Along the long Huashan Road, tall plane trees are planted on both sides of the road. When the branches sprout in spring, they are already lush and green, providing shade and protection from the sun, like a green tunnel.
This area is mostly composed of garden houses built in the 1920s and 1930s, and is dotted with many former residences of celebrities. It is the earliest wealthy area in Shanghai. After liberation, it also had a resounding name called "Shangzhijiao".
A sky-blue Santana 2000 taxi followed this Huashan Road and turned into a branch road at a fork in the road. After walking a few dozen meters, it stopped at a cafe that was renovated from an old bungalow and had a very old Shanghai style.
The doorway stopped.
A tall and thin man wearing a beige baseball cap and sunglasses got out of the car. He was wearing a Burberry T-shirt of the same color as the hat, a pair of khaki casual pants, and a pair of shoes with a matching logo on his feet.
I put on my sneakers and walked straight towards the cafe.
"welcome!"
Pushing open the black lattice glass door, a fresh-looking waitress came forward and asked with a professional smile: "Sir, how many are there?"
"I made an appointment with someone..."
Before he finished speaking, he saw a middle-aged man with a fat crew cut and a pair of black-rimmed glasses standing up and waving to him from the seat facing the garden window: "Xiao He, here!"
He Xin looked happy, nodded to the waitress, and walked over quickly.
"Director, I haven't seen you for a long time. Is it rare to go back to your hometown?"
"Hometown? I still don't know whether I am from Shanghai, Guizhou, Beijing or Hu Jian." Wang Xiaoshuai shook hands with him, with a smile on his face but a very emotional tone.
He was born in Shanghai, grew up in Guizhou, and then went to school in the capital. His job was assigned to Hu Jian, and his registered permanent residence is still in Hu Jian.
"Sir, please!"
The waitress who greeted us before brought us a free glass of lemonade and handed us our order.
He Xin didn't turn the page and asked directly: "Do you have any cream cakes here?"
The waitress was a little confused and quickly introduced: "Sir, we have matcha cake, cheese cake, black forest, and..."
He waved his hand and interrupted: "I want pure fresh milk cake, a cream cake like ruby."
"Sir, please wait a moment. Let me ask you." The waitress was obviously not very skilled in her business.
"You didn't have lunch?" Wang Xiaoshuai asked, taking a sip of coffee.
"No, I'm just greedy. I like this one." He Xin chuckled.
With that said, he asked again: "Director, when is the new movie "I 11" you told me about last time going to start filming?"
"Well, this project can't be carried out now."
When it comes to this topic, Wang Xiaoshuai seems a little embarrassed.
“Investors withdrew their capital?”
He Xin's first thought was this. The market is sluggish these days, and the biggest problem in making movies is money.
"That's not true."
Wang Xiaoshuai shook his head and said with a bitter smile: "It's my fault. I haven't figured out how to tell this story until now. Instead of forcing it down and turning it into a pot of uncooked rice, I might as well put it aside for now."
"..."
When He Xin heard this, he was immediately speechless. At the same time, he secretly mourned for the investors behind him. You said that they had invested all their money, but you had been tinkering for more than half a year, and then you said, "I'm not ready yet, so I won't shoot."
!”
I don’t know what the other investors thought when they heard what he said?
This is probably the pretentiousness of so-called cultural people!
Just when he didn't know how to answer Wang Xiaoshuai's words, the waitress happened to come over and said: "Sir, we can make the fresh milk cake you want freshly for you."
"Oh, thank you, let's have a guest."
"One guest? You mean one portion, right?"
"Uh, yes, not too much, just as big as this." As he said that, he made a gesture of three or four inches.
"Okay, sir, would you like coffee?"
"Coffee, no need, thank you!"
"Sir, please wait a moment."
Watching the waitress leave, Wang Xiaoshuai smiled and said: "Basically all the waitresses now come from other places, and they don't even understand what a guest is."
"I'm used to it. My dad has made me speak Shanghainese since I was a child, and I am familiar with everything in Shanghai. He is just worried that I will be looked down upon by others when I return to Shanghai one day, or that I will be called a country boy."
With the fusion of memories and the passage of time, he has now recognized his current identity as He Xin. As for the He Xiaozu in his previous life, he seems to be becoming more and more indifferent.
