The bard joins the entertainment industry

"Don't make money?" Liu Dehua blurted out in surprise, "Then you..."

Then he remembered something, glanced at Zhang Yimou and said with a smile: "You kid, I almost let you fool me, Director Zhang's name alone is worth 100 million in box office.

As long as your script is not bad, you can get your money back no matter what.

And you just said that you are very confident in your script, and it’s not like you’re doing it just to make money. "

Chen Shuo just smiled, looked at Zhang Yimou and said seriously: "Although this money is nothing to Director Zhang, our investment in this movie is not much to begin with. This is already equivalent to a quarter or even That’s one-third of the total investment.

If you think it's not enough, we really can't come up with more money and can only give you a share of the box office.

We can give you 10% of the total revenue share of the film company. "

In the past two years, as Zhang Yimou began to make commercial films, his salary has also increased.

The first film he directed, "Red Sorghum," was only paid RMB 200,000. When he directed "My Father and Mother" in 1999, he received a director's salary of RMB 5 million.

As for "Hero", the salary was doubled, with a salary of 10 million, and the salary of "House of Flying Daggers" was even more 15 million.

Even the production fee for "Impression Liu Sanjie" that he produced in 2002 exceeded 8 million.

The 5 million given by Chen Shuo is indeed not high for him.

Moreover, he has always been unwilling to participate in the box office share because he finds it troublesome.

Just use the money to make movies and do your job as a director, and don't want to get involved in more.

However, these were his previous thoughts, and no one thought he had too much money.

You know, just this year, he gave birth to another boy.

Before that, he already had a daughter who was two years older than Chen Shuo, and a son who was more than three years old.

From now on, there will be more places to spend money.

Moreover, with the popularity of "Heroes" and "House of Flying Daggers", he has already wavered a little in his decision not to take a share.

It’s clear that his movies can make money, so why can’t he make more?

Two movies, with a box office of 500 million U.S. dollars, but he only took over 3 million U.S. dollars, not even 1%.

Just thinking about it makes me feel overwhelmed.

Now, why not take this opportunity to see how much money you can make.

The reasons are all ready-made, just because of Chen Shuo's warm invitation.

Generally speaking, if the director gets a share, it is understandable to reduce the film's salary, and it does not count as a reduction in one's worth.

Seeing that Zhang Yimou was already moved, Chen Shuo kept up his efforts and said: "Director Zhang, money or not is actually secondary.

I feel that participating in other movies during your break can also provide you with some different inspirations.

Now, our company has two relatively complete movie scripts. If you don't mind it, how about you take a look first? "

Zhang Yimou nodded subconsciously and said: "Okay."

Chen Shuo was overjoyed when he heard this. He immediately took out two scripts from the bag beside him, handed them to him with both hands and said, "These are the first drafts of the two scripts. You can take a look at them first."

Without waiting for Andy Lau to speak, he handed the same two scripts to Andy Lau and said, "Brother Hua might as well take a look.

Of course, if you are willing to participate in the investment, we are very welcome. If you want to star, you can only use the box office share to offset the remuneration.

With your current net worth, we can't afford it. "

With the bonus of "House of Flying Daggers", Andy Lau's salary is now at least tens of millions.

Even if he was willing to reduce his salary due to connections, it would still be at least 8 million.

The idea of ​​Chen Shuo and others for this movie was to use Zhang Yimou's team to train their own team, and invested most of their money in the production.

The actor's salary budget is only five million, which is not enough to pay him.

"Let me take a look first." Andy Lau took the script and started to read it.

He first looked at the titles of the two scripts. One said "Sword Rain" and the other said "Gemini Thieves".

It is easy to tell from the name that "Swordsman" is a martial arts film, but he is more curious about the story of "Gemini Thieves".

Liu Xi, who was adopted since childhood, followed her adoptive father Liu Jixiang to escort a treasure, but it was stolen by a group of mysterious people on the way.

Through experience, Liu Jixiang suspected that this matter was related to the "Twin Gates" that disappeared many years ago, so he found the owner Chang Zhong.

Chang Zhong and Liu Jixiang were brothers in the same sect, but an accident that year caused the destruction of the Twin Sects, and they had no intention of rebuilding the Twin Sects and kept their names anonymous.

Liu Jixiang later adopted Liu Xi, while Chang Zhong formed a circus with his new apprentice.

After hearing about this, he began to help Liu Xi and the others find the lost treasures and track down the forces suspected of the Twin Gates.

When they found the murderer, they discovered that the murderer turned out to be Chang Zhong's younger brother Chang Yong.

The accident that year was caused by Chang Yong, and I thought he had died in that accident. Unexpectedly, he survived, re-established the Twin Gates, and began to do evil for his own selfish desires.

The two sides started a battle between good and evil in order to compete for the treasure.

The plot seems very cliché, but the various strange tricks and magic depicted in it, as well as the use of the characteristics of the twins to achieve the effect of confusing people, attracted Andy Lau.

