The Tech Changes, but Not the Crime
湯唯王力宏出演好萊塢新片《駭客交鋒》
When the director Michael Mann began work on his new film, “Blackhat,” an international thriller about good and wicked hackers, he wanted to start by researching some technological basics. Really, really elemental stuff. Like: “What’s electricity?”
洛杉磯——導(dǎo)演邁克爾·曼(Michael Mann)的新片《駭客交鋒》(Blackhat)是一部國際背景下的驚悚劇,講述亦正亦邪的黑客們的故事,著手準(zhǔn)備時,他想先研究點(diǎn)技術(shù)方面的基礎(chǔ)知識。就是最最基本的東西,比如:“電力是什么?”
“How does it flow?” he wondered. “It’s not linear.”
“它是怎么流動的?”他想,“它可不是線性的。”
Also, “how does a single transistor work?” he asked. “How do these chips work?”
還有,“單晶體管是怎么工作的?”他問道。“芯片呢?”
Investigating these and other “dopey fundamentals,” as he put it, was his way into a turbocharged story that stars Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis and Wang Leehom, and aims to bring authentic depictions of cyberterrorism to the multiplex.
他借由研究諸如此類他所謂“傻瓜基本知識”,來深入這個高速運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)的故事。這部影片由克里斯·海姆斯沃斯(Chris Hemsworth)、維奧拉·戴維斯(Viola Davis)和王力宏等人主演,希望能在多廳影院里真實(shí)地再現(xiàn)網(wǎng)絡(luò)恐怖主義。
“The way my mind works, I have to understand the basic building blocks, then I can generate up,” Mr. Mann said in an interview in his quiet production office here. Given the resources, learning the rudiments of technology “is simple,” he added. “Everything else is terribly complex.”
“我的想法是,我得理解最基本的元素,然后才能去構(gòu)建它們,”曼在自己安靜的制片辦公室里接受了采訪。以他的資源,學(xué)習(xí)這些技術(shù)基礎(chǔ)知識“很簡單”。他補(bǔ)充說,“其他東西才是復(fù)雜得可怕。”
For Mr. Mann, the writer, director and producer best known for muscular films like “Heat,” “The Insider” “Ali” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Blackhat,” which is due Jan. 16, posed challenges unlike anything he’d ever tackled, including how to depict the tedium of coding in dramatic fashion. But at 71, with four Oscar nominations and much critical adulation to his credit, Mr. Mann remains undimmed. Surrounded by Muhammad Ali memorabilia in his office, his footnotable conversation hurtled from Eero Saarinen to Brancusi to the mechanics of a municipal storm drain; at one point, he diagramed how computer bits work.
曼是作家、導(dǎo)演和制作人,以執(zhí)導(dǎo)《盜火線》(Heat)、《驚爆內(nèi)幕》(The Insider)、《拳王阿里》(Ali)、《最后的莫西干人》(The Last of the Mohicans)等強(qiáng)悍的男人片聞名。將在1月16日上映的《駭客交鋒》對于他來說是種挑戰(zhàn),要處理各種之前從未處理過的東西,比如怎樣用激動人心的方式來展現(xiàn)枯燥的編程過程。但71歲的曼曾四獲奧斯卡提名,在評論界贏得好評無數(shù),他的思路一直都很清晰。他的辦公室里到處都是拳王阿里的紀(jì)念品,他的談話亮點(diǎn)不斷,從伊洛·沙里寧(Eero Saarinen)到布蘭諾西(Brancusi),再到暴雨排水道市政工程的結(jié)構(gòu);甚至還畫圖示意電腦零件是怎么工作的。
With “Blackhat,” he even attended Comic Con for the first time. And as a filmmaker well-versed in black markets, corruption, the criminal underbelly and the law (Mr. Mann’s credits include “Miami Vice” and numerous prison dramas), the film’s unexpected resonance in the aftermath of the recent cyberattack on Sony served only to highlight his belief that the premise was ripe for exploration.
