This New Year's Day, many people choose to spend money on their vacation time to buy tickets and go to the cinema to watch a movie about other people's work, "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!".》。In the movie, Hu Jianlin, a blue-collar worker in a factory played by Dapeng, knows nothing about the workplace, but he was transferred to the group headquarters by mistake and rose step by step in a high-ranking factory. In this large enterprise, it is difficult for conscientious workers to tell what meaningful work they have done, but they are tired of coping with the overtime culture of 996 and the granularity that is not alignedMiddle and senior leaders are mainly busy throwing the blame at each other and engaging in a large-scale layoff to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
13 days after its release, the movie "The Annual Meeting Can't Be Stopped!".>> 5The box office of 400 million yuan has become a dark horse at the beginning of 2024, and it also won 8High rating of 2 points. Many reviews believe that this is a truly funny domestic original comedy that is rare in recent years. Its funny comes from the fact that we are a little familiar with everything in the movie, but it is so absurd and ironic. As a popular phrase this year, the world is a huge grass deck.
We chatted with Dong Runnian, the screenwriter and director of this film, about this ** and his experience in the creative industry. Many people are not very familiar with this director, but since graduating in 2003, Dong Runnian has been a professional screenwriter for 20 years, and has created many well-known works such as "The Chef Plays the Ruffian", "The Heart Blossoms on the Road", "Lao Paoer" and so on. The interview was about 9 a.m. in Dong Runnian's studio, which is a normal working time for him. Unlike many people's imagination of the life of creators, Dong Runnian gets up at 6 o'clock in the morning every day and usually comes to work at 10 o'clock, living a very regular and professional creative life.
Even if you have enough understanding of the market for genre films, "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!".After the release, the audience's emotional devotion to this movie still exceeded Dong Runnian's expectations at the beginning. In the middle of the interview, Ying Luojia, the director's wife and the screenwriter and producer of this film, pushed the door in: I rushed up to report the good news!Douban rose by 01 point!Now 82 up!There was jubilation in the office, Dong Runnian leaned his shoulders on the edge of the desk, and said with a smile, I, I don't really understand, but I was shocked......」
"The annual meeting can't be stopped!The script has undergone several revisions over a period of several years, and the temperament of the story has been constantly changing with the changes in the context of the real workplace. Only the two elements of the annual meeting and layoffs have carried over from the original version. The annual meeting is the scene that best reflects the changing times of the business, while the layoffs were originally just a setup made to form a dramatic conflict. However, at the end of 2023, when the film is released, no one looks at it with a theatrical eye anymore.
The following is the narration of screenwriter and director Dong Runnian.
textWang Yuan.
EditChu Ming.
The earliest version of this story is still an inspirational story. In 2017, I wrote the first version of the story, a young man who was about to be laid off, in order to keep his job, formed a group with all kinds of employees in the company who were not usually well received, and wanted to perform together at the annual meeting. We set being able to perform well at the annual meeting and get an award as their last chance to keep their jobs, such a workplace, inspirational, and light comedy story. It's completely different from today's satirical comedies.
I first thought I wanted to write this story because I was chatting with my friends, and I often heard them complain about some strange things they encountered at work, which I thought was quite funny. I studied science in high school, and many of my classmates ended up in these big Internet companies, and when they talked about their work, I was like listening to a book from heaven, and there were a lot of new terms. It's obviously not a technical term, but you just don't understand it. In fact, it is the current Internet slang.
I thought it was interesting. After listening to their conversations, you will find that no matter what different positions they are in, their architecture, working models, and problems are actually the same. At that time, I also reflected on why there are few domestic movies and TV series that really talk about workplace life, in fact, it should be a bonanza of creation that can be tapped. My parents also work, a dual-income family, and when chatting with relatives and friends at home, it is also a very common thing for everyone to complain about their boss and work. In fact, working life is a very important way of life in the city today, and it is reasonable to say that it is the closest theme to everyone's life.
But now when you think back to the complaints of those big factory people at that time, there is actually a kind of optimism. Although he was complaining, he was not anxious, and they themselves took this as a pleasure. My peers were all thirty-seven or eighteen years old at the time, and they were basically middle-level managers. They complain a lot about the complexity of the OA system and the bureaucratic atmosphere, which basically hinders their "enterprising momentum." Although there was a vague worry at that time, about the fact that after reaching a certain age, I could only switch from technology to management, and I didn't earn as much as before, but I didn't have such a clear age anxiety as being fired at the age of 35. I feel that when they talk about these things, they don't really think that there is anything wrong with the system, but they may have some pride in their work.
