BOX OFFICE专栏BOX OFFICE UPDATE
Hidden Figures director Ted Melfi tackles the little-known story of the African American women who helped NASA win the Space Race《隐藏人物》导演泰德·梅尔菲述说帮助NASA赢得太空竞赛的非洲裔美国女性鲜为人知的故事
太空探险背后的数学
Hidden Figures tells the real-life stories of three African American women —Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—nasa employees who were directly caught up in America's Space Race with the Soviets, the civil rights movement at home, and the changing role of women in the workforce. Boxoffice spoke with Ted Melfi (left), who directed and shares a screenwriting credit on the film, about how this remarkable story finally made it to the big screen.影片《隐藏人物》（Hidden Figures）由泰德·梅尔菲（《圣人文森特》）执导，故事以冷战时期美苏的太空竞赛为背景，根据三名非洲裔美国女性数学家成功帮助一名宇航员脱险的真实事件改编。Boxoffiice杂志就此不同寻常的故事如何最终搬上大银幕，采访了导演兼编剧之一泰德·梅尔菲（右图）。
How did you first encounter this project?你是怎样结缘该项目的？
I first heard about it from producer Donna Gigliotti. She has a great nose for finding material and she found this book by Margot Lee Shetterly that was shockingly unheard of. She gave me a copy of the book, I read it on a Friday, and by Monday I said, “I've got to be involved with this no matter what.”it is just one of those remarkable stories. The fact that you've never heard of the story before, that there were women behind the math and the science for the Mercury space missions, it is just staggering in and of itself—but then to find out that they were a team of African American women is even more staggering, coupled with the fact that they were going through segregation at the time. These women had to work in separate facilities and use separate bathrooms, separate cafeterias, separate everything. It so touched me and inspired me, especially because I have two daughters and I really felt obligated to deal with the sexism and racism cinematically.
我最初是从制片人堂娜·吉廖蒂那里听说它的。她对新素材的嗅觉总是那样灵敏，觉得玛戈特·李·谢特利写的这本书非比寻常。她给了我这本书，我在一个星期五看完了它，到了下周一，我说：“无论如何我都必须参与。”它确实是一个不同寻常的故事。事实上你以前从未听说过有女性做探索水星太空任务的数学和科学后盾，就其本身而言它就
令人震惊，而紧接着发现她们是三位非洲裔美国女性科学家再加上那时候她们正经受种族隔离更令人惊愕。这些女性必须在隔离设施内工作，使用单独的卫生间、单独的自助餐厅、单独的一切东西。它深深触动我和激发我，特别是我自己就有两个女儿，我真真实实感到用电影方式与性别歧视和种族歧视作斗争责无旁贷。
You co-wrote the screenplay with Allison Schroeder; did structuring the script present any challenges? It's not very easy to balance three central characters with different story lines who don't share too many scenes.你和艾莉森·施罗德共同编剧，剧本组织方面有何挑战？三位主角有不同的故事线索，而且难得同镜出场，在她们之中取得平衡非常不容易。
Writing is my first love and I've been writing for, I don't know, 30 years? Since I was a kid. I'm just really driven by story, structure, and how to weave things together. I took the three female story lines and I wrote them out on index cards and wove them together along the way. I had a lot of help from a lot of smart people. My wife, Kimberly Quinn, is a great writer and was instrumental in helping craft the material. Everyone else over at Fox was very helpful as well, people like Jenno Topping and Donna Gigliotti— lots of female voices throughout the process. They provided a series of checks and balances along the way.
写作是我的第一嗜好，我就一直笔耕不缀，可能有30年了吧。从孩提时代起，我就着迷于故事、结构、情节组织。我取得三位女性的故事情节，把它们记在索引卡上。同时把它们编织在一起。很多能人智者给予我大量帮助。我妻子金柏莉·奎恩是一位出色的作家，在帮助精心制作材料方面起了很大作用。福克斯的所有其他同仁也非常乐于助人，如千诺·托平和堂娜·吉廖蒂等等，整个过程中大量女行话语来自她们。一路走来她们提供了很好的制衡。
Unfortunately, there continues to be a dearth of roles for minority actors in studio productions. Hidden Figures stands out by not only having three great roles for African American women but also a number of intriguing supporting roles as well. What was the casting process like for the film?很遗憾，在制片厂拍摄中少数族裔演员的角色依然凤毛麟角。《隐藏人物》脱颖而出，不仅因为有三个非洲裔美国女性的主角，而且还有大量迷人配角。此影片怎样为角色选派演员？
I think we all know this; it’s nothing new: women are underserved in general in the entertainment business, especially in regard to the size and quality of their roles. Women for the longest time were limited to playing the girlfriend, secretary, or wife in the movies.
