World Online Business Conference—Besson Dialogues with Alibaba Group CMO Dong Benhong

　　On July 11, 2017, the World Online Business Conference was held at the Hangzhou International Expo Center. The following is a conversation between the famous French director Luc Besson and Alibaba Group CMO Dong Benhong.　　

　　Dong Benhong: Hello everyone, I am Chris, from Alibaba Group.

　　We will discuss with you for 20 minutes. Today we are very happy and honored to attend our online merchant conference. As we all know, there are more than 2,000 online merchants who operate their online stores on the eye. They are very successful in their operations. They also hope to get inspiration and advice from you, how to use innovation to make their business a step further. So today, we really hope to discuss originality and creativity. I know that you have a lot of fans in China, and your fans have many questions you want to ask you.

　　Taopiaopiao is an online ticket selling platform under Alibaba Group. We have established a system and an infrastructure to enable some foreign movies to be marketed and promoted in China. I have collected some questions from Taopiaopiao.

　　Luc Besson: In the last 5 minutes, I wanted the audience to ask me some questions. Think about what questions should I ask.

　　Dong Benhong: You have many very great works, so one person wants to ask you is, can you share with us about originality and creativity, choose your work and talk to us about your ideas about originality and creativity, such as the creative process, how does your brain work? Can you explain it with one of your works?

　　Luc Besson: The truth is the relationship between what you need to do, what you want to express, and the way you shoot. For example, there is a very beautiful woman, or you say this is a very, very good woman, very beautiful woman. No matter what adjective you use, whether you say it is incredible or incredible, such as being beautiful or elegant, these are all different adjectives. Then the same goes for you when you make a movie. The camera is equivalent to an adjective. For example, from here to there, what you capture with different lenses is different. Therefore, when you are shooting, you should use your lens to translate and interpret the subject you are going to shoot. So for directors, this is the most important thing. How to find the right adjective through movement and use the lens perspective to describe the subject you are going to shoot.

　　For example, I'm very close to you now, and then you say Chris, I'm sorry, but I have to tell your dog that died, and then suddenly stopped, and then I'll have a very large shot, and then in this shot, I'll show my very lonely feeling, and I feel after hearing this news, so I switched to a shot to show that each of us is very small. This person suddenly my dog ​​died, and I was very sad at the time. Then there is also the sound and the tool. You can tell me, Chris, I'm sorry to tell you, but your dog is dead, and then the big camera is facing your face, and then you can hear the sound of meow... on the background, and then I will laugh because you told me that my dog ​​is dead, but I hear the sound of cats. So you can suddenly turn from sound to pleasure to laugh, not through vision but pushing the hearing to express such a transformation. So there are many possibilities that you can express, so when we are directors, we can use such tools.

　　I have a movie called "This Killer Is Not Too Cold", which is a movie a long time ago, telling the story of a professional killer. There is a bad guy here. He said I will be in such a building soon. If you haven't seen this movie, you can go back and take a look. He walked very slowly. Then suddenly someone came over and saw the second and third person, with emotion. Then Gary walked out of the elevator and needed medicine. He took a pill, bite it, and listened to the sound of the bite of the medicine. So the way I took pictures is that this group of people was going in this direction, but Gary was going in another direction. This is usually illogical. You should go in his direction, but the direction I took pictures in the opposite direction. You will see one person passing by another person passing by. The purpose of my shooting like this is to show that these people are not important, because what really matters is the last shot, the person who walks out of the elevator, which is the protagonist that our movie should focus on. So through this way of moving, although he is a shot, I have to express a lot of things, just like I use one word to express a lot of different emotions.

　　This is an example to explain the complexity of our work. In fact, everyone can make movies and everyone can play football. But if you want to make a very good movie, it is very difficult. I think it should be the most difficult job in the world.

　　Dong Benhong: Thank you very much for sharing. You just mentioned observing a tree and getting inspiration from it. Many people, including great writers, get inspiration from different things like drinking. I know you don’t smoke or drink, and your life is very simple and simple. So have you ever been worried that one day when you wake up in the morning, you see a tree and you suddenly have no inspiration. What should you do? My question is, how can you maintain inspiration and keep yourself in a constant stream of inspiration and creativity? Is there any secret?

　　Luc Besson: Yes, I get up every morning and write. Since 17, it’s just like I’m working out every day. Everyone knows that you must exercise every day, but few people can stick to it. We know that fitness is good for the body and good for health. So the same is true for my brain, you have to keep training him. Keep writing every day and train your brain.

　　I have been doing this since I was 16 or 17 years old. At that time, all the things I wrote were thrown into the trash can. I made a movie "The Fifth Element" at that time. I wrote this script since I was 16 years old. I wrote more than 200 pages of script, and threw it into the trash can. Then I wrote another 200 pages and threw it into the trash can. Then I wrote 400 pages, and then I kept it. I want to tell you that the 200 pages I wrote at the beginning was not good, it was very bad. But if you persevere little by little, you will gradually find the feeling. Now 30 years have passed, and I feel that my ability to write scripts has improved. My ability to write is like riding a bicycle. Once we learn it, you will not forget it. So you need to love doing this very much, and you need to persist every day. Trees can definitely give you inspiration, and there are trees everywhere. Just run to the park to see the trees. There is also a tree at my doorstep. It has been more than 300 years. Every time I see this tree, I will tell him, Hello Mr. Tree, because he is over 300 years old, he is much older than us, and he even knows the king before. I have never seen the king before, because he has experienced so many times, so I think he is very powerful. This is how you have to constantly hone your skills. Whether it is inspiration or creativity, it will definitely be of great help to your business operations.