So the version I originally wrote, although the protagonist is set to such a person who is at risk of being laid off, but the whole story is still going in a particularly inspirational direction, and the workplace is also a very serious background environment in it, and I don't think there will be any problems with the company itself. A few years later, I went to shoot "The Man Caught by the Light", and when I looked back at the script in 2020, I felt that its emotions didn't seem to be accurate.
The subjects of our interviews began to expand to some young, grassroots employees of large factories, and found that many of them hated writing **, weekly, and monthly reports. I was particularly impressed by a girl who said: I do such a thing in a week, I have to write three reports, I don't know how to write, obviously two lines can write a thing clearly, I have to write very complicated, it seems to be very high. So these Internet slang came here, obviously the two of them sent an email to the right thing, and when they wrote it in the weekly report, they had to write it in alignment granularity, because she had to fill the word count and make the report look very quality.
Individuals in this group will question the value of their work, what do you say this thing contributes to GDP?At that stage, the people I interviewed had two very concentrated feelings, one was that they felt tired, and the other was that they felt unfair, and it was better to be able to work than to be able to make a report. But that's not a state of despair and fear.
There was also a piece of news at that time. A homeless man lived in a business building for a month, where he could find food and drink, and even a place to bathe, and he just mingled in it, and no one found out that he was not from here. I was very shocked after reading it. It stands to reason that these large enterprises represent the most advanced management system, and all employees are the smartest and most intelligent people, but such a system can have such a big loophole. Later, isn't there a stalk on the Internet, that is, how high the IQ of the business war you think is, but the business war in reality is to directly grab the official seal, pull out the power of the opponent's machine, or something, and some seemingly very smart people end up doing very stupid things.
At this time, in fact, this sense of absurdity and irony gradually formed in my heart. I'm not targeting any specific company or anything, but when an organization has a certain number of people, it just comes out with all kinds of strange things and all kinds of strange loopholes. We did a lot of interviews after that, and the more sarcastic points we collected, the more you thought it was so funny. Just like the phrase that suddenly became popular this year, the whole world is a huge grass platform team.
"The annual meeting can't be stopped!In ", Zhuang Zhengzhi, played by Wang Xun, secretly wandered in the corporate building, and no one found out. Photo source movie "The Annual Meeting Can't Be Stopped!".》
Nowadays, everyone's demand for being funny is getting stronger and stronger, and the threshold for laughter is getting higher and higher. A viewer may have seen more jokes online than a comedy creator. If a short **5 seconds doesn't amuse him, he's already rowed away. What else can you do to impress people and make them laugh, that's a very difficult thing to do right now.
Some people commented that they didn't use this kind of, pee, and fart jokes in our movies, and to be honest, we didn't think about it during the creative process, because poop, pee, and fart comedy itself is also a big category. I think the style is still high or not, and the biggest problem is that it is not new. You've found that everyone else has done it funny, and no joke can make the audience laugh twice.
Including me chatting with talk show actors, everyone generally faces this problem, there are many experiences and topics in foreign comedies that are not suitable for China, so now everyone generally takes a logic that is to dig to the bottom of life, push some places in his own life that he thinks are ridiculous to an extreme situation, and then amplify its ridiculous places.
In this movie, we are also on this path. For example, at the beginning, the white guest greeted Dapeng. The line in Bai Ke's mouth is "From now on, you will be my subordinate", but the body language is completely reversed, and he regards Dapeng as a leader. This includes the triple dislocation, the misalignment between lines and physical actions, the misalignment of the relationship between the characters themselves, and the scene where we borrowed the toast scene from the wine table culture, where two people are lower than each other with a wine glass, and borrowed it into this scene. Although the audience may not be able to get it at the first time, everyone has experienced it more or less in life, and there will be a sense of déjà vu, which has formed the biggest joke in this scene. This joke is not generated by a certain paragraph or a certain sentence alone.
The way this kind of comedy jokes is set up is very similar to some of the traditional cross talk. I wrote this version of the script and was greatly inspired by Niu Qun Feng Gong's "Thief Company" and Liu Baorui's "Lian Sheng**". Including the current structure of Hu Jianlin, Ma Jack and Penny, it is also influenced by a traditional cross talk "Picking Up the Horse Jacket", which relies on a group of relationships formed by one pretending to be stupid, one picking thorns on the side, and one having to settle things for this troublemaker.