Let him watch with relish.

On the other side, Zhang Yimou watched "Sword Rain" first.

He has an inexplicable love for martial arts, especially when he saw Chen Shuo's name among the screenwriters, it made him want to take a look.

When filming "House of Flying Daggers", Chen Shuo showed that he had a strong sense of the script and was able to find loopholes in the script and make up for them to make the plot more rounded.

The script begins with a narration.

According to legend, the body of the great Indian monk Rama contains martial arts secrets. As long as you get the body and understand the secrets, you can practice peerless magic and dominate the martial arts world.

It's a very cliched beginning, nothing surprising at all.

Basically, you can tell by looking at this that this is a martial arts routine plot about competing for magical secrets and magical weapons.

But it is this old routine that is not easy to make mistakes.

"Hidden Dragon and Crouching Tiger" is basically such a routine, didn't it still win an Oscar?

As long as you can create something new, you can get the audience to pay for it.

Zhang Yimou then looked down.

The terrifying assassination organization "Blackstone" has been tracking Rama's body.

There is a top-notch master in the organization, nicknamed "Xiaoyu", so named because his sword wounds are as fine as rain.

After an assassination attempt on the chief minister Zhang Haiduan obtained half of Rama's body, he was inspired by Lu Zhu, a monk with outstanding martial arts skills, to put down his butcher knife and retire from the world.

Blackstone issued a pursuit warrant and put a heavy reward on her head.

Xiaoyu changed his appearance, changed his name to Zeng Jing, and made a living by selling cloth.

With the help of a matchmaker, she married Jiang Asheng, who worked as a stagecoach in the capital, and lived an ordinary but happy life.

Who would have thought that because of an accident, her identity would be exposed and she would be found by the leader of Black Stone, Wheel King.

For the life of her husband Jiang Asheng and her own happiness, she had to help Chakravartin find Rama's body.

However, once you enter the rivers and lakes, you can't help yourself. If you enter this quagmire, how can you easily escape?

The Wheel King sent people to kill Zeng Jing and silence him, but he never thought that Jiang Asheng also hid his secret.

He turned out to be Zhang Renfeng, the son of Zhang Haiduan who was killed by Heishi...

Seeing this, Zhang Yimou couldn't help but sigh secretly in his heart. This script was indeed better than his.

Both "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" have some unsatisfactory aspects.

The story of "Hero" is too spacey and ordinary.

Although "House of Flying Daggers" has better box office and plot than "Hero", it is inevitable that the weight of the story and characters is somewhat unreasonable.

Liu Captou, who was originally supposed to be the protagonist, didn't have as many scenes as Sui Feng, a supporting character.

Moreover, the stories before and after have a slight sense of separation. If they are divided into two stories, they can each become a movie.

The current book "Jian Yu Jiang Hu" is very good. It mainly focuses on the emotional changes of Zeng Jing and Jiang Asheng, interspersed with the scenes of other characters, and presents each character very fully.

Overall, the story is quite satisfactory with bright spots everywhere, making it a very qualified work.

Moreover, two of the masters inspired Zeng Jing’s Shiqiao Zen and sublimated this work a lot.

Compared with the sword of the world in "Hero" and the sword of Jianghu in "House of Flying Daggers", it has more Jianghu charm.

He flipped through "Gemini Thieves" again, but felt that the script was a bit too thin, and there were too many places to show off skills, and it didn't have a high artistic content.

I just flipped through it hastily and stopped paying attention. Instead, I couldn't put it down and read "Jian Yu Jiang Hu".

Seeing him like this, Liu Dehua couldn't help but be interested in the script. After reading it again, he had to admit that this script was better than "Gemini Thieves".

However, his perspective on the problem is somewhat different.

If you look at it from the perspective of making money, he feels that the box office of "Gemini Thieves" may be better.

After all, the peak era of martial arts was the Hong Kong films of the 1980s and 1990s, and today's audiences seem to be more willing to watch those colorful scenes.

Of course, as he just said, if Zhang Yimou is willing to supervise the production of "Jian Yu Jiang Hu", his name alone is worth 100 million.

After all, since the beginning of the millennium, the only two domestic films with a box office of over 100 million were made by Zhang Yimou.

And the total box office is as high as 500 million US dollars.

This is why he feels that Chen Shuo's idea to ask Zhang Yimou to supervise the production is a bit fanciful.

It's just that Chen Shuo directly promised Zhang Yimou 10% of the total revenue of the film, which he did not expect.

This means that as long as the box office exceeds 100 million, Zhang Yimou can get a share of 3 to 4 million.

Coupled with the five million supervisory salary, the income is already nearly ten million.

For a producer of a low-budget film, being able to earn so much money is enough.

Moreover, this does not include overseas box office revenue.

As long as this movie can reach the standard of over 100 million, Zhang Yimou will definitely earn more than he did before.