為了推廣《駭客交鋒》,他甚至第一次參加了Comic Con動漫大會。作為電影人,他擅長拍攝黑市、腐敗、地下犯罪和法律(曼還拍過《邁阿密風(fēng)云》[Miami Vice]等眾多監(jiān)獄影片),《駭客交鋒》意外地與最近索尼公司遭黑客攻擊的事件相呼應(yīng),這更加凸顯出他的信念:對這類電影進(jìn)行探索的時機(jī)已經(jīng)成熟。
“It’s almost like there’s an invisible kind of exoskeleton above the layer in which we think our lives take place on planet Earth, that’s made up of interconnectedness and data,” he said. “We’re swimming around in it, and everything is totally porous, vulnerable and accessible. And if it hasn’t been targeted, that’s only because somebody hasn’t bothered to yet.”
“我們在地球中生活的區(qū)域之上,仿佛覆蓋著一層隱形的外骨骼,由互聯(lián)的數(shù)據(jù)構(gòu)成,”他說,“我們就在其中游泳,一切都是可滲透的、脆弱的、可進(jìn)入的。如果這個題材還沒有被拍攝過,或許只是因?yàn)檫€沒人愿意費(fèi)這個力氣吧。”
The idea for the film — which, he recalled in his implacably precise manner, he first had on Aug. 8, 2011 — was inspired by Stuxnet, the computer worm that was identified in 2010, after it had struck an Iranian nuclear facility. “Blackhat,” the term for a vicious hacker (“white hat” is a good guy), starts with a malware attack on a Chinese nuclear reactor. Mr. Wang plays the M.I.T.-trained Chinese military official tasked with finding the culprit; Mr. Hemsworth plays his old programming-whiz college roommate, now incarcerated, whose prison sentence is commuted in exchange for helping solve the puzzle. This being a Michael Mann movie, that means using fists as well as keyboards. Car chases, too.
他極為精確地回憶,這部影片的創(chuàng)意是在2011年8月8日產(chǎn)生的,靈感來自2010年發(fā)現(xiàn)的電腦蠕蟲Stuxnet,當(dāng)時它攻擊了伊朗的核設(shè)施?!恶斂徒讳h》的英文名字“Blackhat”既“黑帽”是指邪惡的黑客,(“白帽”是指好黑客)。在片中,一個“黑帽”用惡意軟件攻擊了中國的核反應(yīng)堆,王力宏飾演一個麻省理工學(xué)院培養(yǎng)的中國軍官,負(fù)責(zé)找出肇事者,海姆斯沃斯飾演他大學(xué)期間的室友,是編程高手,因犯罪入獄,為了獲得減刑來幫助王解決這個難題。既然這是一部邁克爾·曼的電影,所以除了鍵盤,拳頭也是必不可少的,當(dāng)然還有追車場面。
Mr. Mann said he had long wanted to make a movie in Asia, bolstered by a recent visit to Indonesia for another project. “Blackhat” is set in Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malaysia. “There’s an explosive energy,” he said of Jakarta, reeling off stats about its population and architecture. He likened Kuala Lumpur to “Islamic Brentwood,” the wealthy Los Angeles enclave. And he was eager to shoot in Hong Kong, partly because of the neon. “I wanted it to be an atmosphere of just intense visual, chromatic, busyness and liveliness,” he said. (He prized his cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, a new partner, because of his soft use of light as a counterweight.)