Because I am from Tianjin, when I was a child, the radio every day was full of allegro, storytelling and cross talk from 1:30 to 5:30 in the afternoon, and I listened to it every day, and there may not be traditional cross talk that I have not heard. The jokes of traditional cross talk are actually not so dense, and the foreshadowing time is very long. Teacher Ma Sanli's "Teasing You", the whole paragraph is the last burden, it can produce the best effect in the end, and it is not afraid of foreshadowing. The first 20 minutes of our movie are basically introducing the relationship between the characters, and we are also under pressure in our hearts, whether the current audience can accept such a long period of foreshadowing. We even tried to stuff some baggage into it, but in the end the rhythm was not right, so we cut it. Fortunately, the feedback is okay now, and the audience still accepts it. Maybe you bought a ticket to go in after all, and it's unlikely that you will watch it for 10 minutes and leave (laughs).
It's my first time directing a genre film. There is a contract between the genre film and the audience. What I'm looking for this time is a narrative rhythm that is extremely informative and extremely fast. Now everyone is used to 1Watching dramas at 5 times the speed, the audience must no longer have the patience for the traditional way of speaking and reaction speed that may be a little slower than in normal life. When I was on set, I said to the actors, I hope everyone has 15x faster performance. In the end, we had almost 2,300 shots. We also hope to use the overall rhythm to drive the audience's emotional feelings.
This time, there are about 20 comedians we work with, or actors with comedy labels in everyone's cognition, and all of them have different performance styles. For example, Dapeng is the style of Northeast comedy;The white guest was the kind of Japanese and comic book at the earliest.,Very exaggerated acting;The contestants in the annual comedy contest are more on the stage, and many of them used to be drama actors;Stand-up comedians didn't belong to theatrical performances before, and many of them acted for the first time. At that time, when there was a new face in the organization, in fact, my biggest anxiety was whether this could be grouped together. Everyone's acting is different, and they can't catch each other.
Later, when I talked to the actors about the script and characters, everyone gradually made it clear that our story itself is also a structural comedy, and everyone felt that this thing could not be performed in the same way as comedy, and it should not be too exaggerated, and it should be a daily life style. After everyone forms this consensus, it will be easier to do later, no matter what style you have, including the three dogs This is so conspicuous, we can also condense it into a unified style.
The biggest challenge of this shoot was not the comedy side yet. The main thing is that we started shooting in November 2022, and the original shooting period was 60 days. Halfway through the shooting, there were 200 people in the group, and only 5 people had no yang. It was really hard, and the non-combat attrition was serious. Basically, there are 1 or 3 people who are resting in shifts, like me, who doesn't have a ** shift like the director of photography, so I can only shoot there with a fever.
On New Year's Day, our whole group had a 7-day break, and the actual shooting was compressed to 53 days. Originally, we had already set up 800 group performers for the scene at the end of the annual meeting, and we planned to add all the leading actors together to finish filming this scene in three days. As a result, at that time, there were only 200 people in the group performance, and the actors were also feverish, so they had no choice but to change it to two stages of filming on and off stage. All 200 spectators sat in one direction and sat on the other side. Our chairman's glasses will also reflect light, so he will wear them, and he can see that there is no one on the stage at all, which has to be made up for by post-production special effects. We don't seem to have any sense of special effects, but in fact, there are a lot of such special effects shots that make people laugh and cry.
After the New Year's Day holiday, after everyone eased up a little, we will go back and shoot the part where the three leading actors sang and danced on stage. At that time, the three of them were full of confidence, thinking that they could act after the illness had recovered, but after taking a film, they found that it was not good, so they hurriedly got oxygen, and their heartbeats reached the level of 1670. Later, I had to prepare two oxygen bags for each of them for each of them. In the middle, after filming Dapeng came to watch the surveillance, I found out how his hand was broken, and I thought he had knocked somewhere on stage. No, it was dark when he sang, and in order to prevent himself from fainting, he desperately picked out his hand and pulled out a big hole.
We later recorded this song in the studio, but in the end we used the live version of the three of them for 80% of the film. It's definitely not perfect, there's a lot of out-of-tune, there's a lot of screaming, not keeping up with the beat. But we still think that overall, the feeling of temperament and atmosphere is the best.