"Yes, whether it is my parents' generation who went to the third-line support, or your father's educated youth who went to the frontier to join the team, even if they cannot come back, they must try their best to let their children return to Shanghai."
As he spoke, he let out a long sigh, shook his head with emotion and said, "They are really exactly the same, how pitiful the hearts of parents in the world are!"
He Xin nodded and recalled: "I remember that my father told me to study hard since I was a child. In the future, I must go to a university in Shanghai, and then stay here to get married and start a family. Unfortunately, my academic performance was very poor at that time.
Be brave!"
Thinking of the experience of the original owner of this body, he always felt inexplicably sad. His soul had passed through this body and merged with its soul. To this day, he still can't figure out why he became He Xin. Maybe
The owner of this body also passed away at that time, and his soul traveled through his body to bring him back to life.
He Xin is unfortunate, but at the same time he is also lucky.
Wang Xiaoshuai saw the sad look on his face and thought he was thinking of his deceased parents, so he comforted him: "Look, aren't you doing well now? You have become a big star. I heard that you bought a house here some time ago.
Your parents can rest in peace knowing that you are so promising."
But He Xin shook his head with a wry smile and said: "If my parents were still alive, I might still be a gangster in a small county in Northeast China. Maybe I wouldn't be able to come to the capital at all, and I wouldn't meet you, and I wouldn't be able to meet you."
You may end up on this path now. Speaking of which, it’s all fate!”
Thinking about He Xiaozu's previous life, like most ordinary people, he stayed in the small county town of his hometown all his life. Maybe the southeast coast is more developed than the northeast in all aspects, and there are more opportunities.
Maybe He Xin, who lives in a small northeastern town, can no longer survive, or he may go out to work, like countless people in Beijing and Shanghai, working as construction workers, security guards, waiters, and courier boys, or he may go astray and end up working hard.
Prison, who knows?
"Forget it, let's not talk about it anymore. Take a look at it first. I think you should like this book."
Perhaps because the topic was a bit heavy without realizing it, Wang Xiaoshuai waved his hand, took out a script from his bag and handed it over.
He Xin took it and took a look. It said "I'm Nineteen" on the cover.
"This should be the second part of your third-tier series, right?"
Wang Xiaoshuai looked a little helpless and said: "I couldn't finish "My 11" halfway through. It would be a pity to give up, and it would be hard to explain to the investors. I finished the book "My 19" two years ago.
It’s finished. The main reason is that this book is written by someone else. It is a book that combines what I heard and saw in Guizhou with some real cases that happened. It is relatively objective. Unlike "Me 11", it is
When writing about my own teenage years, I always have a mentality of worrying about gains and losses."
At this moment, the freshly made cream cake was served, and it was obviously larger than what he had indicated before.
"Would you like some?"
Wang Xiaoshuai hurriedly waved his hands and said: "I can't bear this. You don't see me drinking coffee without adding sugar. I can't help it. I went for a physical checkup a while ago. My blood sugar is a bit high. The doctor said that if it continues to develop, I may develop diabetes.
.”
"Director, you are not yet 40 this year, how could this happen?" He Xin couldn't help but asked with concern.
"How many people in our industry are in good health? Most of them are caused by high stress and irregular life. So you must pay attention to it even if you are young, otherwise all kinds of problems will appear as you get older.
.”
"I'm fine, I can eat and sleep, and I keep running every morning."
As He Xin, who has died once, every time he thinks about all the regrets of being in a hospital bed in his previous life, and finally living again, he pays special attention to his health. He does not seek to live a long life, but to be like ordinary people.
Live your life smoothly, but don't end up like you did in your last life, where you burped in your early forties.
The script of "I Nineteen" only has a total of more than 50 pages, which adds up to 40,000 to 50,000 words at most. The main reason is that there are not many dialogues in the script, and it is more about the description of the characters' psychology.
He Xin turned over the script while eating the cake at first, but gradually he stopped using the fork to stab the cake, holding the script in his hands and reading it in rapt attention.
Wang Xiaoshuai, who was sitting opposite, couldn't help but have a proud smile on his face when he saw this scene.
He Xin read very carefully, and it took him almost an hour to finish reading this book.
"Director, are all the stories here true?"
