Wherever the storm passes, no one can remain unmoved | Interview with director and screenwriter Qin Haiyan

The core of domestic violence is "control". Deformed love. The victim becomes the perpetrator, and the extension of the harm is even more frightening.

What is reflected by domestic violence is actually more storms: social motherhood, the shackles of traditional marriage and childbearing concepts, and the negligence loopholes in the legal system... Multi-dimensional problems form an unhealthy inner cycle, a cycle of suffering. The end of the heroine's murder is not a break in the game, but a cry of resistance, calling for the elimination of evil from the law and from the source.

Author: Scorpion

Editor: Blue Two

Format: Wang Wei

The theme of domestic violence has rarely received positive attention from film and television works, and without much similar experience, the birth of "I Passed Through the Storm" itself is like going through a storm.

In 2019, director and screenwriter Qin Haiyan rushed to the scene after receiving help from a friend who was subjected to her husband's domestic violence WeChat, and after a series of actions such as calling the police and mediation, the butterfly that caused the storm flapped its wings in her heart.

"I must write a story about domestic violence, in the final analysis, it is four words, empathy."

It is this empathy that makes "I Through the Storm" use a delicate female perspective to present the various dilemmas of a victim woman from body to heart, from marriage and family to public opinion. The wounds of domestic violence will not even end due to the severance of the marriage relationship, and this injury will return with many bonds that cannot be removed. This deeper insight reveals a hidden universality, "using movies to talk about some suffering because we are all women."

Not only to put domestic violence on the table to examine, but also to see what is behind domestic violence - this has become the core idea of the main creative team. When interviewing director and screenwriter Qin Haiyan, she mentioned the phrase "all beings are suffering". This suffering is not only focused on the heroine, but also manifested everywhere with the relationship between people as the core. After watching the movie, regardless of whether the audience has experienced domestic violence or not, they will be immersed in the pain and fear of the heroine, and at the same time, not only the heroine, but also the lawyers who defend her, relatives and friends around her, various passers-by in society, and even the male protagonist as the perpetrator.

When an avalanche, no snowflake is innocent; No one in the storm could remain unmoved.

This is also the reason why the title of "I Passed Through the Storm" was not written as "She Passed Through the Storm". This is not a film just for women, but for everyone, to reveal and accuse the evil of domestic violence. After all, it's not just her who has gone through the storm, but also us.

All beings suffer

Obviously a middle-class couple in Kochi, obviously a family with a rich life, why would they still fall into this jungle beast-like hand-to-hand fight?

On the second day of experiencing a friend's domestic violence, Qin Haiyan talked to a producer about it; The producer, who was also a woman, vomited physiologically after listening to it. At that moment, a resonance seized by reality lingered between the two women. The producer said, Haiyan, this matter or you can do it yourself.

After nineteen years of screenwriting work, Qin Haiyan finally stepped over to the responsibility of directing with surging emotions for this story.

Once when creating the movies "Find You" or "Thousands of Miles Home", based on a large number of interviews with real events and characters, rooted in life, and then promoted the film and television level, it became her preferred methodology; This time, the bloody real testimony made her her the first interviewee. In the script creation stage, Qin Haiyan interviewed more than 200 women from rural to urban strata who had been subjected to domestic violence. This indiscriminate violence made her once again feel that all living beings are suffering, and this feeling also turned into the sentence "If there is a similarity, it is not a coincidence" in the poster of "I Passed Through the Storm".

The shadow of the heroine Xu Min was almost engraved in Qin Haiyan's mind, and she went straight to Hengdian to find Tong Liya, who was filming, and there was no second choice in her heart. Perhaps the time and place are favorable, and when Tong Liya agreed, she did not hesitate for a moment. In the movie, the heroine Xu Min faces her husband of domestic violence, sometimes firmly divorced, sometimes fearful, sometimes accused, sometimes silent, and has always been on the cusp of vacillating left and right trade-offs. This entanglement is the epitome of Qin Haiyan's extensive interviews.

But the core of "I Pass Through the Storm" is not just to introduce a pure victim, the establishment of the abuser is equally important. In Qin Haiyan's expectations, this man should not be a typical fierce demon, he should have flesh and blood, there is a deep reason behind his behavior, he is usually docile and deceptive, only in this way, when this man is violent, he will hurt more families.