Thank God that’s changing, but it’s particularly hard to see that change with African American roles. Dr. Stacy Smith, a faculty members at the Annenberg School of Media and Communications at USC, she researches this. She studied 290 of the highest-grossing films that had come out over the last couple of years. Of those 290 films, there was not one, not one African American female in any role that had something to do with stature or intellect. Not one. It’s shocking to think about. Casting-wise, what you find is the opposite: there are so many actors that want to play the roles and would be great at it, so you have to be really selective. I had been wanting to work with Taraji P. Henson since I saw her in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I fell in love with her during Benjamin Button, and then to see her in Empire, you go, “How can that possibly be the same person!” She can do anything. When I told her about the script—i didn’t even give her a script, I didn’t have a script yet—i told her about the project on the phone and she just said, “I’m in.” The same thing happened with Octavia Spencer, who I’d been wanting to work with for years as well. Janelle Monáe was the only actress of the three principals that we auditioned—we wanted to find a fresh idea for Mary because she was such a firecracker. She came in and read for us and just blew us away. The three of them came together relatively quickly; the rest of the cast took a lot more time.
我相信大家都知道这种情况；这并不新鲜：在娱乐业通常缺少女性，尤其是就角色规模和质量而言。大多数时间女性只限于在影片中扮演女朋友、女秘书或妻子。幸亏这种情况正在改变，但还是很难看到非洲裔美国人角色的变化。南加州大学安能伯格传媒学院的史黛西·史密斯博士对此进行了研究。她详细地调研了过去几年出现的290部最卖座电影。在这290部影片中，没有哪部影片有哪个角色的非洲裔美国女性跟德高望重或聪明才智挂上钩，一个角色都没有。想起来就令人震惊。角色选派方面，你会发现恰恰相反：有如此之多的想扮演角色的演员而且都演技不俗，因此你不得不精挑细选。自从我在影片《返老还童》中看到塔拉吉·P·汉森的表演以后，我就一直期待与她合作。在《返老还童》中，我对她一见钟情，接着又在《帝国》中目睹她，还有很多，“这怎么可能是同一个人！”她可以扮演任何角色。当我给她讲剧本时，我甚至没有给她剧本，我还没有剧本，我在电话中给她讲此项目，她只是说：“这个角色我势在必得。”同样的事发生在奥克塔维亚·斯宾瑟身上，多年来我也一直渴望与她合作。杰奈尔·莫娜是我们三个主角中唯一进行面试的女演员——我们希望为火爆的玛丽另辟蹊径。她立竿见影，翩翩而来，试读台词，便彻底征服了我们。他们三人几乎是一拍即合，其余演员则花了较长时间。
The film is anchored by those three performances.
Would you say you're an actor's director, or do you pull a Hitchcock, step behind the camera, and let them work on their own?这部影片是被这三位女主角的表演所定格。你会说你是演员的导演，或者你还是模仿希区柯克，退居摄影机后，让她们独立工作？
I spent many years in acting classes before I became a director. That's actually where I met my wife, in acting class, but I was studying actors to learn how to talk to them and learn the process and understand what they went through. I wanted to understand what it takes to build a role and build a character, so I would consider myself an actor's director because I only care about the acting. I think the visual always has to be secondary to the acting. If you put great actors with a great script in a white room, it will be compelling. People will watch it. What they won't watch is bad acting in the most amazing setting—that's not compelling. That's why I lean into the acting more than anything, and that's where I'm going to stay for the rest of my life, because that's really all that matters.
