Best Director in Literature Department of Huayu

Chapter 102 Sharp Tongue (Seeking Monthly Tickets)

When the plane landed at Jiangbei Airport, it was drizzling in the mountain city.

After leaving the airport, Lin Ruiyang took a taxi and headed home.

The driver spoke with a heavy accent.

"Coming back for the Chinese New Year?"

"Um.

"Working outside?"

"7

I guess so.

"Young people should go out and explore. Many college graduates can't find jobs these days, but you college students are still better off than us."

Lin Ruiyang smiled but offered no explanation.

The car sped along the river onto the airport expressway. Dense raindrops blurred the towering mountains and buildings outside the car window.

At the beginning of 2006, this mountain town was in a period of rapid, unbridled growth, a transition between the old and the new.

Inside the carriage, an old radio was crackling and playing local news, occasionally interspersed with a few outdated, hoarse love songs by Dao Lang.

After getting off the bus, Lin Ruiyang saw Jiang Yuehua as soon as he walked to the familiar building.

"Mom." Lin Ruiyang stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Jiang Yuehua's hand trembled, and she almost dropped the water ladle. She turned around somewhat slowly, squinting her eyes to make out the young man standing there.

"Ruiyang?" Jiang Yuehua threw the water ladle into the bucket, wiped her hands haphazardly on her apron, and walked over in two quick steps.

She walked up to Lin Ruiyang and looked him up and down. Her brows furrowed immediately, but she still uttered the same line that hadn't changed in her past life or this one: "You've lost weight again after going out, quite a lot of weight."

"You always say that when I come back. I haven't lost weight, I'm just wearing less underneath."

"It's so cold this month, why are you wearing so little? You'll catch a cold..."

""

The familiar murmurs and tone instantly calmed Lin Ruiyang's restless heart.

He did nothing for the next few days.

Every morning, I wake up naturally, put on a thick down jacket, wear slippers, and walk to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant at the alley entrance to order a bowl of noodles with extra chili peppers.

Pair it with a bottle of chilled Wei Yi soy milk, and enjoy a bite of hot and spicy noodles followed by a sip of sweet and icy milk until every pore on your body opens up.

By the evening of the fourth day, the rain in the mountain city had intensified, and the neon lights on both sides of the river were lit up early.

After dinner, Lin Ruiyang returned to his room, turned on his laptop, and plugged in the newly installed telephone line to dial up and connect to the internet.

The internet speed these days is so slow it's frustrating. A full half minute passed before the chubby penguin in the lower right corner finally started beeping.

Before he could even open his friends list, a chat window popped up with a non-mainstream profile picture.

"Senior! Are you in China or abroad? Are you there?"

Lin Ruiyang typed in reply: "Adjusting to the time difference at my hometown, what's up?"

"Great! Senior, I just finished filming a TV series recently, and I was planning to go back to Yanjing for a few days to relax during the winter break. But then my agent suddenly gave me a movie script by director Li Shaohong, and I'm really unsure about it. Could I ask you for some advice? (Please, please.jpg)"

Lin Ruiyang looked at the densely packed words popping up on the screen and chuckled. He did have some impression of this movie; it was considered her early representative work on the big screen.

The director made the mistake of confusing aesthetic beauty with pretentious artistic flair, which is to put it bluntly, he repeated his old mistake, causing the movie to fall apart.

Lin Ruiyang typed in response: "What type of script is it? What's the general direction it's going to be?"

On the other end of the computer, in a bedroom in Yanjing, Yang Mi, who was sitting cross-legged on a chair, saw the reply pop up on the screen. Her bright eyes lit up immediately, and her fair fingers quickly typed on the keyboard.

"It's a psychological thriller! The tentative title is 'The Door.' The story is about a male protagonist who, due to paranoia and a strong possessiveness, always feels that everyone around him is trying to harm him, and even suspects that the female protagonist, whom I play, has betrayed him, which ultimately triggers a series of terrifying events."

But the script is written in a lot of mysterious and cryptic places, filled with a lot of internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness descriptions. The agent said the director wanted an extreme, breathtakingly beautiful yet terrifying feeling... Ugh, anyway, I felt the writing was particularly mystical and nonsensical, and while reading it, I always felt like I couldn't grasp the core of the characters. Senior, am I too stupid?

"It's not that you're stupid, it's that the script's words are using atmosphere to interfere with your judgment. Director Li Shaohong is good at using extreme audiovisual elements to entangle the characters."

Listen, the big screen will magnify your micro-expressions dozens of times. If, during the audition, you simply follow the script's descriptions of horror and supernatural phenomena, the result will be superficial and pretentious, and the audience will think you're just making a fuss over nothing.

"what?"

"Then how should I act?"

This was followed by an emoji of someone scratching their hair.

Lin Ruiyang smiled. This girl's greatest strength was that she would ask directly if she didn't know something.

"Tell me first what this girl in the script wants most?"

Yang Mi was silent for a while, obviously going to look at the script.

After waiting for a while, the message popped up again.

"Do you want to be loved? Or do you want to maintain this relationship?"

"Then let's act in this one."

"Don't act in horror, don't act in suspense, and especially don't act in what the director calls 'suffocating' scenes."

"You just need to play an ordinary girl who falls in love with the wrong man."

"That simple?"

"It's that simple."

"What's truly terrifying is never ghosts, but people, especially since the supernatural shouldn't appear in movies anyway."

"The audience finds it terrifying in the end not because of your performance, but because they discover a normal girl being drawn step by step into the world of a mentally unstable person."

"That's what a real person is like."

On the other end of the computer, Yang Mi stared at the screen.

Many things that were previously incomprehensible suddenly became connected.

She realized that she had indeed been getting stuck on things, focusing on stream of consciousness, suspense, and thriller atmosphere, while forgetting about the character himself.

"Senior, are you particularly good at giving acting instructions to actors?"

"It's alright, mainly because you're not that stupid."

"Hehe." The other side immediately sent a smug emoji.

Then he added another sentence.

"If I really take this role, you can't laugh at me when it's released."

"That depends on how well you act."

"That's too much! Are all directors this harsh?"

"Only a great director like me is sharp-tongued."

"You're really shameless."

"Thanks anyway, senior! I'll treat you to dinner when I win Best Actress!"

Just as Lin Ruiyang was about to reply, before he could press send, his personal cell phone, which he had only turned on after returning to China, suddenly rang without warning.