《The Great Long March》The main creator talks about shooting: a porcelain bowl, a family history and nearly 40,000 words of notes

A blue and white porcelain bowl in the Xiangjiang Campaign Memorial Hall reminds the creator of The Great Long March of an unnamed child.It was a relic left by the Little Red Army. His remains were found 30 centimeters next to the bowl. The bone age was determined to be less than 14 years old.There is no documentation explaining his name or which army he came from. Based on this, the screenwriter used reasonable historical imagination to write the story of the young soldier of the Xiangjiang Independent Company in the play.

On October 14, director Zhang Yongxin, screenwriter Wei Xiaoyu, as well as He Zhengjun who played Zhu De and Cao Lei who played Zhou Enlai talked about how these characters came into the camera.The TV series will be broadcast on a prime time slot on CCTV starting from October 9, and will be launched simultaneously on iQiyi, Migu Video and Tencent Video.This work commemorates the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army's Long March. After more than five years of planning and promotion, with the original creators of "The Age of Awakening" as the core team, the filming lasted 457 days.

In order to prepare the script, the team repeated the Long March three times and collected and reviewed approximately 30 million words of information.When we actually started writing, the first thing that had to be solved was how to deploy several armies at the same time: the Central Red Army was the main line, the Second Red Front Army, the Fourth Red Front Army, and the 25th Red Army all had their own histories, and they also had to be included in the Southern Guerrillas and the Northern Shaanxi Soviet Area.

Zhang Yongxin chose to seize the timeline.Where did the Red Army go during the Chinese New Year? Where were they during the Mid-Autumn Festival?Using the same point in time to cut through experiences in different places, several stories that are difficult to put together can take care of each other.Wei Xiaoyu introduced that major historical nodes should be presented as completely as possible, and the specific writing method should look for emotions that can be understood by the audience from real people and real events.

Straw sandals are another thread that runs from beginning to end.In the first scene in Ruijin, Jiangxi, Mao Zedong lowered his head to put on a pair of straw sandals. Halfway through, he turned on the oil lamp on the table.Zhang Yongxin revealed that the last scene will return to straw sandals: The Little Red Army asked whether there will be another Long March in the future. Mao Zedong talked about how people must walk when they are alive. No matter when, the ability to wear straw sandals must not be lost.

Yu Hewei played Mao Zedong for the first time. He and the director repeatedly discussed the character's mental state in adversity.There is a rain scene in the play. Mao Zedong walked into the heavy rain, raised his hands and looked at the sky, saying that "it is endless fun to fight against the sky".Yu Hewei lost 15 pounds to get closer to his lean state. He joined the group for about nine months and had to review the material every night.Zhang Yongxin pays more attention to what is conveyed in the eyes and believes that the spiritual resemblance formed in the performance can drive the physical resemblance.

The details of life are also supported by historical data: the relationship between Mao Zedong and He Zizhen, the relationship with Zhang Wentian that started from literature, and the fact that he and the little soldiers lived in a shabby shack and fetched water to wash each other's feet can all be found.When writing about military and route debates, Wei Xiaoyu also had to let his lines bring out the characters' depression and unwillingness, and retain the texture of everyday speech while being accurate.

The scene of the “Child Army” of the 25th Red Army went through several rounds of discussions.The earliest script only stated that you would lose money if you stepped on a fellow villager's potato. The director asked the screenwriter and actors to continue deliberation, and finally formed the current plot: the little soldier was worried that the army commander would be hungry, so he dug up the fellow villager's potatoes. When the potatoes were not returned, everyone collected copper coins, buried them in the ground, and stamped a note saying "We are the Red Army%".Such changes are still based on historical materials.Among the hundreds of named characters in the play, some minor characters are fictional, but there are historical materials behind the stories.