在我成为导演前，在表演课程上我花了多年时间。实际上我就是在表演课期间遇到我的妻子，但我当时在研究演员，了解如何与他们交谈，了解流程和了解他们经历什么。我想了解如何才能成功营造一个角色，打造一个主角，因此我会定位我自己是一个演员的导演，因为我只关心表演。我觉得视觉始终从属于表演。如果你将伟大的演员及很棒的剧本置于一间白色房间，将非常引人注目。人们将注视它。
他们不想看到的是令人叹服的环境内差劲的表演——这没有吸引力。这就是我把表演放在第一位的原因，也是我一生追求的目标，因为这是真正最重要的。
Not to take anything away from the visual elements of the film, specifically the production design, which was really able to capture the era.不对该影片视觉元素做任何删减，具体地说制作设计，它的的确确抓住了那个时代的精髓。
We decided to work with Mandy Walker, who is brilliant and has a wonderful eye, as our director of photography, alongside Wynn Thomas, a star of the industry, as our production designer, and Renee Kalfus as our wardrobe stylist. We brainstormed for a long time on what the film would look like, and we decided that the film would have two distinct looks. The look of NASA would be clean, bright, and white—sterile, not warm. It would be a place that looked very modern for its time. The home lodge of the women would be the exact opposite, showing the tremendous warmth, love, and support of their home and church life. Their car became their sanctuary where they could talk and say anything they wanted to. Back in those days, from research and interviewing Katherine Johnson, these women went three places: they went to work, they went home, and they went to church. That was the life of an African American woman in 1960s segregated America. We really wanted to capture those ideas: the warmth and care of the home and the coldness of the work environment. That started to build the film's visual vocabulary. Then we did hectic research through sources like Gordon Parks photographs, NASA'S brilliant documentary When We Left Earth, NASA, and the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. All these things added to the visual vocabulary of the film. Katherine Johnson (above and played by Taraji P. Henson) worked for NASA for decades. In addition to her responsibilities on the Mercury missions as shown in the film, Johnson also played a role on the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. Dorothy Vaughan (above left, and played by Octavia Spencer) was an early pioneer in electronic computing. Mary Jackson (played by Janelle Monáe) was an aerospace engineer who worked at NASA for 34 years.
我们决定与曼蒂·沃克合作，由他作为摄影指导，他极有才气并且有一双令人惊叹的眼睛。业界明星韦恩·托马斯出任美术指导，蕾妮·卡尔佛斯出任我们的服装师。我们对该影片的视觉形象集思广益讨论了很长时间，确定该片子要有两个不同的色调。NASA形象要洁净、明亮和白色——中性，而非暖色。这将是一个在其时代看上去非常现代的所在。女性的住所则恰恰相反，非常温馨、充满爱意，以及对她们的家庭和教会生活的支持。她们的汽车成为她们的庇护所，她们可随意说她们想说的任何话语。在那些时候，从研究和采访凯瑟琳·约翰逊，这些女性去三个地方：她们去上班、她们回家和她们去教堂。这是1960年代种族隔离美国非洲裔美国女性的生活。我们就是想拍摄这些色调：家庭的温馨和关怀以及工作环境的冷漠。这从建立该影片的视觉词汇开始。然后我们通过如戈登·帕克斯照片、NASA精彩的纪录片“当我们离开地球”和民权纪录片“美国民权之路”等原始资料进行了繁忙的研究。所有这些东西都加入该影片的视觉词汇表。
This film is going to be coming out during what feels like a very divisive time here in the United States, with a new administration entering the White House days after the film's wide release. It's hard to deny that there exists a general concern about the future of civil rights and civil liberties in this country. Do you think this film can be an inspiration to audiences entering the theater with those anxieties?该影片将在美国一个非常分裂的时间发行，在它大规模上映若干天后新政府将入主白宫。很难否认美国存在对公民权利和公民自由的未来的担忧。你认为这部影片可以为带着这些担心进入影院的观众带来鼓舞吗？
What I would say is, paraphrasing something Octavia Spencer said in London a couple of days ago: “In 1961, these women, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, didn't even have the right to vote.”they could not even vote but they still put their heads down, did the work, and achieved great success in helping America achieve its greatest mission at the time: getting a man into space. This country has been through a lot but it knows how to succeed, how to be resilient. I hope that the movie inspires people to put their heads down and do the work as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson did. They did the work, achieved something great, and now we're honoring them. There was a time in this country when black and white, male and female came together and achieved NASA'S greatest mission. That's what I hope people get out of it, and I hope it helps with the anxiety of the times.
我想借用奥克塔维亚·斯宾瑟几天前在伦敦说的一席话：“1961年，这些女人，凯瑟琳·约翰逊、桃乐茜·沃恩和玛丽·杰克逊甚至没有选举权。”即使她们不能投票，但她们依然低头工作，并且帮助美国完成其当时最伟大的任务——载人进入太空方面取得了巨大成功。这个国家历经沧桑，但它知道如何获得成功，如何坚韧乐观去面对。我希望这部影片激励人们像凯瑟琳·约翰逊、桃乐茜·沃恩和玛丽·杰克逊一样去面对去工作。她们工作，做了一些伟大的事情，现在我们尊敬她们。在美国历史上曾经有一个时期，黑人和白人、男人和女人齐心协力实现了NASA伟大的使命。这就是我希望人们从它得到的东西而且我希望它对缓解现时的忧虑有所帮助。