A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

Lu Yuan finished the goji berry water and swallowed it.

"Teacher Xu, what Stanislavski... I don't know those people."

Xu Changlin: "..."

"I spent three years as an extra, so what I learned was pretty rudimentary." Lu Yuan screwed the lid on his thermos and tossed it around in his hand. "That kind of imposing aura you mentioned, actually, doesn't involve any special techniques."

"Oh?"

"Think about it, what's the difference between playing a big boss and watching a foreman on a construction site?"

Xu Changlin straightened his back involuntarily.

"When the foreman came to inspect the construction site, he walked from one end of the corridor to the other. Dozens of workers were squatting on both sides eating boxed lunches. He glanced at them—what was that look in his eyes? It was like, 'You are not human.'"

Lu Yuan rubbed a scratch on the thermos with his fingernail.

"As long as you feel in your heart that everyone in front of you owes you money, your aura will naturally come out."

The passing photography assistant paused for a moment.

Two lighting technicians carrying a C-frame passed by, slowing their pace.

Screenwriter Song Yun was looking for a power outlet with her laptop, but stopped halfway there.

Shen Yibai's top-tier villainous aura, which even makes three Golden Horse Award-winning actors take notice, is based on the core methodology of "pretending that others owe you money."

Song Yun hugged the laptop to her chest, opened and closed her mouth twice, then closed it again.

She spent four months writing the character Shen Yibai, researched 160,000 words of financial crime data, and rewrote the character's psychological model four times.

Someone owes you money.

She needs some quiet time.

Next to the notice board, Jiang Yan opened her surveying book and wrote a line on the blank page:

"When a target is probing a highly cognitive individual, they employ extremely low-information-entropy colloquialisms to reduce the barrier to information exchange. The core of these rhetoric is wrapped in a shell of basic social experience, significantly reducing the symmetry of information exchange. This is a typical social engineering defense structure."

Xu Changlin remained silent for five or six seconds on the stool.

He tapped his knee a few times with his right index finger. "Interesting. A heavy sword has no edge."

He leaned forward.

"Then let me ask you one more question. In the second half of the script, scene forty-two—Shen Yibai is framed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the police, all his escape routes are blocked, his financial chain breaks, and his allies betray him. He is sitting in the interrogation room, facing six people."

Lu Yuan bent down and stroked the hair on the back of Lao Liu's head.

"A complete loss. He sat in that chair, never once bowing his head." Xu Changlin tapped his finger in the air. "How do you plan to get in with this 'clinging to a sense of superiority even in dire straits' attitude?"

This was indeed a critical problem. When Song Yun wrote this scene, he drew a whole page of psychological tree diagrams of the characters on the back of the manuscript paper, with branches as dense as a spider web.

Shen Yibai's psychological burden in this scene was extreme—he knew he was finished, but he couldn't let anyone see it, or even admit it to himself. It was an arrogance built on ruins, hollow and shaky, but with an outer shell harder than ever before.

Is the methodology for this state taught in formal academic programs? Yes.

"Layered and nested emotions," "defensive narcissistic projection under cognitive dissonance," and a whole set of psychoanalytic frameworks from Freud to Winnicott are used to build the core of the character, and then Stanislavski's "what if" is used as the trigger engine...

He could talk for three days and three nights.

But being able to speak and being able to act are two different things.

Lu Yuan smoothed down the tuft of hair sticking up on the back of Lao Liu's head, his fingers never stopping.

"Teacher Xu, that's actually quite simple."

"Simple?"

"It's like being cornered in an alley by debt collectors. It's a dead end; you can't escape."

Xu Changlin narrowed his eyes.

"If your legs buckle at this moment, you're done for, your underwear will be ripped off. But if you—" Lu Yuan gestured with his thermos, "stand up straight, put your chest right in front of their nose, and have 'whatever' written on your face."

He unscrewed the lid of the thermos and took a sip.

"The other party will become nervous. He will think, does this person have a weapon in his pocket? Does he have some trick up his sleeve that I don't know about? The more he thinks about it, the more afraid he becomes, and the less he dares to make the first move."

The thermos lid was screwed back on, and the aroma of goji berries wafted out.

"Just etch the words 'bluffing' into your bones. In the end, it's just someone who's so poor he's penniless, yet he steps out and plays a madman who doesn't even care about his own life. The poorer he is, the more arrogant he becomes; the more desperate he is, the more flamboyant he becomes. It's not difficult at all."

Xu Changlin stared at him for two seconds.

Then he slapped his thigh with his right hand.

"good!"

"What a brilliant example of 'the poorer you are, the more arrogant you become!' This is the ultimate simplicity! Returning to basics!"

He stood up, his stool sliding backward from the impact. At fifty-two, his eyes shone like light bulbs.

"Brother, let me tell you, I've been in this industry for twenty-eight years, and I've dismantled every theory that could be broken down—academic, experiential, methodological. In the end—" He poked Lu Yuan's chest with his index finger, "I'm no match for your two simple words."

"In your future scenes together, go all out. Don't hold back."

Lu Yuan leaned against the cardboard box and raised his thermos to Xu Changlin as a sign of agreement.

Xu Changlin strode away.

Inside the shed, only a dozen pairs of dumbfounded eyes remained, along with an orange cat that had licked an empty lunchbox and was burping.

After burping, the sixth child rolled over onto the cardboard, exposing his round belly.

......

Su Qinghan closed the storyboard, stood up, and said, "Tomorrow at 2 PM, we'll begin filming scene 42. The interrogation room battle."

"Everyone, get yourselves together!"

At 1:40 p.m., the interrogation room scene had been set up, with iron-gray walls, a one-way mirror, a table and two chairs.

Xu Changlin changed into an old jacket and sat on a folding chair on the outer edge of the room. His eyes were closed and his hands were resting on his knees.

Assistant Xiao Zhong, carrying a thermos, tried to hand over some water, but was bounced back by Xu Changlin's aura when he was three meters away.

The fact that a three-time Golden Horse Award-winning actor finishes filming is a well-known spectacle in the industry. In the last twenty minutes before getting into character, the air density around him is different from other places.

At the other end of the shed, Lu Yuan entered, with Lao Liu carrying half a cat treat in his mouth and swishing his tail.

He looked around and found an equipment box in a blind spot of the photography area, and put Lao Liu on it.

"Lie still and don't run around."

The sixth brother rolled over, landing on his back, and rubbed the back of his head against the metal box to indicate that he had received it.

Lu Yuan took out a sealed bag from the inside pocket of his down jacket, popped a goji berry into his mouth, chewed it, and walked toward the iron chair in the center of the interrogation table.

Sit down, put your arms on the armrests, lean back firmly, and tuck your chin in slightly.

The silhouette of the person was sharply defined by the spotlight from the overhead light.

Su Qinghan sat behind the monitor and went through the storyboard one last time.

In the forty-second scene, as the final piece was placed on the board, all of Shen Yibai's escape routes were sealed off: his funding chain was severed, his allies defected, and the evidence was complete. Chu Tianxing, the investigative reporter who had been following him for three years, sat opposite him for the first time and revealed his hand.

A five-minute standoff.

The amount of dialogue is three times that of a typical scene between two characters. The density of psychological warfare is the highest she has ever written in her career.