The annual meeting of the three leading actors sang and danced. Photo source movie "The Annual Meeting Can't Be Stopped!".》
For me, the most wonderful thing about being a director is that you can build a parallel world brick by brick, and if you build it well, this world is credible, and you can make the audience empathize. I think why do we need art to create this thing, from a social level, our society is actually made up of the common imagination of all people, and what kind of common imagination they have generated by the people living in this land will eventually form a society. My hometown is in Tanggu, Tianjin, and it is a bit like the feeling in "The Long Season", a city radiating from a few factories as the core. Tanggu has three large factories: Tianjin Port, Tianjin Salt Farm, and Tianjin Soda Factory, and in the 90s, there was another Bohai Oil. 80% of the population of Tanggu is basically serving these large enterprises, a common acquaintance society. So I also have a deep affection for that kind of big factory. I remember that there was no bathroom at home at that time, so my father took me to the large bathhouse of the unit to take a bath. Watching movies is also organized by the unit, and going to the auditorium of the unit is not called a movie theater. When I was about 10 years old, my employer installed CCTV in the workers' homes, and the first three days were the "Star Wars" trilogy. I was shocked that there was such a thing in the world. Later, Hollywood blockbusters began to be introduced in China, and I went to that auditorium to watch them. In 1995, "Forrest Gump" was released, and it was still a dubbed version, and I cried on the spot. When I got home that day, I found a notebook on which I memorized the plot and lines, and theoretically it was my first time writing a screenplay. Of course, I can't remember it until the end of the writing. But that ** gave me a great shock. You just realized that the movie can really tell a wonderful life, and you can experience that kind of emotion in those two hours, which has a great impact on me. Later, my junior high school classmates showed me the junior high school classmates, and I wrote on it: I want to be a director because I think it's a great thing to make the audience cry and laugh. But I forgot about it when I was in high school. I used to have a good academic performance in Tanggu, and I was the third in Nankai Middle School in Tanggu District in the high school entrance examination. As a result, when I arrived in Nankai, I found that it was nothing, and I fell directly from the top three to the bottom thirty of the grade, and the study pressure came up all of a sudden. But fortunately, in the past few years in our school, we happened to promote quality education, and you were not allowed to do evening self-study, you had to join clubs, so I joined the drama club, engaged in sketches or something, and often slipped out to watch movies. "Titanic" and "Love Letters" are all love movies that I watched with a few boys in my class. After two years of quality education, the school found that it was over, and all the grades of these students had come down, so they quickly cut off all these activities. But I'm grateful that there was a relaxed environment in those years. In my junior year of high school, it was also because one of my classmates knew that I usually liked these things and gave me a copy of the film school admissions brochure, that I began to pay attention to this matter, and suddenly realized that it was not a possibility. I was thinking about whether or not to study biology, and biology was very popular at the time, but I couldn't pass the exam. As a result, the film academy did not recruit students in the directing department that year, and I finally took the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, which is now the directing department of the Communication University of China, which is actually a major for TV program directing. At that time, the domestic film industry had not yet developed at all, and we were very confused when we graduated, and our teachers told us that if you become a film director, it is equivalent to entering a sunset industry. You either go to be a TV program director, or you just start with the crew, starting with the assistant director of the scene, which is a very hard and long method, and young people basically have no chance. So I started my career as a screenwriter, and I was relatively lucky, I wrote two TV series with my teacher when I was in graduate school, and I entered the industry relatively smoothly. A few years after graduation, my wife and I lived in Tongzhou, and she was also in this industry, working as a producer, and she had to take the subway for an hour and a half every day to work at the company on Zhichun Road, because there had to be someone to make money. I wrote the script at home, usually until two or three o'clock at night, and then slept at home during the day, and I didn't go out at all for half a month. Often, I can't shoot it after I finish writing, or I think it's a good write, and I go to the director and producer to approve it for nothing. During that time, I was really extremely self-doubting, and I felt that for a few years, there was always a black shadow wrapped around you, holding you, making you unable to move and unable to straighten your waist. 
