The film "Emergency Rescue" is the fourth collaboration between Lin Chaoxian and Peng Yuyan. In each previous collaboration, the two continued to challenge the limit with each other’s support. When the two first collaborated on "Guild Wars", Peng Yuyan received professional boxer training and spent three months learning Muay Thai, lock skills and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. During the shooting, he played against professional boxers in the hope of "convincing the audience". During the second collaboration "Breaking Wind", Peng Yuyan participated in the training for four months. During the training and shooting process, he cycled more than 110,000 kilometers and circled the earth almost three times. For the third time, Lin Chaoxian and Peng Yuyan’s challenge once again rose to a new height. During filming, Lin Chaoxian was even accidentally bitten by a six-inch centipede on his ankle. Peng Yuyan was in real combat, and every action command was close to the truth. This time in "Emergency Rescue", they will challenge the "water drama" that is recognized as difficult to shoot around the world. "Emergency Rescue" is the first maritime rescue film in a Chinese film. It is based on a real maritime rescue incident. Peng Yuyan said that the director has changed from "Devil Forest" and "Exploding Forest" to "Water Monster Forest".
The director came to shoot as soon as he came to me
Q: Why did you take on the role of "Emergency Rescue"? The filming conditions were very difficult. What were your mental preparations before taking on the role?
Peng Yuyan: Director Lin Chaoxian came to me as soon as he found me. I know that filming a director’s play will be particularly interesting and enjoyable, and of course there will be certain challenges and difficulties. This is also the reason why I want to shoot a director’s play, so I have already prepared it, but I didn’t expect that the preparation this time was not enough. When I arrived at the scene (8 months of shooting), the difficulty level was upgraded every day, which was very challenging. Physical and mental surprises were unprecedented.
Q: You are playing the captain of the maritime secret service. How much do you know about the real rescue team?
Peng Yuyan: My name is Gao Qian in the play. He is the captain of the maritime secret service team. He is a person with great courage, experience, and a strong sense of responsibility. He has performed many tasks and saved many people.
Before we started filming, the director showed us some information about the rescue team members, so we will understand their lives and train with them. We are like friends. They look like ordinary people, but when they receive the mission, they look completely different. Once they went on a mission, I followed them. You can’t imagine these ordinary people hanging from the helicopter, you will feel like they are in another world. As rescue team members, they need to be extra focused to save another life, because sometimes, you have to give up something to save other people’s lives. In the water, you only have three or five minutes, and you can only save two people, but there are twenty or thirty people around, so what should you do? This is what they have to face. They have to face human tragedies every day when they go to work, and when they return home, they have to be a normal person. If they don’t have faith, they will definitely not be able to do it. This is what the director wants to talk about in this play. We have also experienced it firsthand before realizing how amazing they are.
The salvage team members gave the "hope of life" to others. They faced the tragedy of life. Without faith and a firm heart, they would not be able to meet and complete the task.
Q. Did you find it challenging to play your father for the first time in Emergency Rescue?
Peng Yuyan: I think it is very difficult for the director to give me this role. The director is very interesting. He knows that I am a single parent family, so playing a father, I have to spend a lot of time convincing myself that there is no father image in my life. Thank you very much to the director for giving me this role. The actor who plays my son is very smart and cute, and it is natural and great to act with him, because the child is very real, he will memorize the lines very well, and it is very natural when acting. When acting with him, I also hope to maintain this innocence and naturalness. The director and screenwriter did a lot of homework in advance to understand the lives of the rescue team members. Family is also very important to the rescue team members, which should be an important reason for them to be so brave and responsible to give. Maybe everyone thinks this is an action movie, but I think it’s actually a drama full of love.
Been abused in various ways,
Be mentally prepared every time you go into the water
Q: What scenes did you remember most from this shoot?
Peng Yuyan: There are many scenes that I have the deepest impression of, and usually the first time is the most unforgettable. Like the first time I was blown up by fire, I was blown up in a fire at 600 or 700 degrees Celsius, and I fried several times. I thought it was all right, but I was about to be blown up by water later. After the explosion, the director was very excited and said, "Eddie was finally blown up by me with water." I didn’t know that water could be used to blow people up before, but after the explosion, I was hoisted into the air for a day, and I was about to vomit. But it was also quite enjoyable, because the real shooting was hung from a helicopter at a very high altitude, so it was also very memorable. He thought that it would be fine, then he would use fire to flood, and then he would use water to flood, so this time it was a variety of experiences, basically all kinds of "abuse". This is the director’s style, he just likes to "abuse" artists. But in fact, actors can get a lot of nutrients in this process, which is also what makes us fall in love with the director, so that we can make a very unforgettable play.
