Chapter 252: Great Skin
The preparations for "The Chaser" actually lasted more than half a year. Luo Hongzhen said that it took five months just to find a filming location, because the film required a lot of alleys and the camera car had to be able to fit in. Finally, they found the hillside location of the Telescope Cave with great difficulty.
The surrounding houses and roads are irregular, and the various undulating alleys are indeed good places for pursuit.
Usually, a press conference will be held when a movie or TV series starts filming, but this time it is different. Rather than calling it the start of filming, it is more like a test shoot before filming, in order to test whether Jung Da Bin has the potential to play the leading female role. This was agreed upon with Jung Soo-heng at the beginning. If it doesn't work out, someone else will be chosen, and at the same time, Jung Soo-heng's pay can be saved.
If Zheng Da Bin is not available, the crew can wait for a few days and invite the backup heroine. Anyway, the heroine of a movie of this cost will basically not be rejected as long as she is not a first-line actress, and Luo Hongzhen and others have no intention of looking for any popular superstar.
However, the crew had already encountered difficulties before the trial shooting even started, and this difficulty did not come from Zheng Da Bin.
At this moment, the villa in the middle of Wangyuan Cave is the villa where Ji Yingmin lived and buried the body in the movie. The decoration style of the house is very old and a little messy at the moment. The makeup artist and the two protagonists today are sitting in front of the makeup mirror beside them and receiving makeup from the makeup artist.
Zheng Dabin was fine. She was sitting on the side wearing silver silk pajamas, with disheveled hair and a dull and worried look on her face. She was very close to what the heroine in Luo Hongzhen's mind should look like.
Although he hasn't started acting yet, he is satisfied with the image alone.
But what was unexpected was that something went wrong with Zheng Xiuheng. Of course, even Zheng Xiuheng himself did not expect this kind of problem.
At this moment, his hair had returned to its ordinary side-parted style, and he had taken off his glasses, making him look a lot smaller.
But this is not the problem. Although he looks much younger, Zheng Xiuheng's serious look means he is not too young. Moreover, his facial features are strong. He just needs to work a little harder on makeup. For a movie makeup artist, this is not a difficult task.
However, what makes people speechless and amazed is that Zheng Xiuheng's skin is so good that if you use instruments to detect his pores, they are also flawless.
The current situation is that even if you apply powder, the degree of coverage is only average, so the effect of the photo will naturally be worse.
Zheng Xiuheng himself was also speechless. He had never thought that having good skin would become a problem that surpassed acting skills.
"hehe!"
"How can you still smile? What products did you use? How come your skin is so good?" Luo Hongzhen, who was sitting next to him, asked with a sad face. He felt speechless at the moment. Applying powder could cover up Zheng Xiuheng's skin color and make the skin a little rougher, but to fake pores and skin on the face...does he have to hire a special effects makeup artist?
Zheng Xiuheng did find it funny. The person in the mirror looked about 27 or 28 years old, very mature and steady. But when he looked closer, his skin color was basically the same, and he couldn't see any pores.
Looking at the female makeup artist in her thirties, Zheng Xiuheng asked with a smile, "Is there no other way to cover it up? Let's not use Director Luo's standards first, just make it look like someone in their thirties with slightly darker skin, is that okay?"
Although the female makeup artist was helpless, she envied Zheng Xiuheng's skin. After hearing what he said, she thought about it and nodded: "That's fine. But I have an idea now. Maybe applying two or three layers of thin foundation on the face to adjust the color may highlight some of the effects of dry skin. How about we try it?"
"Let's try. Anyway, there aren't many intact scenes in the movie. When I get beaten and have wounds, these should be easy to cover up!" Luo Hongzhen thought about it and could only arrange it this way. After being scared by Zheng Xiuheng last time, coupled with the script and story he created, he really didn't sleep well for a long time. If he went home alone at night, he would be suspicious and always react excessively to the slightest movement. He himself didn't expect that Zheng Xiuheng's performance that day, coupled with his own wild imagination, would have such a powerful effect.
But also because of this, he was even more determined to use Zheng Xiuheng to play this murderous maniac. The two even had two script discussions on Antenna about how to play the murderous maniac Ji Yingmin well.
In fact, as the best template for crime films, "Memories of Murder" is undoubtedly the number one in the history of Korean films, while "Oldboy" is more like a crime film than a crime, apart from the same thriller and suspense elements.
The script of "The Chaser", in the words of Zheng Xiuheng, is full of loopholes. However, because the main theme of the film is to satirize the helplessness of the police, civil servants and society, this kind of thing can easily scratch the itch in the hearts of Koreans, and the story itself is not bad, so the loopholes do not matter.
And there is really no way to fill these loopholes, just like the incompetent performance of the police and government officials in the movie. If they were all made highly capable, it would not be ironic, and this story would probably not be called "The Chaser", but "The Great Korean Police and the Former Policeman and Current Pimp Chasing Crime."