曼說,他早就想在亞洲拍一部電影,近期他又為另一個計(jì)劃去了一趟印度尼西亞?!恶斂徒讳h》的背景發(fā)生在香港、雅加達(dá)和馬來西亞。“那里有一種爆炸般的能量,”他這樣描述雅加達(dá),還一口氣報(bào)出那里的人口和建筑統(tǒng)計(jì)數(shù)據(jù)。他把吉隆坡比作“伊斯蘭世界的布倫特伍德”——后者是洛杉磯一塊富庶的城中城。他熱切地希望在香港拍攝,部分是因?yàn)槟抢锏哪藓鐭簟?ldquo;我希望它形成一種氛圍,非常視覺化、五光十色,有繁忙和生機(jī)勃勃的感覺,”他說。他還夸贊了自己的攝影師,新搭檔斯圖爾特·德里布(Stuart Dryburgh),因?yàn)樗麥睾偷靥幚砉饩€,將之作為一種平衡力量。
The movie starts with a nearly five-minute dramatization of code speeding through a network, shooting lights and grids, and a reverse internal shot of a keystroke. Mr. Mann wanted to make it as true as possible; he got a 3-D computer model from Qualcomm, the semiconductor maker, to help visualize it. “So the geography is real,” he said. But “if a conductive metal has a surfeit of electrons or no electrons, it does not change color — that’s fiction. I had to present it some way; I didn’t want to do motorcycles on a 3-D grid like ‘Tron.’ ”
影片開頭用僅五分鐘的時間以戲劇化的形式呈現(xiàn)了電腦編碼在網(wǎng)絡(luò)上的快速傳播,有光線、網(wǎng)格以及鍵盤背面內(nèi)部的畫面。曼希望這這一幕盡可能真實(shí),他使用半導(dǎo)體制造商高通公司(Qualcomm)制作的3-D電腦模型來將這一幕變得更加形象。“這些布局都是真的,”他說。但是“如果一塊傳導(dǎo)金屬過量負(fù)載了電子,或上面沒有電子,它就不會變色——這是虛構(gòu)的。我得把它用某些方式表現(xiàn)出來,我不想像《創(chuàng)戰(zhàn)紀(jì)》(Tron)里那樣,用3-D網(wǎng)格呈現(xiàn)摩托車。”
Capturing the flow of data has bedeviled every filmmaker who’s ever made a movie about programming, said Steve F. Anderson, a film professor at the University of Southern California who studies depictions of technology on screen. “3-D fly-throughs, psychedelic explosions of 1’s and 0’s, an array of monitors and techno music” are all part of what Mr. Anderson calls “Hollywood technological-anxiety films.”
如何捕捉信息流,這令所有拍攝與編程有關(guān)的導(dǎo)演都感到頭疼。南加州大學(xué)電影教授史蒂夫·F·安德森(Steve F. Anderson)專門研究如何電影中如何呈現(xiàn)技術(shù)。“飛過銀幕的3-D效果,數(shù)字‘1’與‘0’迷幻地爆炸開來,一系列顯示屏,以及電腦風(fēng)格的音樂”,這些都是安德森所謂的“好萊塢技術(shù)焦慮電影”的組成部分。
“They’re almost universally dystopian, and whenever there’s some great new technology that’s going to solve all our problems, it will invariably go awry and create drama and chaos,” Mr. Anderson explained. Hollywood, he added, “has a love-hate relationship with technology, because it also wants to fetishize it.”
“他們大都是反烏托邦主義者,只要出現(xiàn)什么偉大的、能解決所有問題的新技術(shù),就總會出錯,造成戲劇性情節(jié)和混亂,”安德森解釋。他補(bǔ)充說,好萊塢“對技術(shù)有種愛恨交織的態(tài)度,因?yàn)楹萌R塢也想崇拜技術(shù)。”
Enter what he calls the superhacker, “someone who can seamlessly traverse the digital world and real world.” (This is in contrast to the other stereotype, “the pudgy, sexually repressed, sedentary, overweight geek.”) Though “The Matrix” set the superhacker standard, a prime example Mr. Anderson noted was Hugh Jackman in the 2001 movie “Swordfish.” In an online archive of hacker clips that Mr. Anderson maintains, there’s Mr. Jackman, sexy in a loose shirt, pounding red wine as he types awkwardly, shouting “Oh yeah!” at his seven oversize monitors.
安德森所謂的超級駭客是指“一個可以無縫隙穿越數(shù)碼世界與真實(shí)世界的人”(這種人和電影中的另一種老套模式正好相反——也就是那種“矮墩墩、性壓抑、總是坐著、體重超重的書呆子極客”)。《黑客帝國》(The Matrix)為超級黑客樹立了標(biāo)準(zhǔn),不過安德森指出,最好的例子還要算休·杰克曼(Hugh Jackman)在2001年的電影《劍魚行動》(Swordfish)里飾演的角色。安德森維護(hù)著一個在線檔案館,里面都是各種電影中的黑客形象片段,在這個網(wǎng)站上,可以看到杰克曼在該片中飾演的角色,穿著松松垮垮的襯衣,樣子非常性感,邊喝紅酒邊笨拙地打字,對著七臺超大的顯示器喊“歐耶!”
