The 3-body problem opens with an unusual scene for a science fiction series. We are in the past, in the Beijing 1966 in the midst of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A physicist is publicly forced to renounce American discoveries on the origin of the cosmos. He is beaten to death in front of the crowd and his daughter Ye Wenjie. Years later, it is she who starts an interstellar communications project and thus triggers the plot’s intricacy.
Lo showrunner Alexander Woo, the son of Cantonese parents from Hong Kong who emigrated in the 1950s, explained the importance of this scene. The responsibility he felt in representing the Cultural Revolution within the series based on Liu Cixin’s novels. He says that when writing a TV series he always tries to show something never seen before. He succeeded, together with David Benioff, DB Weiss – who have not lost the ability to unsettle shown Game of thrones – to show some sequences of great impact. These include a massacre on a ship carried out with a decidedly unusual weapon, and moments of cosmic terror. The most important scenes for Woo, however, are precisely those set in China of the past. They tell of a dark era, which he says is poorly represented in cinema.
The scene that means the most to me is one that was seen many times by millions of people decades ago. Yet it has rarely been shown on screen. The Cultural Revolution has become a hazy image in the memory of the country where it happened and barely a footnote to most people who didn’t live through it. Those lives that weren’t lost were changed in ways both large and (if you were lucky) small. My grandfather’s colleague suffered a fate similar to that of the unfortunate Professor Ye. My family fled. It’s very possible I wouldn’t be writing this if we hadn’t. How do you responsibly sum up all of this in a five-minute opening scene for a TV show?
The response required a great expenditure of resources. For The 3-body problem recreating a crowd of people during a public execution in ancient China was as challenging as showing an alien spaceship. The sequence required a strong synergy with director Derek Tsang, who shared its importance from a representational point of view, and with the special effects team to The 3-body problem. To recreate the crowd they worked on both digital multiplication and sound, to bring the performance of 300 people to that of 1000. The sequence was not well received in China with the accusation of having been produced by the American platform to disfigure the history of the nation. All expected and a sign that the scene works according to the screenwriter.
We asked ourselves what part we can play as writers? If we are honest, it is a complementary part. The fact itself is accurately told in Cixin Liu’s novel. Our goal was to present the scene to fit the time constraints of the episode and the point of view of the camera lens. From a writing perspective, it is not as scary as creating the scene from scratch. Did we do our job well? If the reaction of the Chinese audience on the Internet is any indication, then we hit the nail on the head.
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Fonte: HollywoodReporter