"What hit me the most was that things like this would happen to people around us who were similar to you and me, so I established the portrait of husband and wife very early. The male protagonist needs to have a great sense of contrast, which is what he can't see in his usual life. Wu Yuhan looks innocent, and I fancy the contrast he can perform. ”

Therefore, the husband and wife relationship of "I Passed Through the Storm" presents a calm, thoughtful and confusing at first glance, and shocking multi-layered effects under deep investigation, like peeling an onion, more façade and more real. This three-dimensionality is also extended by the relationship between the husband and wife, becoming a panoramic ukiyo-e.

The first is novice lawyer Li Xiaomeng. Behind Li Xiaomeng, he represents lawyers, police, and public welfare organizations, a kind of impartial and saving force, but in handling cases, this fairness is sometimes affected and has some subjective biases. Even Li Xiaomeng was misled by the male protagonist's politeness and kindness, and asked the female protagonist "what did he do wrong". The contrast between Li Xiaomeng and Xu Min is actually the contrast between the audience and the heroine, representing the audience's perspective, through the eyes of outsiders, seeing a chicken feather that cannot be photographed by monitors in marriage. Later, Li Xiaomeng found that Xu Min, who was finally divorced, chose to remarry, angry and helpless, and this is also a disguised extension of the harm of domestic violence. "I interviewed a lawyer who had a difficult divorce and finally went through, but he saw that the woman ended up going home. For him, this emotional damage is actually greater. ”

The core of domestic violence is "control", the hidden control of the male protagonist in the movie is suffocating, and every time a text message subtitle with white characters on a black background appears on the screen, someone in the audience gasps for air. He may love her, but he is deformed and miserable. Qin Haiyan used the influence of his native family to lay the foundation for the character: "I think he is still a person, a pitiful and hateful person, and he may indeed express love in this way because he has not learned how to love at all in his native family." But the tighter he grasped, the more deformed he became. This is an angle of compassion. In the same vein, the male protagonist's mother also presents an image of a control freak, and she has grown from a victim to a perpetrator with smoke marks on her arms. This intergenerational relationship may also affect the next generation of male and female protagonists, which is what is more frightening.

Social motherhood, the shackles of traditional marriage and childbearing concepts, the negligence and loopholes of the legal system... What is reflected by domestic violence is actually more storms. The absence of multiple dimensions such as family, relatives and friends, street grassroots, and social legal system has formed an unhealthy internal cycle, a cycle of suffering. The end of the heroine's murder is not a break in the game, but a cry of resistance, to call for the elimination of malignancy from the rules and the source.

"I interviewed lawyer Li Ying, and she had a top 10 case, which happened to be stuck at the moment of the promulgation of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law in 2015. With the support of this regulation, her client received a more reasonable sentence after killing her husband. In March 2016, the Anti-Domestic Violence Law was also truly implemented, and we ushered in a judicial progress. This is the ending landing of the film structure, but also the landing of reality. ”

As Qin Haiyan's directorial debut, "I Pass Through the Storm" is a pioneer in anti-domestic violence films, and it is also a good start for popularizing anti-domestic violence laws, and is undoubtedly a bold and beneficial attempt of realistic films.

Full breakout

When "I Passed Through the Storm" premiered, a sentence from producer Wang Hongwei poked Qin Haiyan's heart: "Even if a person chooses to do the right thing, not everyone will help him, and there will be many obstacles in the middle." Although the staff of the movie all have a sense of mission and are "particularly burning", the feeling of "taking quick-acting heart-saving pills every day" still makes Qin Haiyan laugh and say that the next film will no longer have the name "through the storm".

Qin Haiyan, who has been newly promoted as a director, called the change from screenwriter to director "taking engineering drawings to do hard work on the spot". Despite the hardship of joining the group, film and television practitioners are tacit, but Qin Haiyan used her own way to make the shooting scene as "calm" as possible.

"My crew may be relatively small, there are not so many special effects, and the work is very regular, just like work. I don't like consumption, I want to communicate well, maybe this is a kind of female tolerance or cooperation. If I am a circumference, then the circumference is constantly changing; Being a director is not actually an authority, but whether your energy can take care of everyone. ”

Qin Haiyan's energy burst out when his functions were changed. She spent a month or two on her "engineering drawings" before starting the camera, painted all the storyboards, and completed the preliminary run-in with the photographer. When shooting on the spot, there are storyboards directly on the notice sheet, and the communication cost of the team is greatly reduced. In the film, the scene of a small goldfish swimming in a basin cuts to memories, and the bowl of noodles rotates to the washing machine, and these stylized transition storyboards are all by her.

