyu's favorite scene: during the last filming, she talked to the actors while waiting for the lights on the scene. The grandmother on the side was so sleepy that she rubbed her eyes, and Xiaoyu fell asleep tiredly, as if she had returned to a chaotic dream.
Walking out of the Yuhuatang
At this year's FIRST Youth Film Festival, "Don't Goodbye, Fish Flower Pond" ushered in the domestic premiere. As a new director, Xiaoyu, who was sitting in the seat of the middle aisle in the first half of the first screening, was very nervous:
Whenever someone walks past her, she will observe whether the other party has a bag. "If you don't bring a bag, you may just go to the bathroom. If you bring a bag, you really leave (early). I really want to hold them and say, 'Don't leave, it's pretty good to watch behind'."
Before that, the film was shortlisted for the 74th Locarno International Film Festival and was screened locally, and received a good response, but Xiaoyu didn't feel nervous at that time - "because the audience is all foreigners, and I always feel that there is a layer of (cultural diaphragm). If they can't get it, I think it doesn't matter."The first screening of the
FIRST Youth Film Festival was in a large cinema. Xiaoyu couldn't hear too many audience reactions and always felt that few people were watching it. The second screening was in a small hall, which made her relax: "This time the audience is very close to me, and everyone laughs all the laughs, and everyone seems to be crying, and I can hear it."
Xiaoyu originally thought that this movie would have thresholds and restrictions on watching movies, "Will girls with particularly delicate emotions, or people who have lived with their grandparents since childhood easier to empathize" -
But in the post-screen communication session, a teenage boy said that he could feel the state and emotions in the film, and a grandparent over 60 years old said that he thought of his own experience, "At that moment, I suddenly felt like 'blocking up and down', and the relationship between people was very close."
"Don't Goodbye, Fish Pond" was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the FIRST Youth Film Exhibition and finally won the "One Stand" award. The result of
winning the award is not within Xiaoyu's expectations. "But in fact, I don't think too much about the 'no award'. If the audience likes or needs what this film conveys, I feel that I have completed the (mission)."
Many film critics listed this work as one of the "Top Ten of the Year" in their hearts. Some people believe that in the works of new domestic directors, there are more and more personalization and self-expression, while others are keen to explore the similar styles to directors Apichabang and Cai Mingliang from the film. Xiaoyu gave his own response to this:
"The one who has the greatest influence on me in terms of movies is director Hou Hsiao-hsien. For the first time, I found that I could observe the world in this way. When I film my own works, I will be influenced by them to a certain extent. This is inevitable. Although the topics we want to discuss are different, everyone will have some common life experiences, and there will be similarities in some technical aspects."
Many young directors like Xiaoyu are also constantly exploring more pioneering ways of expression in the creative process. During her graduate school, she studied experimental imaging major:
. It is also in conjunction with my university's animation major. Early avant-garde works, such as some lunar exploration and mechanical dance clips, are all semi-animation and semi-real-shoot material experiments. I also hope to find the common points of the two on the audio-visual level, and try to use animation thinking to make live-action movies in the future."
At the end of this year, Xiaoyu was conducting a roadshow activity of "Don't See You Goodbye, Fish Flower Pond" in major cities. In her words, "Everything to Act". In a director's note behind the scenes, she admitted that she had exhausted her energy when writing the script:
"Every day afterwards is like a long marathon relay - force, which is the continuous love provided by everyone. These loves fill my body, and I am driven by them to shoot, post-production, film festival until it is released."
At present, Xiaoyu has also begun the preparations for the next feature film. She is preparing to tell a story of "the monsters grow up and leave the fish pond." As a "experienced person", she left a message for the new director:
"I want to encourage everyone to be impulsive when creating, do things when they are most motivated and expressive, and don't let yourself feel regret or regret on a certain day in the future.
I don't dare to imagine what would happen now if I didn't make up my mind to make a movie in 2019 - because my grandma has been in poor health and later started to be hospitalized for dialysis, then this movie may not be available again."
