The role of “Peng Lai” has a fatal attraction to Yao Chen like “Crazy Flowers”.
This kind of attraction even made Yao Chen decide to join in the preparatory situation shorter than previous episodes.
Penley, a rock musician, a failed idealist. She once stood at the pinnacle of her stage career and returned from a runaway, facing her daughter whom she hadn’t seen for many years, an elderly mother, an old friend in adolescence, and a quagmire life.
Compared with the atypical mother image in “Rock and Roll”, Yao Chen pays more attention to “Peng Lai” himself as an individual.
“I was attracted to this script at first, but I was actually attracted to Peng Lai. I have hardly ever seen a script in which everything the heroine experienced was so bad, presented like a puddle of mud.”
After going through the performance, saying goodbye to the characters, and seeing Peng Lai in “Rock and Roll” again, Yao Chen’s description of “Peng Lai” has never changed – “My description of her has always been one sentence. , is a dead dog.”
In fact, Yao Chen ordered a guitar before he finally decided to play “Peng Lai” and carried it on his back every day. “The first is to adapt to the weight, and the second is to make yourself and the piano look more integrated.”
“This is really not the role that I decided to take on at the first time. But before everything was settled, I started to find a teacher to learn guitar, and it was also a new skill for myself.”
Due to the time preparation, Yao Chen could only take the initiative to adjust the way of creation and make some trade-offs. “When filming was about to start, I didn’t write too much about Peng Lai’s piano skills, because no matter how I practiced, I couldn’t look like someone who has played the piano for ten or twenty years. I can’t achieve it in terms of technique, but at least I need to do it. It is harmonious to have this piano on its back.”
During the filming, she spent almost all the rest days in the Leith Cool Music Base, chatting with friends who played rock, and slowly entering their context, “their breath and energy field will also affect you.”
In the end, the most important thing is to find out what kind of person Penglai is. “That’s all it takes.”
Becoming a Penglai is not an easy task.
Penglai has a lot of shadows of rock actresses in the 1980s and 1990s, which was also an era when women were not absent in rock expression.
Initially taking over Peng Lai, Yao Chen watched a large number of documentaries, videos and written materials of rock bands at home and abroad. “The generation of rock musicians like Luo Qi and Wei Hua, the best domestic rock musicians back then, was similar to Penglai’s era. At that time, female rock musicians were still in the minority. I like Punk godmother Patti Smith very much. , I read a lot of related materials during the period of doing character biography.” This kind of picture and visual reading is only to establish a basic understanding of the rock profession, and cannot be directly used as a doctrine and applied to the characters.
“When I was young, I went to see the livehouse by bicycle. At that time, I also listened to Dou Wei, He Yong, Zhang Chu, and Xu Wei. These were all rock musicians that we liked very much at that time, but I can’t say that I know rock and roll very well. Because I myself I mostly listen to folk songs on weekdays, so I also need to adjust my inner rhythm when acting in this play.”
In order to better become “Peng Lai”, Yao Chen also went to chat with current rock musicians, such as Shi Lu.
“Shi Lu told me, in fact, rock is when you sing on stage, it’s OK to express yourself.”
This sentence is a great reminder to Yao Chen. At that time, she was still trying to find a prototype for “Peng Lai”, trying to find a character to put on “Peng Lai”. “No one can get in because they are not Penglai. Penglai’s personality is very distinct and strong.”
As Peng Lai, finding her way to stand on the stage and thinking about how she expresses herself is the most important thing.
In the opening performance of “Rock and Roll”, it is also a rare description of Peng Lai’s past peak moments in the play. Before the opening, Yao Chen shouted “Hello! Hello! Hello!” , No rock musician had such a reference on stage, “It just popped into my head and I did it subconsciously.”
This scene is also a highlight in “Rock and Roll”, which also impressed Yao Chen deeply.
“The whole process of Penglai is very sad, and the tone of the characters is downward. This performance is the only time Penglai’s most gorgeous and bright show on the stage, so when creating, I consciously make myself look very special. Because only the more indulgent, the more arrogant, and the more mischievous you are at the beginning, the more depressed Peng Lai will be at the end, and a strong contrast and contrast can be formed.”
The scene of the live performance was filmed at a relatively late stage of the entire shooting. Although the role of “Peng Lai” had already grown on Yao Chen in the later stage, she was still very nervous during the shooting.
“The day before the filming happened to be my rest day, so I didn’t rest, and I went to the scene again to see how everyone rehearsed. Because it was the opening scene of the whole film, all departments were very strict, and they were very strict about this. The scene is also very important. What shocked me was that I didn’t expect to invite 800 extras, and they were all students of the professional music school. At that moment, I was really a little scared, because I felt like a fake in music. .”