In order to let the actors find their own "empathy", Qin Haiyan also specially made some designs to help them experience the changes in the characters' emotions. Qin Haiyan specially spent a day and a half shooting something other than the script: let Tong Liya and Wu Yuhan take the young actors who play children, eat, drink, sing and play together, live together, and feel the happiness of being a family. And by the afternoon of the next day, the team began to film the scene where the heroine went home to argue with her husband, "the actors were breathless, because there would be a feeling of tearing beautiful things apart with their own hands, which is actually quite ruthless."

The actors with a sense of mission have a very high degree of cooperation in entering the play. When not filming, Wu Yuhan deliberately distanced himself from Tong Liya and maintained the emotion of distance. Tong Liya also has extreme empathy with her role, and before starring in the final court scene, she also deliberately watched the family reunion short film that was filmed again, "She established in her heart, how is our family, if not for all this, obviously a good feeling, it mobilized a lot of emotions." After the filming of the whole scene, Tong Liya's whole person was soaked with tears and sweat, and many people present cried, and the applause was thunderous.

Not only the director and actors, but also the entire team of "I Passed Through the Storm" supported each other and successfully passed through this creative storm. Qin Haiyan, who became a director for the first time, cooperated with Cool Whale Film and Television, and the two producers Wang Hongwei and Lu Yang gave great help. Lu Yang always stood by Qin Haiyan's side and supported it; When creating films such as "Assassination of a Novelist" and "Ten Thousand Miles Home", Wang Hongwei was the team's anchor, from the script to the editing, at every stage, Wang Hongwei would carefully give opinions - this kind of allocation is not forced intervention, but after the director establishes his prestige, he will appear.

"What impressed me more deeply is that Teacher Wang Hongwei said that you and Dahan are really too kind, and without this real evil of yin and human nature, it is still a breath away from filming. For example, the scene where Teacher Arya (who plays the male protagonist's mother) throws the ring ruler actually filmed her too pitifully and less convincing. After the reshoot, she showed a little hatred in the camera. Teacher Wang is like an old Chinese medicine doctor, a little click, the whole feeling has changed, really powerful. ”

Courtroom re-scene filming

This kind of team co-creation occurs in all aspects of the crew, and Qin Haiyan continues to absorb and fine-tune. Photography Chen Zhiying, using a more realistic way to complete the lens performance; Shu Xinjia, who is in charge of the art set, will use many elements to complete ingenuity beyond the script, "for example, he will put a portrait of Guan Gong in the law firm, which he thinks is more in line with the character of that character"; The sound director Wang Gang and Liu Xiaosha, and the music director Zhang Ye, their shaping of the auditory system fits Qin Haiyan's theme of "all sentient beings are suffering" and has become an indispensable part of the narrative; In the later creation, Qin Haiyan specifically mentioned that the editing director Yang Hongyu played a key role. And so on and so forth.

"I think at a certain stage, the director has to step aside a little bit and let another completely objective person create and bring you some new looks."

In the original script, the narrative around the heroine Xu Min actually has more suspense, and the audience needs to distinguish whether she was really subjected to domestic violence, whether she is lying, and the description of the male protagonist's domestic violence is more secretive, with a kind of Rashomon effect. The audience needs to slowly discover the ironclad fact that the heroine was subjected to domestic violence through the fog, and slowly move closer to her from the beginning of the suspicion - "There will be a threshold, and the ability to think and discern may be higher."

When editing, the main creators collectively collided in a new direction: it was directly confirmed at the beginning that the male protagonist Chen Jun was problematic, and Xu Min was a victim of domestic violence; Some subtle changes caused a huge change in mood, "When Xu Min got off the car after entertaining, Chen Jun stared at her from above, this shot cut a close-up, just one or two shots, the meaning has completely changed, you know, Xu Min is controlled for a long time, that person is going to start unscrupulous."

The efforts of all the staff broke through, so that "I Passed Through the Storm" smoothly passed through the storm, 10 days after the film, the cumulative box office has exceeded 100 million, which is not easy for such a special realistic heavy theme. In the future, Qin Haiyan may create more works on the road of directing, continue to play her strengths based on reality, or may return to a pure screenwriter position and enjoy the joy of creation behind the scenes, but one thing is certain: when you pass through the storm, you are different.