　　For example, if you are doing a certain sport or gymnastics now, do you think doing this will lead to a weakening of another aspect of your ability? Actually, this is not the case. I think you need to watch more movies, read more books, go to museums, communicate more with your friends, tell them stories, and you can do different things to get inspiration. Of course there is the Internet, and when I woke up this morning I saw a very good news. Although the world has not changed, I am very happy that everyone is telling their life stories. I can actually get a lot of new inspiration from the Internet, listen to people tell their stories, and then get a lot of inspiration.

　　Dong Benhong: Yes, you must maintain your observation and enhance your imagination.

　　We just watched this video. Your work has also been influenced by anime and has also been affected by your latest works. So can you tell us what kind of anime has been influenced by your works and why it has been influenced by anime?

　　Luc Besson: I have made 17 movies, and 3 of them have been influenced by anime. You also know that journalists are good at taking things out of context, so I don’t know how this sentence comes from. Of course I like comics, but my life is not greatly affected by anime. My latest movie was an anime movie that was influential when I was 10 years old. When you were 10 years old, you looked at this kind of space travel, traveling in space, your 10-year-old child liked to see this thing very much, and then open the window and I saw the herd of cows, so my life was a very remote mountainous area, so I wanted to escape from the very boring life in the current real life. I escaped from reality through these animation works, which was my dream when I was a child.

　　When you are writing a story, you take a raw material, such as an anime novel, then you start with 1, not 0, and generally write a story from 0. So this is a gap between anime and you have no other reference. A movie is two hours, while a cartoon book is finished in 10 minutes. But because of the big foundation of this anime book, you skipped the first step, and the only difference is here.

　　Dong Benhong: There are many entrepreneurs here now who sell products. We have many successful cases, namely, making movies and buying peripheral products through the movie license. Because many movie fans like to buy peripheral products, we have many successful cases, such as the peripheral products of "Transformers 5", etc. For you, do you have anything to share with us about commercializing movies?

　　Luc Besson: This practice from the big screen to the real life. When everyone goes to the movie, we will want to bring some souvenirs home after watching the movie, because they see so many actions and such romantic things on the big screen. So I think I like the peripheral products very much. Because of this souvenir, it is an emotional connection. I made a long time ago a movie called "Blue Sea and Blue Sky", which talked about dolphins and nature. At that time, someone told me that I could make some peripheral products. After listening to it, I didn't like it very much. I made that movie for 5 years, and then told them that our peripheral products sold for garbage. I said no? Can you find other things? Can you please stop selling the products in the surrounding areas that are very bad? I think if you successfully create an emotion in the movie, then you sell the product based on this emotion. Everyone also likes this product, which is also beneficial to the company. For example, in one of my movies, there was a small animal. At that time, I ordered it to sell it to the surrounding area, so we just look at whether the small animal's products were selling well. But many children asked us if there are any other peripheral products, and we said that the peripheral products were not made. So this is a good example. If you have a very good character and do a good job in the surrounding area, you will naturally want to buy this surrounding product, so peripheral products are a good thing. And the longer you make this chain, the better, but it must be good.

　　Dong Benhong: We know that there are many, many hundreds of Alibaba suppliers and online merchants here. They can make good peripheral products for you, and they have the ability to make this product.

　　Luc Besson: I am also a consumer. If I see the surrounding products going further and further, the only thing he can continue to exist is to sell money, which is completely ineffective. At least in my hometown, at least in Europe, if that's the case, it's totally impossible. If I see that the surrounding products have very poor quality, or a very bad idea, I will reject such surrounding products. If the peripheral products are closely connected, it will be beneficial to the entire industry, because the peripheral products can exist in the market for a long time, and people will buy this product many years later. So when you make a choice, if your surroundings are well made, the quality is well made, and the design is well made, then your product can exist in the market for a relatively long time.

　　Dong Benhong: From my last question, we love your movies very much, especially the effects that are made by many high-tech assistance. Do you think that technology like VR can help film movies? What do you think is a good thing? Is it an enhanced movie viewing experience?

　　Luc Besson: I think VR is a good thing, but there is one thing, because it is a new technology, a new way of telling stories, a new way of expressing them. We must learn how to use VR to tell a story. You can't let a screenwriter who originally wrote a movie write a VR script, because someone came to me. Can you write a script in VR? But I said no, I must first understand VR. For example, if you write a story for a book, or write a lyrics for a song, or write a poem, there is a completely different way of telling stories. Because the carriers are different, your ability to write a script does not mean that you can write a lyric, and the other way, your ability to write a lyrics does not mean that you can write a script for a movie. So I think VR is a new form and new tool, and we must learn this tool. If you are just a few script writers in Hollywood and they make some adjustments to write scripts for VR, I don’t think it works. I think it’s good to find new ways to tell stories.

　　Dong Benhong: Thank you, you have made it very clear. Technology is a tool, not the ultimate goal. When we look at various possibilities in the future, we will look at various shopping experiences, VR shopping, etc. But ultimately, it is necessary to improve the shopping experience and the convenience of shopping, not just for technology.

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