The ascent of Chan
Producer-director Peter Ho-sun Chan tells Liz Shackleton how the growth of China is transforming the film-making landscape
market demand. Peter Ho-sun Chan is one of those rare fi lm-makers who can shift gears to respond to the latest crisis or opportunity, while keeping his story- telling and artistic values intact. He is also one of Hong Kong’s most
I
international film-makers. Born in Bangkok and raised in Hong Kong, Chan studied at UCLA before heading back to Asia to work with John Woo. After directing several hit dramas in Hong Kong in the 1990s, including award-winning romance Comrades, Almost A Love Story, he directed The Love Letter in the US for DreamWorks in 1998. Moving back to Asia and noticing the
decline of Hong Kong movies at the end of the 1990s, Chan launched Applause Pictures and kick-started the pan-Asian co-production movement, with hits such as Three and The Eye series, which brought together talent from all over the region. When the China market began to blossom in 2005, he headed north and made a string of Hong Kong-China co-productions, which have grossed a combined $126.6m (RMB800m) in China alone. These include films he directed — such as The Warlords and last year’s Cannes Midnight title Wu Xia — and others, such as Teddy Chen’s Body- guards And Assassins, that he produced. After making The Warlords, Chan
briefly partnered with Bona Film Group, but is now going it alone under the We Pictures banner. We is currently producing Andrew Lau’s The Guillotines, which Chan describes as “a fun, young movie that will change the perception of period films
n Asia’s constantly evolving economic climate, it pays for a fi lm-maker to be able to react quickly to changes in
‘With the kind of population we have in China, I believe we can only make bigger and
better movies’ Peter Ho-sun Chan
Peter Ho-sun Chan
in China”. More recently, Chan teamed with Edko Films, Huayi Brothers and PCCW on the Now Popcorn Movie Channel, which launched on IPTV plat- form Now TV on March 15. As this year’s Filmmaker In Focus at
the Hong Kong International Film Fes- tival (HKIFF), Chan is being celebrated with a series of publications, exhibi- tions, seminars and the screening of 12 of his fi lms.
Q You’ve recently been focusing on big-budget films aimed at mainland audiences. How important is the inter- national market for these movies now that the China market is so big? Over the past decade, the international market has been a sort of back-up or insurance policy at a time when the Chinese market wasn’t completely mature for recoupment of a big- budget film. But the trend has changed. The audience in China is beginning to look for things other than blockbusters, and the international market has shrunk to an unrecog- nisable size. So because the foreign market has
Bodyguards And Assassins ■ 8 Screen International March 2012
shrunk and the local has been increas- ing at an incredible pace, to be blunt, the foreign market accounts for less than 10%-15% of our budget recoup- ment. If I can cut 10%-15% in my
budget, then I don’t have to worry about the foreign market. This is the reality today, though it changes all the time. In the last decade, the economics of Chi- nese-language films have changed about three times.
Q What impact do you think the wid- ening of China’s import quotas will have on Chinese fi lm-making? I remember in Taiwan in the 1990s [when quotas were loosened], the mar- ket share of Hong Kong movies went from 40%-50% to around 1% almost overnight. I don’t think anything as drastic as that would ever happen in China, not only because of state control, but because of the taste of the Chinese audience. When you look at what’s mak- ing money in China, only a few excep- tional titles like Transformers and Kung Fu Panda are as big as we think. So we’ll just have to fi nd ways to deal
with it and it should encourage us to make better movies. One of the old lines I kept using when doing the pan-Asian thing is the population concept — basi- cally if you have a large enough popula- tion with enough buying power, you inevitably create the best product — and that’s how Hollywood came to dominate the world. With the kind of population we have in China, I believe we can only make bigger and better movies. Give us
www.screendaily.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28