THOMAS PODVIN’S FREELANCE WORK
Freelance writer - translator - Editor

Although a film about antelope poaching in Tibet may not be everyone's cup of yak tea, in his highly acclaimed Mountain Patrol (Kekexili), Xinjiang-born director Lu Chuan tells the valiant story of a group of Tibetans and their battle against such poachers. "To make a film requires a lot of courage," says Lu. Indeed it does. Tackling thorny social issues isn't easy in China and like the mountain patrol, Lu has sometimes had to sacrifice principle for commercial reality.
Lu's sacrifices have not always been restricted to the financial end of things. His first film, The Missing Gun, was a "nightmare" for the young Beijing Film Academy graduate. Two years later, he went back for more, shooting Mountain Patrol on the 5000-meter high Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Warmth and oxygen were luxuries; Lu became severely ill and one member of the production team fell victim to Tibet's notoriously risky roads.
For his hardship he was awarded the chance to represent China in the Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards in March 2006. But the world of film financing being what it is, his newfound fame did little to attract investors, and he had to abandon his plans for Nanking! Nanking! -- a film about the Nanjing Massacre. Yet Lu is not the type to surrender so easily. Like the yaks that graze the Tibetan plateau, he thrives in harsh environments.
His latest project, Border Area (Bian Jiang), is currently in production in the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region. The plot has broad appeal and casting Hong Kong singer/actor Leon Lai should help increase the film's earning potential, so hopes are high. Produced by Huayi Brothers & Taihe Films, Border Area is adapted from the Wang Gang novel "Yinggelishi" with a screenplay written by Lu's father, Lu Tianming. The film follows a Xinjiangnese student who tries to learn English for the love of his classmate; a decision that brings unexpected turns to his life. Something Lu himself should be familiar with.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
October 2005 issue

Wang Xiaoshuai, director of Beijing Bicycle, and more recently Shanghai Dreams, which brought home the Jury Prize at Cannes, met with us at Duolun Museum of Modern Art to discuss the trials and tribulations of filmmaking and deliver a lecture on his craft to an eager audience. The museum was a fitting backdrop for the lecture – as chief curator Gu Zhengqing sees it as “a site to rethink societal problems” a favorite topic for Wang’s company, Sixth-Generation films.

Wang’s lecture, Carving My Time — from The Days to Shanghai Dreams, explored the parallels between life and cinema, and between the lines, the reality of China’s current production methods and distribution.

While Wang Xiaoshuai might be considered successful – he has produced several well-respected works – realizing his dreams in the film industry has proved to be an arduous journey, along a road strewn with compromise.

Shanghai Dreams – the fruit of Wang’s real life experiences growing up in grizzly Guizhou – also serves as a metaphor for the current, rather desperate, situation of the Chinese film industry. As it turns out, the film was no dream to produce. Between having to beg film-star Wang Luodan to participate in the film, and scrounging for money to complete the project, Wang and co-producer Pi Li certainly had a rough go of it.

Their situation is typical of most non-commercial film producers who rely on private investors. With a single phone call, Wang might dial up RMB 500,000 or conversely, struggle for months to scrape together enough coin to cover the basics. Without box office revenues, enticing investors in China is reliably difficult. Most revenue comes from sponsorships – advertisements which air before the film starts. Sponsors therefore see the film as a mere pretext for audiences to watch their commercials. And even with sponsorship and decent box office revenues, many films end up in the red.

Shanghai Dreams came dangerously close. Riding a wave of euphoria following his victory at Cannes, Wang was encouraged by the film’s distribution company to release Shanghai Dreams two months ahead of schedule. Suddenly short of time, Wang cut a few deals and lost 50 per cent of the expected sponsorship revenue. He calculated the risk by banking on an early release and a higher box-office gross improving his chances of securing financing for his next film. The math is straightforward. Shanghai Dreams cost RMB 10 million, and the box-office brought in a “rather satisfying” RMB 3 million. This amount is shared between cinemas, distribution companies, PR agencies and film reproduction labs. International sales, which begin at around RMB 8 million (USD 1 million), 80 per cent of the initial investment – will help recoup costs. In China directors don’t make money with movies. Says Pi: “Our own profit will come from DVDs and CCTV – and it’s a very small profit.”

