＂Knife Tip＂ and ＂Mistakes by the River＂ are coming, and the original author has something to say!

Special feature of 1905 film network "I liked it after the first time, and after the second time, I patted it.Wei ShujunShoulder, and then withZhu YilongShake hands and congratulate them both! "I saw the avant-garde novel I wrote 36 years agoMistakes by the riverFinally put on the big screen, writerYuhuaHe praised the creative director Wei Shujun for shooting the texture of life, and the leading actor Zhu.onedragonThe performance is impeccable.

Returning with the honor of major film festivals, The Mistake by the River has scored 7.6 points in Douban, and the box office has exceeded 100 million in three days, creating a new personal box office record for director Wei Shujun, which has performed well in the dimension of art films and has also become another successful work adapted from a novel by a well-known writer.

At the same time, the film adaptation of the novel "The Father of the Spy Wars" has frequently exposed new trends: the spy war film directed and starring was announced to be released on November 24, and another film of the same name adapted from Decryption was officially launched recently.

As the leader of spy novels, Mai Jia once modestly said that his fame was largely attributed to the success of the film and television remake. "I am grateful to the movies and TV series, which made my words have the due value and made me get enough dignity and dignity."

This time, it’s really worrying how his "Spy War Seal", "Knife Point" and "Decryption" written in 11 years will be condensed and adapted into movies.

The relationship between film adaptation and the original work has always been subtle, whether it is reduction, transcendence or subversion, magic change. How does the original author view and handle the relationship between literature and film?

Space for adaptation

Language and images have their own strengths.

"It’s hard to change. It’s hard to change. I’m still a little surprised that Wei Shujun adapted him this time!"As the original author and film lover, Yu Hua knows the difficulty of adaptation of The Mistake by the River. And the directorZhang Yimou、Lu XiaoyaAnd the other two companies have bought the right to edit, but they have given up one after another, which is enough to see the difficulty.

In Yu Hua’s view, Wei Shujun’s success lies in grasping the balance between respecting the original work and reasonable adaptation. On the one hand, "Wei Shujun respects the original work more than Zhang Yimou", which shows the spiritual temperament of the original work and the relationship between the individual and the times and destiny; On the other hand, many clever adaptations also made Yu Hua admit that he was "better than the original".

For example, the transformation and fullness of characters such as Qian Ling, Wang Hong and Xu Liang, and the exquisite design of transforming dilapidated cinemas into case-handling places all made the life texture of that era come to the fore. At the same time, the addition of Ma Zhe’s wife’s scenes and the subtle hints for children at the end all increase the thickness of the role and the depth of the theme.

Yu Hua has always maintained an open attitude towards film adaptation. "Language narration and image narration have their own strengths. Some things may be wonderful parts in the novel, but they are not felt when they are moved to the screen. But sometimes things that are not in the novel will be completely different when they are created on the screen."

For this reason, he thinks that Wei Shujun’s "respect for the original" and Zhang Yimou’s "disrespect for the original" are not better or worse. The key lies in whether effective image expression can be formed. "Only fools will be loyal to the original … Because when the director adapts a novel, he wants to pull it into his own feeling system. "

Not only Yu Hua, but Mo Yan also left enough room for film and television creators who adapted their own works. He once told Zhang Yimou that he was not a famous artist like Lu Xun and Ba Jin and did not need to be faithful to the original works.

"You can change it as you like. It has nothing to do with me if you want’ my grandfather’ and’ my grandmother’ to develop secret weapons in the sorghum field. Far from having anything to do with it, I also want to cheer your good courage. It is the glory of your Zhang Yimou to shoot well, and it is not my shame to shoot badly. "

I also appreciate and encourage the creative adaptation of the film. "The film has incorporated many connotations and depths that were not there before."arrivedThe Wandering Earth IIHe even admitted that "it has little to do with novels", but he grasped the essence of science fiction movies — — "Historical film in general.coldThe sense of mulberry and heaviness can be compared with Hollywood in terms of production level.

Furthermore, Liu Cixin believes that the content of science fiction literature is especially suitable for the adaptation and presentation of images. "For science fiction art, the power of images is much greater than that of words, because sometimes what we purely imagine is difficult to accurately convey to readers through words, but images can."

Regret and controversy

Is the writer’s cross-border screenwriter reliable?

As two different art forms, literature and film have obvious "barriers", but the author, as the "first original powder", can’t help but be particularly picky when he sees that his painstaking works have become other people’s creative materials, and there are not a few people who have regrets about the adaptation of film and television, and even publicly express their dissatisfaction.

The most famous films in the history of cinema are all classics that capture hundreds of millions of fans, but they can’t be recognized by the original authors.

Wei Yu, a popular online writer who wrote Si Teng and West Out of Yumen, also publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the film and television party magic change’s works, and announced that when selling copyright in the future, he should state in the contract that the author has the right to edit the script, otherwise he would rather not make the money.

Mo Yan, Mai Jia, etc. have also expressed their "regret" about the fly in the ointment of film adaptation, all of which are related to the limited length and space of the film. Mo Yan once said: "So many characters and so many colorful stories in the novel have become more than 200 shots in the movie, and many precious things have not been got in."

Mai Jia also lamented that many classic contents in the novel were not presented in the film. "The original author just wants to keep remaking and give more things to the audience."

From novels with hundreds of thousands of words to movies with only about 120 minutes, the choice is an inevitable process. This point is deeply understood by both the author and the screenwriter. "The theory of interpreting the whole novel with a movie itself is untenable. Because the theme of the novel is generally the richer the better, but the film only needs one theme, and it is right to lose it. "

Perhaps it is to avoid the "bad taste" of the works, or to open up a new field of creation. There are not a few writers like Liu Zhenyun who escort their works from "cross-border" screenwriters, and the results have their own successes and failures.

When creating a film, the original author changed 26 screenwriters and decided to cross-border screenwriter personally, just to "leave the purest place of the novel", which also opened the road of film and television, from scriptwriting to planning, production and distribution, and the participation became deeper and deeper.

Also choose deep cross-border and make the film and television map bigger and bigger under pressure. His position for himself is to grow from a simple writer to an IP operation expert.

Rao Xueman and movies.Hourglassfilm crew

Another film and television adaptation "big family" also took the first step of "cross-border". The online drama "Daming under the microscope" became his screenwriter’s first show, and then he will cooperate with the director as a screenwriter of the film.

When it comes to the experience of being a screenwriter for the first time, Ma Boyong used the words "letting go and withdrawing". "Letting go" means letting go of one’s desire to express as a writer; "Retreat" means that getting used to the lens language is also risky for literary creation.

As the saying goes, "interlacing is like a mountain", a good writer is not necessarily a successful screenwriter. Even if he is facing his own work, he should respect the law of film and television creation.

All along, literature and film are interdependent "symbiotic relationship", as director Zhang Yimou said, "literature is carried with the film". The fertile soil of literature nourishes the creation of images, and the wings of images can also take literature to a broader world.

Finding a balance between restoration and adaptation is the reason why Error by the River moved Yu Hua, and it is also our expectation for the film versions of Knife’s Tip and Decryption.