At that moment, Yao Chen’s uncertainty about the stage and the knot of “Peng Lai” returning to the stage later overlapped from a certain time and space.
“That day was actually going to be a shooter. Our music director, Lao Lu, was also helping to move. Later, it didn’t feel right. I decided to do it myself. Although it was only the back scene, I still quickly drew it for myself. A makeup, I need to let the people offstage have a chemical reaction with Peng Lai at that moment,” Yao Chen said, “You have to make them believe.”
Before taking the stage to officially start filming, Yao Chen also chatted with the students offstage and borrowed picks from them.
“As soon as the music started and I shouted “Hello” three times, I felt like they were instantly ignited, and the whole place was on fire in an instant. I even vaguely heard a young man below say, hey, come on!” At that moment , whether on stage or off stage, everyone believed that it was a frenetic concert scene, some people were riding the train, running up and down the stage again and again, and even one person ran up the stage with a big flag, “Although this The scene was cut ruthlessly by the director, but the belief of everyone on the scene also made me believe that I am Penglai at this moment.”
At that moment, Yao Chen suddenly felt that the thickest barrier between himself and “Peng Lai” had been completely penetrated, shattered, and had grown together completely.
At that moment, Yao Chen finally became “Peng Lai”.
Peng Lai and Bai Tian have an abnormal mother-daughter relationship, and Peng Lai has also become a rare image of an atypical mother in the drama in recent years.
Saying goodbye to the more common group anxiety faced by mothers in the current society, such as the workplace, further education, and family relations, Peng Lai is not only facing the same strangers who have been separated from his daughter for more than ten years, but also has almost no worries about domestic life. The vacuum is also accompanied by the physical hidden dangers of long-term alcoholism in a repressed life abroad.
In Yao Chen’s view, Peng Lai and Bai Tian, beyond the core of traditional maternal love, are more like the difference between two individuals with different personalities.
Peng Lai experienced ex-husband cheating, divorce, real estate cutting, and going abroad. The plot does not stick to the pull in it, and it handles the laying out of the previous situation at a speed of lightning and flint, and it is neat and tidy. But this kind of simplicity also led to the lack of communication between Penglai and his daughter during the day. How to return to the mother’s position, this is not with superficial tears and lyricism, but in a fierce collision, rubbing out sparks.
“John Duffy is a rookie actor. When he first joined the group, he normally showed respect to the senior actors. But for me, the two roles of Peng Lai and Bai Tian are tit for tat, a very comet hitting the earth style. The relationship between the characters, so she had to stand up and not show any fear of me. The first thing I did was to break her so-called respect for me and help her build up her own character self-confidence.
“Yao Chen said that the best way is to get acquainted quickly. In this way, Zhuang Dafei will be more relaxed when communicating with her. “We will rehearse repeatedly and take her to pick out the details of the performance together. Because the richer the details of each play, the more informative it is. For example, if there are some rival scenes, I will think of several ways to deal with them, but if one of them is unacceptable to her, or the performance will interfere with her, no matter how good it is, it will not be used. We have gradually established a tacit understanding and trust in the cooperation, so in the end, the state of Peng Lai and Bai Tian, the mother and daughter, is matched with the performance state, and people will not dance. “
“Mother Thorn Zixiao, blood is thicker than wine”, and finally reconciled.
Yao Chen used “one step away” to describe the ending of “Rock and Roll”.
“Rock and Roll” did not fall into a kind of happy family reunion, and some viewers have regrets about the ending of Be. In Yao Chen’s view, this may be a regrettable ending for Peng Lai, but it is real enough for her.
“Life is always unsatisfactory. Those who fail want to succeed, but not everyone has the luck to succeed. This is indeed more in line with the trajectory of Peng Lai’s destiny. So as for the ending, I think the screenwriter is very good. , giving such an unsatisfactory ending, is actually more moving than being brilliant again than performing on stage.”
When “Rock and Roll” ended, Yao Chen wrote on Weibo, “Good luck, Ms. Peng Lai.”
There is a reason behind every choice. Yao Chen is not familiar with the workplace and urban dramas, but chooses to create a rock singer who is not delicate, whose life is a little feather, and whose peak is no longer at the peak. , the world finds a self-consistent way of coexistence, the glory is no longer, and it is not even decent.
Yao Chen chose to become “Peng Lai” in her own way and bid farewell to this role.
“The ideal is always young.”
Written by: Juvan Zhu
Design: Bingbing