Despite their sobering financial circumstances, Pi and Wang are optimistic. Together they founded the “Debo” or “Huge Morals” production Company. Both men believe in the old Chinese saying: “With high morals you can solve any problem.” Wang and Pi realize how important it is to offer more opportunities to young filmmakers. “With Debo, we plan to do more commercial projects to support independent films,” explains Pi. A necessary evil perhaps, but one they hope will subsidize a broader array of local artistic films.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
Photo courtesy Hugo Hu www.huphoto.cdd.cn
October 2005 issue

In a real coup for Chinese cinema, Director Tsui Hark’s martial arts epic, Seven Swords, opened the Venice International Film Festival last month – the first time an Asian production has opened any Western film festival. It also closed with a Chinese film. What’s more, restored Chinese classics from the 1930s and 40s were shown alongside new Asian movies for the duration of the ten day extravaganza. Festival director Marco Muller, a fluent Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, directing the festival for a second year, said in an interview, “This reflects the importance of Asia and the variety of its cinema.” Tsui has been tirelessly devoted to the creative possibilities in Chinese culture, and that variety is there in large part thanks to his hard work, talent and dedication to Chinese cinematic culture in all its styles.

His most recent film, Seven Swords is born out of Wuxia tradition, “Wuxia literature is an art and culture of its own” says the Hong Kong-based Tsui. “These are imaginary stories developed from our everyday lives, expressing the spirit of justice, heroism and humanity.” Wuxia (Chinese chivalry) novels grew out of a deep cultural heritage; they are for the most part tales of Chinese knights in ancient China moving in a world of martial arts, or Jiang Hu. There is something particularly magical about Seven Swords (Qi Jian), and it’s not just the USD 7 million (RMB 56 million) it grossed in its first two weeks on Chinese screens – despite the foot-wrinkling typhoon which should have kept people at home watching reruns of The Wild Bunch.

Wuxia pian is the film genre derived from this magical literature (Kungfu movies fall into this category) and, in these action-packed stories, characters practise martial arts and possess all manner of magical skills – they fly through tree tops and perform acrobatics that would give Schwarzenegger or Stallone a slipped disc. Add to the mix a seemingly endless cast of characters and intricate, interconnected subplots and audiences end up with a spectacle that is the equal or better than anything produced in Hollywood. Indeed, Tsui is called “Hong-Kong’s Spielberg” (though he was born in Vietmam), and his latest production attempts to seduce Chinese audiences by conjuring the ultimate Wuxia spirit onto the silver screen.

In the trade for more than 25 years, Tsui has delivered some of the best Wuxia movies ever made in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. Trained in Hollywood filmmaking methods, he’s always on the lookout for new ideas and experimenting in order to explore and expose China’s cultural heritage to new generations of filmgoers.

Tsui began making 8mm-experimental films at age 13, but his career took off in the late 70s directing the acclaimed Wuxia TV-series The Golden Dagger Romance. In 1981, he was internationally acclaimed for the gravity-defying martial-art’s tale Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Despite being the first Hong Kong movie to integrate Hollywood special effect techniques (blue screen), it was a domestic flop.

Since then, with more than 60 movies produced and 40 directed, Tsui has tried to find the right balance between personal experimentation, ambition and commercial success with his own company, the Film Workshop. He co-founded the Film Workshop in 1984 with his wife Nansun Shi, one of Hong-Kong’s top producers. In this laboratory for cinematic experiments, the couple has been busy reviving all sorts of film genres. “We think that the Chinese heritage has a lot to offer,” says Nansun, “[although] we’re still trying to find the stories which would be successful in both domestic and international markets.”

Tsui has paid tribute to Chinese folklore and arts; not only revitalizing period dramas and Wuxia pian in the 80s and 90s, but also breaking new ground. The trilogies, A Chinese Ghost Story, Swordsman and The Lovers are among his most outstanding works. That said, as original, iconoclastic and experimental as the 55-year-old director may be, he has managed to produce a series of commercial successes.

It’s no overstatement to say that Tsui Hark almost single-handedly fueled the local film industry from 1986 to 1996 with new ideas, trends and filmic formulas. Pragmatic Hong Kong producers copied his stories and style at will, in effect establishing a new genre. It seemed good for everyone. Producers flooded the market with about 200 films a year and made big money. At the same time, this golden age of filmmaking allowed new filmmakers and actors. Still, the market was limited. Most of these movies were made for the Hong Kong market, with Taiwan Province and South Korea as junior financial territories. Those days are gone. Now it has become unrealistic for a big-budget film to recoup costs just from the Hong Kong market.

