The film production of Betta Fish

As a companion piece of The Outsider, Betta maintains the cast of The Outsider and was filmed in the same city, but the overall style is bleak. Except that the fighting fish in the goldfish bowl is red and blue, the whole film is black and white, and there is no wild and unrestrained romanticism like The Outsider. The title of the film is a metaphor for the hero in the film, the "motorcyclist" and his younger brother, wandering and running around in futuristic cities and dying all the way. This film is unforgettable with its wild passion like opera, the sharp contrast of German expressionism, the pain of existentialism and the symbol of Dadaism. Betta is adapted from the novel of the same name by S·E· Hinton. Francis ford coppola was deeply attracted by the strong resonance caused by the theme of the novel. The hero's admiration for his brother is exactly the same as Coppola's love for his brother Auguste. After filming The Outsider, Coppola secretly vowed to start filming the film at once. As early as during the filming of The Outsider, he teamed up with Hinton to adapt the script, and decided to use the original crew and still shoot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Warner Bros. decided not to release The Outsider because of its dissatisfaction with the original edited version. Despite the shortage of shooting funds, Coppola managed to complete the demonstration of the film with a video recorder during the rehearsal, thus showing the actors the general outline of the film. In order to help Philip Locke get into the role, Coppola recommended albert camus's novels and Napoleon's biography to him, and the shape of "motorcyclist" was really designed according to the symbolic action of Camus lighting a cigarette. Locke said: "I am like an actor who can no longer find interest in work." With a soft spot for violent dancing, Coppola asked MicaelSmuin, the choreographer and deputy director of the San Francisco Ballet, to design the fighting scene between Rasty James and Biff willcocks. He asked that some special visual elements must be included, such as motorcycles, broken glass, flying knives, splashing water and blood. Smon not only spent a week completing this scene, but also designed the street dance of Locke and Diana Scaved with reference to Picnic 1955. Coppola had organized the crew to watch some old films before the film started, among which 195 1 A bloody battle on the Rhine was the inspiration for the smoke film, 1920' s Dr. Carrigari's Cabin provided the style prototype for the film, and 1924' s The meanest man. Coppola widely used shadows, oblique angles, exaggerated composition and a lot of smoke in German expressionist films. Under the influence of Godfrey Reggio's unbalanced life, Coppola decided to use time-lapse photography to vividly express the sky in the film.