The audience is familiar with the character Zhao Gang he played in "Bright Sword", but they may not know that his father is a soldier of the Fourth Red Army and his hometown is Cangxi, Sichuan.He Zhengjun mentioned that at that time, the county had a population of about 300,000, and 30,000 people joined the Red Army. After liberation, statistics showed that about 3,000 people survived.From this set of figures, he felt the price his father had paid for the journey he had taken.

Fathers rarely tell their children about past hardships.He Zhengjun remembers that his father joined the Red Army twice: the first time because he was sick and young, he was persuaded to go home by the army; after he recovered from the illness, he secretly returned to the army.He left his hometown in 1934 and did not return for the first time until the early 1950s.The local civil affairs department told him that he was the first of those who joined the Red Army from several nearby hills to return to his hometown. This experience was later recorded in the county annals.

Therefore, when He Zhengjun took over the great Long March, he felt particularly heavy.The daily life of the crew is also different from his previous experience. The actors study and practice on the set, and continue to exercise after work.The Long March team is mainly young people, and they often don’t have enough to eat. We must first make our appearance closer to that era.

Before turning on the machine, he had a long phone call with Zhu De's descendants.“爱兵如子” remained in my heart from that conversation and became an important clue into the character.Mao Zedong commented that Zhu De's "measurement is as big as the sea and his will is as strong as steel", which also made him understand the character's generosity and determination.

In the play, before the Long March started, Zhu De conducted pre-war mobilization in front of the Red Army Martyrs Memorial Tower in Ruijin.The memorial tower designed by Qian Zhuangfei was built for the soldiers and cadres who died in the counter-encirclement and suppression campaign.He Zhengjun regarded this scene as homework that actors must complete seriously.He believes that the classic actions left by special actors in the past can be used as a reference, but each actor still has to create characters based on his or her own understanding of history.

He also connected the young people in the Long March with today's young audience: Those who set out from the Ruijin and Sichuan-Shaanxi base areas did not know where they would end up and relied on faith to complete the journey; although today's young people choose and walk in different ways, they still need to pay for their pursuits.

When Cao Lei talked about Zhou Enlai, he first talked about the year outside of filming.This character started filming on July 1, 2025, and ended filming on March 10, 2026; before starting filming, he had already begun to follow the character's footsteps.

The ancestral residence of Zhou Enlai in Shaoxing is only two or three streets away from the former residence of Lu Xun.Cao Lei played Lu Xun in The Age of Awakening. He first visited Lu Xun's former residence and then walked to Zhou Enlai's ancestral residence.After that, he went to Huai'an, visited his former residence and memorial hall, and sat in meditation by the well that Zhou Enlai used when he was a child.Sometimes one sitting lasts a whole day.The stories and feelings collected over the course of a year were finally written into nearly 40,000 words of notes.

He and Zhang Yongxin began to cooperate with the Great Military Advisor Sima Yizhi's Military Advisor Alliance, and then they had the Awakening Era 《 Eight Thousand Miles of Road Yunheyue 》, and the Great Long March was the fourth.He thought that there would be more and more understanding, but Cao Lei found that the director was particularly strict with him this time.

When setting the makeup, Zhang Yongxin gave him four words:“warm and sharp”.Cao Lei wants to find how these two temperaments coexist in the characters' eyes.During preparation, he repeatedly watched the video of Zhou Enlai meeting American journalist Snow in his later years. One of the looks he could not forget for a long time helped him understand the director's requirements.

This kind of preparation will eventually enter into the specific play.In the first dozen episodes, Zhou Enlai continued to mediate the differences among the leadership, hiding many emotions under forbearance; after the bloody battle on the Xiangjiang River, he clashed head-on with Li De, and the conflict was fully brought to the table.

During the interview on October 14, more than seven months after filming was completed, Cao Lei was still moved when he recalled the filming.On the first day he joined the group, Zhang Yongxin asked everyone to fall in love with the Long March from the bottom of their hearts. He said he had already done it.He expressed his feelings about this creation in terms of "awe, tempering, and rebirth". He hoped that the audience would follow the characters in the play into that period of history, and then bring the strength they gained back to their own life choices.