In “Blackhat,” Mr. Hemsworth, the muscle-bound Australian star of “Thor,” is superhacker incarnate. In real life, he told a Comic Con audience in July, he had to have one of Mr. Mann’s tech experts teach him how to type with more than two fingers.
海姆斯沃斯是一位肌肉發(fā)達(dá)的澳大利亞演員,曾主演電影《雷神》(Thor),在《駭客交鋒》里,他就是一位超級黑客。7月份,他在Comic Con漫展上告訴觀眾們說,現(xiàn)實(shí)生活里,他得讓曼請來的技術(shù)專家教他怎么用十個手指打字,而不是用兩個食指。
To the grumble that few hackers look like Mr. Hemsworth, Mr. Mann invoked another consultant, Stephen Watt, a 7-foot blond weight lifter turned cybercriminal. “They look like everything,” Mr. Mann said. He choose stars who are unfamiliar to American audiences, like Mr. Wang, an American-born pop star in China, and the Chinese actress Tang Wei, who plays his sister, a systems engineer who becomes Mr. Hemsworth’s love interest.
有人抱怨說很少有黑客會長成海姆斯沃斯這個樣子,曼提起自己的一位顧問——斯蒂芬·瓦特(Stephen Watt),他身高七英尺,是一位金發(fā)的舉重運(yùn)動員,后來成了網(wǎng)絡(luò)犯罪分子。“他們長什么樣的都有,”曼說。他挑選的都是美國觀眾不熟悉的演員,比如王力宏,他是一個出生在美國的中國流行歌手,還有中國女演員湯唯,在片中飾演王力宏的姊妹,一個系統(tǒng)工程師,海姆斯沃斯愛上了她。
The story was so closely guarded that when Mr. Wang auditioned, he used a “Miami Vice” script, he said. But once he understood the part, its appeal was its atypical “portrayal of the Asian male.” His character speaks Mandarin and perfect English. “That is the exact opposite of every other script I’ve read for an Asian role,” he said.
故事情節(jié)被嚴(yán)格保密,王力宏說,自己試鏡時,用的還是《邁阿密風(fēng)云》的劇本。在搞清楚自己的角色后,這個非典型的“亞洲男性形象”引起了他的興趣。他飾演的角色說普通話,也說一口完美的英語,“這和我看到過的所有亞洲角色的劇本都不同,”他說。
Mr. Mann has his stars read together — “a sneaky way to be rewriting dialogue,” he said. His process, honed early in his career as a TV writer in the 1970s and ’80s, begins with a longhand outline. Once the story takes shape, “I just dictate up the screenplay,” he said, as though channeling different characters and conceiving their lines extemporaneously was no big deal. “I discovered a long time ago, I cannot get it down fast enough,” he added. (For a while, he employed court stenographers.)
曼讓所有演員聚在一起讀劇本——“一種重寫對話的狡猾方式,”他說。他的工作方式是先手寫一份大綱——這是他在事業(yè)生涯早期,也就是20世紀(jì)70到 80年代期間擔(dān)任電視劇編劇時形成的。一旦故事成型,“我就口述劇本,”他說,好像刻畫不同角色并為他們即興創(chuàng)造臺詞根本算不上什么大事。“很早以前,我發(fā)現(xiàn)我沒法足夠快地把它們寫下來,”他補(bǔ)充說(有段時間他還雇用過速記員)。
Mr. Wang, 38, who called for an interview from Taiwan at 3:30 a.m. local time while finishing an album, was impressed with Mr. Mann’s vitality. In their 66-day shoot on 74 locations, “there was not one day that he slept more than four hours,” Mr. Wang said. “He had to have two assistants on rotation to keep up with him.”