Q: Are the safety measures in place for Emergency Rescue this time?
Peng Yuyan: Yes, of course, there is still a case. Although I have tried the thermal insulation clothes, the minimum fire is 300 degrees Celsius, and my whole fireproof clothes are on fire, but this is the feeling of shooting. Although I am fully armed, I am still afraid, and I can still feel my skin burning. If I shoot like this every day, I am still afraid of being suspended every day, and finally go into the water, the water temperature is 6 degrees Celsius. I didn’t think I could survive it. It’s really cold.
I consider myself to be the kind of actor that I am not afraid of as long as I am given the conditions to do it, but for this drama, I really have to prepare myself every day before going into the water because the water is too cold and there are chemicals in the water. There are a lot of scenes in which I need to take off my equipment. Without goggles, the chemicals will get into my eyes and my eyes will not open. Those photographers wear goggles when they go into the water. Take off the goggles and the water will get into my eyes. I can’t stand it and wash them all the time. And I soak for more than ten hours a day, maybe 15 minutes each time, because it is too cold. I have to wash my eyes every day, and in the end my eyes will keep watering and my eyes will be red. The director also feels distressed, so he will also go down with me. After filming this drama, I still don’t want to swim, and I feel that the quota for touching water this year has been exhausted.
Q: No serious injuries this time, right?
Peng Yuyan: I have drowned a few times, and one particularly impressive one was being hooked by Weiya in Mexico and then pressed under the bottom of the pool. Everyone was scared, and I couldn’t get out. I found the Weiya card that tied me in the base of the truck, and the rescue team hadn’t come to rescue me yet. I thought I would save myself first, so I looked for any tools on my body to cut the rope, but I couldn’t cut it. Later, I found the hook point and untied the rope desperately, and then came out. The director kept saying "It’s alright, it’s alright". I said to take a break, because the rope was very tight and couldn’t be pulled, so I pulled it desperately. My nails were all lifted, and my hands were cracked. The director was scared. This was the most terrifying thing.
Another time was also in the water. My oxygen cylinder was about to run out of air, and the spare gas cylinder could only take eight breaths. The deeper the water pressure, the more I sucked in. I had to save these eight breaths every time. Later, I took a very long shot. The rescue team had to retreat far away. When I was about to swim back, my oxygen cylinder was out of gas, and I couldn’t find a spare gas cylinder. I held my breath to find an exit. This situation often happens. I always think I can swim well, but when you are really more than ten meters underwater, it is completely different from you in the swimming pool, and we are carrying a lot of lead blocks, so I can’t float up. With the water temperature of 6 ° C, it feels like I am in the freezer.
Now that I think back to filming the water scene, I will be afraid. I remember that after filming those scenes, we went to dinner, and the local Mexican staff would take the initiative to greet me and praise me. Friends of our rescue team told me that the local rescue workers felt that this was not something that ordinary people could bear. Many people couldn’t believe that we Chinese actors went to shoot by ourselves, and foreign films went to that scene, and they were all stuntmen.
Q: Are the things you save yourself in the water the methods you learned before filming?
Peng Yuyan: Yes, basically. All the training was used during filming. If we hadn’t trained well in advance, we might not have dared to shoot this scene. We followed the real rescue team to go outside to rescue. The rescue process was very hard. We really experienced the fragility of life, and there was no way to imagine the power of nature. It was really scary. After filming this movie, I feel that we must cherish life.
Q: Apart from feeling the fragility of life, what other impact did the film have on you?
Peng Yuyan: Now if I take a plane, I read the rescue manual, see where the escape pod is, see the people nearby, and if something really happens, who needs help. I didn’t before, but now it becomes instinctive, and then I imagine the situation of filming at that time. I count a few elderly people, and a few are in wheelchairs. These are all things I realized after filming the movie. I can’t help but feel exaggerated. When I talk about the escape pod, I think of the past 8 months of training and the horror of saving people in the plane. I keep telling myself that if something really happened today, I could save people.
And director Lin Chaoxian are also teachers and friends
Q: This is your fourth collaboration with director Lin Chaoxian. Do you feel that his films are getting more and more difficult?
Peng Yuyan: If the difficulty hadn’t increased, I don’t think Lin Chaoxian would have been the director. Since I met the director, I think the most amazing thing about him is that he has not changed what he likes. He is persistent about what he likes, so when the director makes a movie with such enthusiasm, you will be infected, and then you will also think, why not do it?
He is very good every time, and I believe he will only get better and better. This time there are many scenes that he wants to shoot, and there are also many action scenes and emotional scenes. He has to write the characters and then go to the scene to schedule. This is what he has always loved, so I think the director is very good. And the director is more and more challenging, because every time he shoots something new, just like this underwater shot, we have never experienced it before, many of them are unknown. Only when we go to the scene to shoot can we follow the camera to the scene. After training, we have to rehearse before shooting. It is conceivable that many live situations are actually difficult to execute. We are all learning, and the director will give me a lot of confidence.