In his discussion with Zheng Xiuheng, Luo Hongzhen got two insights. One is to be rigorous in some details. For example, when the mayor was splashed with feces, the news of the murderer being arrested was broadcast. The prosecutor found the police chief and asked him to release him. This was because Chi Yingmin had been beaten during the arrest. He was afraid that people would say that this was just to divert attention from the incident of the mayor being splashed with feces, and that he had tortured innocent citizens into confessing...
This can no longer be considered a bug, but it directly drags the entire Korean civil service down to the IQ of a kindergarten kid. Just because of this bizarre reason, a serial killer who killed twelve people was released. After careful consideration, Luo Hongzhen felt ashamed. Although the audience may not find there is anything wrong with the film, it will indeed affect the overall evaluation of the film. Since it is his first work, Luo Hongzhen also wants to make it perfect.
As I said just now, this drama is destined to make civil servants not too powerful, so after the revision, it became the first thing to film the reporters distorting the report, saying that this was an act of diverting the public's attention, and then it caused the mayor to ask the prosecutor to come forward.
In this way, while satirizing civil servants, we can also satirize the unscrupulous media that control public opinion and are eager to create chaos, killing two birds with one stone.
The second point is that in the creation of the character of Ji Young-min, Luo Hongzhen borrowed from Liu Yongzhe, but he wanted to pay attention to rationality in the movie, so he created this character inexplicably.
A murderer who tortured and killed a masseuse because of his impotence admitted to the murder directly after being caught by the police. He also had a breakdown due to the emotional breakdown of a criminal psychologist. After being released, he accidentally killed the heroine. He went back to the room and lay down for a long time before preparing to escape. It feels like that in the whole film, Ji Young-min is a weird middle school student playing games among a bunch of elementary school students, and the protagonist is the only normal person.
Compared with Liu Yongzhe's cruelty in reality, where he even threatened the police to continue killing people if they did not sentence him to death, it can be seen here that Liu Yongzhe's spirit has collapsed and he has completely become detached from society.
But the most terrifying thing about him is his perfect method of committing crimes and his personality that is completely detached from the world. The reason he was caught can only be said to be that his mind is already out of touch with the world. If he still has a little bit of rationality left, I'm afraid more people would have died at his hands. As for whether he wanted to die or self-destruct in the end, it is unknown.
Zheng Xiuheng's suggestion was very simple. Instead of portraying Ji Yingmin as a mentally inexplicable villain who turned into a murderer because of sexual impotence, it would be better to portray him as a creepy "crazy" murderer.
In fact, comparing the two, Ji Young-min's motive for murder is so pale that it is hard to complain. Even Luo Hongzhen actually realized it, so he laid a lot of foreshadowing, such as when he killed the couple other than the masseuse and when he had an emotional breakdown at the police station, he yelled "Why are you bothering me?"
In fact, Zheng Xiuheng asked Luo Hongzhen, asking him "What is the foreshadowing?", but Luo Hongzhen said that there was no reason, it was just a deliberate suspense. This kind of thing can become a topic of discussion among fans after the end of the film, but in fact there is no special reason.
Also, when he first asked the heroine Meizhen if she had any reason to survive, he paused when he heard her say that she had a seven-year-old daughter, and then decided to kill her.
"Why do you ask this?" Zheng Xiuheng asked Luo Hongzhen, and the answer was: "No reason, I just thought of it at the time!"
Well, Zheng Xiuheng was too tired to complain, and his final suggestion was that since the script could not be changed , some details of Ji Yingmin's performance should be adapted.
For example, there are four whistling additions in the film. The first time is when he meets the heroine Meizhen and ties her up in the bathroom, and then he whistles before entering the room.
The second time was when he pretended to be angry after his emotions were broken down at the police station. When the police were happy to induce Ji Youngmin's motive for murder, he suddenly looked at them with a smile, and then whistled comfortably.
The third time was before killing the main female character in the convenience store, when someone whistled outside the door. Of course, the background music had to be heard to create a scary atmosphere, which corresponded exactly to the first whistle.
The fourth time was when she was standing in front of the mirror and changing clothes in the villa.
This is added to create a horror and weird atmosphere. The second thing is to make him laugh. Not laugh all the time, but in some specific plots, he should suddenly show that creepy smile, which can make the audience suddenly feel a creepy fear in the tense plot, showing Ji Youngmin's weirdness and weirdness.
The third is to make this character quieter and more like a literary man, so as to form a contrast between a lamb in front of people and a jackal behind people, giving people a greater sense of impact. There is nothing to modify about other aspects of the plot, and there is nothing to change about the plot. After all, the tone of the movie will not change.
Of course, to achieve all of this, one thing is needed, and that is... acting skills.