Photo provided by the interviewee In 2009, one afternoon, after I finished writing an episode, the sun shining in the west shone in, and I suddenly felt relaxed, and the shadow flew away. Later, when my wife came back, she said, "Why are you so happy today?" and I said, I suddenly felt that I could write a play. Later, I consciously changed my routine, and now I wake up at 6 o'clock almost every morning and wake up at 5 o'clock. Because a senior told me that he started writing at 7 o'clock in the morning every day, and until noon, the day's workload was completed, and your mind was very relaxed throughout the afternoon and evening. I wanted to study this way, I got up early and went to school, but I still couldn't finish writing in the morning, and I couldn't write anyway, so I had to sit there and sometimes write all day until evening. I thought that at least the working hours had to be met, and if I didn't write enough for 8 hours, it would be a waste of the day. In the past, the rhythm of writing TV dramas was generally one episode every three days, which is a pyramid structure, about two or three hundred words on the first day, about 1,000 words on the second day, and then 10,000 words before the third day of delivery, my life is like this every three days. When I can't write it, I sing songs, play with my Transformers toys twice, and watch movies and TV shows or something, but I keep thinking about the script in my head. So my life is quite simple, simple and boring, mainly because it may seem boring to others, but I think I still enjoy it. 
Dong Runnian on the set. Photo courtesy of the interviewee.
After the movie was released, the feedback from the audience was honestly a bit more than I expected. When we wrote and filmed, we knew that this might be funny, it was a satirical thing, but we didn't expect that the audience's emotions would be so strong in the end. We didn't even expect that the audience would applaud in many places, and some of them were very strange, everyone would applaud Hu Jianlin every time he was promoted (laughs). I think one of the things that everyone says a lot is that this movie has become everyone's mouth, a word we didn't expect before. Including the whole process, we didn't think about running to a certain group (to speak), because I don't think I can speak for others, but it is lucky, maybe it fits some of the things that people want to say in this era. I was very impressed by the audience's feedback, after watching this movie and walking out of the cinema, he felt very relaxed, as if he had the strength to face life again, which is a comment that makes me feel particularly proud. The kind of thing we satirize, in fact, whether it is traditional drama, traditional cross talk, or many film and television works in the first decade of the last century, such as the movies directed by Huang Jianxin, you will find this kind of irony very common. It's just that we have transferred this bureaucracy and the alienation of human relations from the system at that time to our new Internet system. Each generation satirizes these, but you'll find that nothing changes in the end with each generation. This is also an interesting point that we found in the previous interview. It stands to reason that this is the most advanced management system now, and these people are also the smartest and most modern people today. But when it comes to the practical level, the problems caused by the complexity of these reporting systems and communication systems, as well as the irresponsibility of these people in doing things, all the things that have been satirized in traditional works decades ago, will still happen here. At this time, the most interesting place appeared, which shows that these are things that transcend the system, the system, and the times. So what is it?It is certainly something inherent in human nature. In fact, no matter what kind of enterprise it is, what kind of system it is, everyone in it has the same purpose, they all want to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, want their own better status and future, want financial gains, and don't want to take the blame, and hope that the responsibility will not fall on their heads if something happens. This is the most normal kind of psychology for the vast majority of human beings. Different nationalities and different cultures generally have this kind of human nature. So when we figure this out, I think we have found the scale of irony. It seems to me that the scale of our satire is not very large, we don't feel how heinous or whatever, it is precisely because we recognize that it is a universal thing, that we kindly describe it and present it. Of course, there are people in the plot who commit crimes, which is another matter, but for those situations that do not involve crimes, we are just ridiculing. It's always okay for us to laugh at ourselves about our own instinct to seek advantage and avoid harm. Even though there are a lot of complaints about the workplace now, I think overall, if you compare it to 20 years ago, it is still a lot better. The spiral is also up, right, you see that it has all kinds of regressions, all kinds of unfairness and injustice locally, but on the whole it is still going up. Maybe I'm a person who doesn't feel very anxious myself. My grandmother is a very cheerful and humorous old lady from Shandong, she always tells us at home, "It's not a problem", and she is quite extensive in managing me. I think I'm quite influenced by her. Later, you will slowly find out that the things you thought were particularly serious at the time, even if you just left it alone, time can help you solve a lot. So there's no need to be anxious, just keep trying, and one day you'll find a solution.
Just like at the end of our movie, my personal value is that our world is bound to get better and better. That's one thing I believe, and I don't doubt it. 
At the end of the movie, everyone gets a more suitable position. Photo source movie "The Annual Meeting Can't Be Stopped!".》