Q: Is there anything that makes director Lin Chaoxian different from other directors you have worked with?
Peng Yuyan: I think it’s fate. He appreciates me very much, and I respect him very much. Very few actors can work with the same director four times, so it’s rare. And to some extent, there is also a problem of habit. Many times, you can omit some running-in things, which is a bit like "family". I have experienced four different lives in 7 years, and these four lives are not something that ordinary people can experience.
Q. Do you agree with the saying "Peng Yuyan who is made of iron, Lin Chaoxian who is made of iron"?
Peng Yuyan: I have heard it (one of the leading actors with the most cooperation times, second only to Zhang Jiahui). When I heard this sentence before, I felt that our emotions were underestimated, as if it were only tempering, but after "Emergency Rescue", I felt that it was too accurate.
Because I think "Emergency Relief" is really like "grinding" and very dangerous, I have been in the mindset of giving it all up several times. If the director wasn’t Lin Chaoxian, I would definitely have doubts. In fact, when I finished filming "Operation Mekong", the director told me about this drama. At that time, I really wanted to shoot, but I felt that I needed to take a break. The director happened to have another drama at that time, so I took a break for a while.
I didn’t take this play because it was dangerous, but because of the subject matter and the character. The director gave me this role this time. It was much more difficult than what I had played in the past, and it was quite different from my past image. (Difficulty) Mainly in terms of emotion, I played a father, and the other was the difficulty of this profession.
The relationship between me and the director is more like a mentor-apprentice relationship. It is natural for the director to shoot a man’s drama and talk about the emotions between men. The director has a pretty good pattern in dealing with this very real human nature. He sees a lot of things and is very real, so I think acting in his play is an immersive experience to some extent. From MMA fighting to cycling to "Emergency Rescue", I don’t need to think about how I want to act, just experience it.
So I think the director and I are also teachers and friends. He thinks I should shoot whatever I should shoot at my age, so he asks me to shoot. If I haven’t reached that stage, then maybe the drama at that stage is not suitable for me. He hopes that I can grow up slowly, and to some extent, I can understand what he wants to pursue. There is a tacit understanding (mutual admiration) between each other, and I will feel that there is such a person in the film industry, which is a kind of existence that will be infected by each other. Needless to say, from what he wants to do, you can see it, so he becomes very compatible. I quite admire the director.
From the first time we worked together on "Guild Wars" to the present, the director and I have not changed. Luckily, I never thought that after filming "Guild Wars", I would be able to cooperate with the director so much in the future, and he may not have thought that Peng Yuyan, an actor, could still be used. The director also gives me a new thing every year or two, so I also think I am quite lucky. The director did a very good job in his field of work, and I also tried my best to play every role during my studies.
We will cherish the opportunity to cooperate with each other
Q: Have you ever had any conflicts or disagreements with the director?
Peng Yuyan: There will definitely be some, maybe I have some ideas on some performances, and the director also knows that I must give the actor space. On this basis, I try my best to surprise him. He may feel that the role I created is more three-dimensional than he imagined in his mind, and the director will feel that it is worth it. I have also passed the addiction I want to play, so I must believe in each other.
A person’s ideas are limited, and we may be infinite together. When you are willing to share your things, he will definitely share his things with you. My disagreement with the director is often that he may think enough is enough, and I want to give more. He will let me act and make me enjoy it. I think one of the advantages of filming with a director is that what he sees is always different from what others see me.
Q: If there is a fifth opportunity to work with a director, do you have a subject that you would like to film?
Peng Yuyan: In fact, we have talked about too many topics. Every time we run and chat, we will think of a theme. He will ask me what I like, and I will also ask him what he likes. Before we discussed a lot of things like racing, action, and gunfight. Usually, the director said he wanted to shoot, but I have no restrictions on his movies because I believe him.
Q: Are you worried that directors will have more and more choices for actors in the future?
Peng Yuyan: This is possible. The director has the right to choose the actors he thinks are suitable. It doesn’t mean that we must cooperate on the fifth film after cooperating on four films now, so this is very delicate. Also, I also have a choice whether to continue to cooperate with him. I think sometimes it is the magnetic field between each other. We can give each other what each other wants. We all know that this is not easy to come by. So when shooting every play, I try my best to make myself not regret it, because this is the only thing I can control. Do the best within the scope of our control, and I will gain experience and wisdom in the process, which is worth it.
Text/Photo by Xiao You/Tian Tian