Tsui Hark learnt this fact of life the hard way. In the mid-nineties, the Asian film industry went downhill, because of the Asian financial crisis, the rise of piracy, Hollywood and Chinese mainland competition, and the exodus of film-talent to the West. Industry vitality declined for nearly a decade. Productivity at The Film-Workshop also dropped, with an average of only one movie a year since 1998, compared to five movies a year between 1986 and 1994.

After a brief period in the US around 1997 (where he found Hollywood-studio policies far too restrictive), and several attempts in Hong Kong with foreign investments, Tsui finally produced a couple of low-key -- and unsuccessful -- movies in the Chinese mainland. Perhaps they were an attempt to assess the local market and Chinese film-production methods, but the experience certainly paved the way for his next ambitious step. “You should not define yourself just in a certain place; it’d be good to go to different places to make movies,” said Tsui at a press conference in Shanghai in July. “It’s my dream to do so and as the majority of the audience is in the Chinese mainland I should do my best for them.”

And so he has. Seven Swords provided just the right opportunity for him to return to the spotlight and expand his fame (and craft) into the Chinese mainland market. With a simple plotline – seven warriors come together to protect a village from a diabolical General – but much attention drawn to characterization and production design, the movie, in a sense, made material Tsui’s ambition. Three teams, three action choreographers and three directors of photography shot 11 principal characters day and night, for three months, to complete the USD 18 million Chinese mainland/Hong-Kong/Korea/Singapore co-production.

An important Chinese TV-production company originally approached Tsui for creative inputs for a local TV series based on Liang Yu-Shen’s classic novel, Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian. With genuine knowledge of the source material and a deep understanding of the creative potential the story could offer, Tsui managed to stretch the project into a series of feature films and TV series, to be shot with Hong Kong crews and a Chinese mainland cast. Indeed, Tsui and his wife and partner, Nansun, believe bilateral cooperation is the best way to keep the Hong Kong cinema alive. A Seven Swords producer and industry maven for three decades, Nansun says: “We are the people who can make it up to the HongKong film industry. If we don’t try, who will?” Extremely motivated and excited by the project, Tsui dropped the production of Initial D, for which he had already started pre-production work in Japan. This film was eventually made by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, who, sad to say, delivered a flat vehicle for pop-idol Jay Chou.

Seven Swords is also Tsui’s attempt to reconcile Chinese audiences with the ‘pugilistic world or martial arts’. Since Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon hit global screens in 2000, numerous ‘high-aesthetic’ Wuxia pian have been made to capture the taste of global audiences. The somewhat more ‘understated’ tastes of the Chinese audience felt the true Wuxia spirit was compromised to please foreign market expectations. Says Tsui: “Nowadays Kungfu movies are becoming more and more abstract, so abstract that I felt it was time to take the genre back to the real thing.”

With Seven Swords, Tsui has found a license to experiment - and make money. Ironically, he’s doing it the Hollywood way, à la the Matrix trilogy with its movie-related products. Seven Swords will become a series of feature films, a TV series, video games and comic books. Can Seven Swords dolls be far behind? Although a multitude of characters and several subplots are common in Wuxia, the complexity of the story may have as much to do with the bank as the story. Which may explain why many critics and audience members came out of the film confused. Explains Tsui: “The clues left in this first movie are necessary and directly linked to the following stories.”

To clear up the confusion, Tsui wrote the “Seven Swords bible”, detailing the characters’ development and the world they inhabit. “Society is composed of many human beings, [and] so is Jiang Hu,” he says. “I just want to make Seven Swords close to real life and provide emotion.”

Seven Swords isn’t flawless; but it’s a success for its creator in the sense that he’s become more ‘bankable’. In the wake of that accomplishment, Tsui is piling up forthcoming projects, including a France-produced movie, The White Phoenix, and a kungfu/comedy starring Stephen Chow.

It seems likely Tsui Hark will carry on his role of cinematic ambassador of Chinese culture for many years to come. May the force be with him.

Special thanks to Film Workshop/Mandarin Films/Ms Nansun Shi/Mr. Gu Ming/www.hkcinemagic.com

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
October 2005 issue