It should be said that the plot in the book was very sad and made him very worried.
"Elopements, rapes, shootings, and madness are all real, but the characters are fictitious. I just concentrated several stories on a specific character. Our generation was in this kind of living state in that era."
He nodded. Artistic creation generally follows this pattern. All events are concentrated on a few special characters, so as to create strong dramatic conflicts.
"When you first told me that you wanted to make a story that reflected the third line, it was probably this book, right?"
Wang Xiaoshuai nodded, looking a little shy and said: "I wanted to make this movie from the beginning, but then I thought one movie wasn't enough, so I wanted to make a trilogy, but the first shot didn't happen."
Compared with Lou Ye and Chief Jia, the two leading figures of the so-called sixth generation of directors, Wang Xiaoshuai's style is more traditional and pays more attention to storytelling, unlike Chief Jia who focuses on the expression of emotions, and Lou Ye is even more obsessed with it.
Yu Xuan skills.
After reading this book, He Xin felt a little regretful. The story is a good story, but it revolves around the relationship between a father and a nineteen-year-old daughter in a family because of their different ideas and yearning for future life.
a tragedy.
As a result, the struggle between the nineteen-year-old daughter and the father who imposes his ideals on her daughter became the main line of the story, and other characters, including the nineteen-year-old daughter's first love boyfriend Xiao Gen, were reduced to secondary roles.
"Director, do you want me to play Xiao Gen?"
Wang Xiaoshuai would not come to Shanghai to treat himself to coffee for no reason today. This was clear to He Xin the moment he took out the script. He regretted that such a good script did not have a suitable role for him. The biggest possibility was that
She plays the role of her 19-year-old daughter's first boyfriend - a young man named Xiao Gen who comes from a local family and has just joined the factory as a temporary worker.
"Don't be ridiculous, with your looks, how can you play Xiao Gen? This character is only nineteen years old!" Wang Xiaoshuai couldn't help laughing.
He Xin originally looked mature. Compared with when Wang Xiaoshuai first met him four years ago, he was still a little childish because he was still a fledgling. So it would be okay to play the role of Xiaogui in "Bicycle". Today, his temperament is more mature, and he plays the role of thirty-year-old Xiaogui.
There is no problem at all for middle-aged people who are many years old, but it is obviously unrealistic to want to play the role of 19-year-old Xiao Gen.
"I would like to ask you to play the role of Lu Jun in the film. Don't worry, the schedule will not be too long. It will only last for half a month at most. What do you think?"
Lu Jun?
He Xin was stunned for a moment. He was the second generation of a family of third-line workers who also came from Shanghai. He was a few years older than Qinghong. He was a trend-setter with the air of a street gangster. He had grown the farm next door.
The girl's belly also made her fall in love with Qinghong's best friend Xiaozhen. Under the pressure of his father, he had to marry the farm girl who had become pregnant, but he eloped with Xiaozhen.
He is obviously a first-generation scumbag.
Recalling that the scumbag Liu Dongbei he played in "Chinese Divorce" was not very successful, he was a little unsure, but under Wang Xiaoshuai's expectant gaze, he still nodded and said: "No problem,
director!"
Seeing him so cheerful, Wang Xiaoshuai felt a little embarrassed and said: "Xiao He, actually it is a bit unreasonable for a big star like you to play a supporting role. I am asking you to do me a favor this time."
After all, this film will be his first film after returning to the system. Compared with several other characters in the film, he also considered that he needs a big star to hold him back.
"Director, I still say the same thing anyway. As long as you need it, I will do whatever you want."
As the person who guided him on this path, He Xin has always been grateful to Wang Xiaoshuai. He regrets that such a good script does not have a role suitable for him, and whether he plays a leading role or a supporting role is secondary.
"There is also the remuneration. You know the investors have only invested a small amount of money in total. I have already built part of it because of myself. The rest may be a bit nervous. You see..."
Before Wang Xiaoshuai finished speaking, He Xin had already started to wave his hands, and even said with a somewhat unhappy expression: "Director, you still treat me as an outsider! Don't think about the salary. If there is any left by then,
Just give me three melons and two dates. If there are none left, we can talk about it later."
However, as he spoke, he was still a little curious: "Director, who will play Qinghong?"