Salon focuses on the importance of a good story in Chinese film

On Thursday, a salon dedicated to discussing the importance of good stories and scripts in film was held at the Beijing Intentional Film Festival’s Film Market event.

“Not too long ago, I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which says the biggest difference between humans and animals is that humans can tell stories. Over the past 12 years, I have been continuously doing one thing – searching for good stories,” said Wu You, founder and CEO of media company Beijing Cloudwood Co, Ltd, the salon’s organizer.

Wu noted that over the past several years, China has been lacking good stories in film.

Taking science fiction as an example, Wu said that during the genre’s height there were a number of writers in the US such as Mary Higgins Clark and Isaac Asimov.

“But in China, the only book we talk about over and over again is Liu Cixin’s Three- Body Problem.”

Talking about sci- fi romance story at the salon, Zhou Yiyu, a free- lancer scriptwriter, said that since Chinese sci- fi films are not able to compete with Hollywood’s superhero blockbusters, the best path in film is to “focus on romance and humanity, and discuss the problems [ Chinese] face today.”

Audiences in their 20s have been gaining ground in China in recent years. As such, how to write good stories targeting younger audiences in China was also a key point of discussion at the salon.

“We have run into a lot of companies which ask for post- 1980 generation scriptwriters or post- 1990 writers... To be honest, we have worked with numerous scriptwriters and have found that age doesn’t really influence what they are capable of writing,” Ying Luojia, a producer and scriptwriter agent, said.