38歲的王力宏于當(dāng)?shù)貢r間凌晨3:30在臺灣接受了電話采訪,當(dāng)時他剛剛錄完一張專輯。曼的活力令王力宏印象深刻。在為期66天的拍片過程中,他們在74個地點(diǎn)進(jìn)行拍攝,“他每天睡覺從沒超過四小時,”王力宏說,“他得請兩個助理輪班倒,才能跟上他的進(jìn)度。”
From the start, Mr. Mann has been confident of his instincts. A Chicago native — his favorite time of the year there is January, he said, “because it’s crystal; you see forever” — he moved to London to study film after discovering Stanley Kubrick as an undergraduate. Returning to the United States, he soon developed a crisp visual style. In the interview, he wore a gray shirt that set off his gray-blue eyes in his gray-carpeted office, and spoke in ecstatic detail about the volume of contrasting colors and patterns in Indonesia. (His wife, Summer Mann, is a painter.)
從一開始,曼就很信任自己的直覺。一年中他最喜歡的時間是一月,他說“因?yàn)樗宄和该鳎阌肋h(yuǎn)都能看見”。他是芝加哥人,大學(xué)時看過斯坦利·庫布里克(Stanley Kubrick)的電影后就來到倫敦學(xué)電影?;氐矫绹?,他發(fā)展出一種干脆爽快的視覺風(fēng)格。在采訪中,他穿著一件灰色襯衫,襯托他灰藍(lán)色的雙眼,他的辦公室里也鋪著灰色的地毯,他入迷地詳細(xì)描述著印度尼西亞的大量對比色和花紋(他的妻子薩莫·曼[Summer Mann]是畫家)。
Mr. Mann’s other hallmark is a fascination with criminals. Asked if he had ever been arrested, he declined to answer, eventually allowing only that he had never been incarcerated “like the people in my movies.” (Let the record show: Michael Mann has never killed a guy.) But he recounted his first time inside a maximum-security prison, where he was working as an uncredited writer on Dustin Hoffman’s 1978 movie “Straight Time,” with awe.
曼的另一個重要特點(diǎn)是對罪犯的迷戀。被問到是否有過遭到逮捕的經(jīng)歷時,他拒絕回答,最后終于承認(rèn),他從未“像我電影里的那些人那樣”遭到監(jiān)禁(紀(jì)錄顯示,邁克爾·曼從來沒殺過人)。但他回憶自己自己第一次走進(jìn)一座最高安全級別監(jiān)獄時的情形,當(dāng)時他為達(dá)斯汀·霍夫曼(Dustin Hoffman)1978年的電影《暗夜心聲》(Straight Time)擔(dān)任不署名編劇,滿心敬畏地到那座監(jiān)獄里參觀。
“Folsom was a revelation,” Mr. Mann said. “I thought there’d be draconian guards, gray men.” Instead, “the convicts had a kind of brio and an aggression,” a vibrancy, and they were tuned in to life outside. “The territorial compression of the human spirit,” he said, makes for an intense and unlimited palette.
“福爾松監(jiān)獄對于我來說是一種啟示,”曼說。“我本來覺得那里肯定會有嚴(yán)厲的警衛(wèi),都是身穿灰衣的人們。”相反,“罪犯們有一種生機(jī)勃勃,有種侵略性,”他們有活力,和外界生活保持著一致。他說“將人類靈魂限制在一個地域之內(nèi)”,只是造就了一個濃烈豐富的調(diào)色板。
The emotions translated to the canvas of cybercrime and code breaking. “I understand,” he said, “because I was a young male, that challenge of, ‘You telling me I can’t get in here?’ You wanna bet?’ ”
這些情感也被繪制在網(wǎng)絡(luò)犯罪與破解代碼的畫布之上。“我理解,”他說,“因?yàn)槲以莻€年輕的男人,總在挑戰(zhàn),‘你說我干不了這個?你想打賭嗎?’”
Though Mr. Mann was eager to make an of-the-moment movie, hacker films typically don’t age well, Mr. Anderson said. (See: that clip of Mr. Jackman.) He suggested that perhaps Hollywood’s narrow, dweebs-or-supermen portrayal may even damage technological literacy. “It doesn’t leave much room for ordinary people who just want to learn to write code,” he said.
盡管曼很渴望拍一部反映當(dāng)下的電影,但安德森說,黑客電影一般并不成熟(參見杰克曼的電影片段)。他說,好萊塢對黑客的塑造非常狹窄,不是怪人就超級英雄,這甚至也損害到了技術(shù)領(lǐng)域。“它沒有為想學(xué)代碼的正常人留下什么空間,”他說。