Scriptwriter reveals secret of blockbuster Full River Red

Full River Red, the highest-grossing blockbuster during Spring Festival, was once planned to be filmed in one continuous shot throughout its 150-minute duration, revealed scriptwriter Chen Yu during a recent seminar held at Beijing's China Film Archive.

Set during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), the historical suspense movie tells the story of a group of grassroots patriots who sacrifice their lives to seek revenge for Yue Fei, a military general who was framed and put to death by the top courtier of the time, Qin Hui.

The movie was shot in a residential compound made up of five enclosed courtyards in an ancient town relic site in Taiyuan, Shanxi province.

Chen, also a professor at the School of Arts at Peking University, recalled that director Zhang Yimou originally decided to produce a movie that was "highly bonded to space".

The complex structure of the architecture complex provides a possibility for the filming: it allowed the actors to keep moving forward, discovering new clues in different spaces, and thus advancing the plot.

However, during the preparation, Zhang and his fellow creators realized that filming the entire 150-minute duration in one continuous shot would result in the loss of the nuances of the actors' performances, said Chen. He added the one-shot cinematography involves cinematographers moving the camera to follow the actors, which would limit their time to capture close-ups and other critical shots.

Despite later abandoning the original plan of filming the movie in one continuous shot, the script was revised 19 times to ensure a fast-paced narration and feature a lot of twists, an effort to maintain the suspense and keep the audience engaged, according to Chen and Jiang Yuxia, vice-president of Huanxi Media Group.

The movie, which will be released in North America on March 17, has raked in over 4.52 billion yuan ($648.6 million) domestically since it opened on Jan 22, making it currently the top-grossing blockbuster in the Year of the Rabbit.