Last weekend, our friend John Jisen Ho attended the Film and Culture Panel at Columbia University. Below is the dispatch John sent to us:
“I think the lecture on the future of Chinese movie industry was interesting, especially given the international attention it got recently with Hollywood stars traveling to China to promote Chinese Hollywood. The speakers definitely look at it from a business/production perspective and are interested in getting an answer for the question: how do we establish a Chinese National and International Market?
All the panelists felt that China movie industry still has to grow and mature. As one panelist mentioned, only a handful of Chinese movie stars can even speak English, so if they want to break into the International Market, they need to train the talent first. The panelists also talked about the need to understand and analyze the social media and social market place to see what is hot and what an average Chinese movie goer would watch.
As a foreigner to China, I chuckled a bit at China’s attempts to make a ‘Chinese version of X-Men’ based on Terracota warriors because it fits the stereotype of Hong Kong movie industry blatantly copying Hollywood movies for their own market. On the other hand, I was quite impressed with recent Sinified versions of Western Films, such as ‘Detective Dee’ a Chinese version of Sherlock Holmes.
The producers were looking for both filmmakers and writers who could produce China culture specific content and international content. One example project was taking Western TV series based on rich royal families and developing it for the Chinese market into a project on the royal family in the Forbidden City. “Western audiences want to know about the lives of their rich, famous and elite,” one producer said, “Us Chinese probably want the same.”
Overall, all producers are business men who analyze the market place for the next big hit, be they American or Chinese. As one producer told me: “My company won’t be as focused on the International Market yet until we have a good grasp of our own market, our next focus is on creating myth and fantasy based movies because China is over-saturrated with martial arts pictures and historical epics, myth and fantasy pictures are fresh and new.”
John (Jisen) Ho has written four feature length movie scripts in English, one was placed honorable mention at the Gotham Screenwriting Contest and another was selected for a stage reading by the Yangtze Theatre of New York. John graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and work as an IT Manager. A fun fact about him is that he appeared on the Chinese TV Show ‘If You Are the One’.