Movie Metropolis opens with a splash
Inside a soundstage in western Qingdao, Shandong province, actors from the action-thriller The
Teacher are performing a series of chase-and-combat sequences for a group of onlookers.
Transfixed by the performance, the audience members, mainly a mix of movie-industry insiders and reporters, give the actors a round of applause after the scenes.
The demonstration was part of a string of events held on April 28 to celebrate the opening of the Qingdao Movie Metropolis, said to be the largest film-studio complex in the world.
As China’s answer to Hollywood, the new film centre, backed by investment from the conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, is a 50 billion yuan (534 billion rupees) project that has taken more than four and a half years to build.
Spanning 410 acres, the sprawling complex will include 52 state-of-the-art studios, with 30 completed in the first phase and 10 more now being built for the second phase.
In addition to the studios the complex is home to a film-set street lined with European and Shanghaistyle architecture, a shopping mall with a theme park, several luxury hotels, a yacht club, a hospital and an international school. It also includes a 30-theatre, 5,000-seat multiplex cinema, the largest in China.
Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda, said the massive film complex marks a milestone for the industrialisation of Chinese cinema and will help to promote Chinese films in foreign countries.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Mr Wang said the facility will firmly place Qingdao on the international cinematic circuit and turn the eastern coastal city into a global movie centre.
Qingdao, with a long history connected to cinema — the first documentary shot in China was made there in 1898 and China’s first movie with sound, Sing-song
Girl Red Peony, was made there in 1931 — was named by UNESCO as a “city of film” in November, the first of its kind in China.
The fantasy epic The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon, and sci-fi film
Pacific Rim: Uprising, headlined by John Boyega, used the Qingdao studios to shoot some specialeffects sequences.
For the US director Jeremy Weiss the convenience and diversity of the film sets at the Qingdao facility were the major inspiration for The
Teacher, a 20-minute short film about a German assassin’s hunt for a Chinese teacher.
The movie, featuring exotic scenes set in a German prison and a traditional Japanese hall, was shot in one of the Wanda soundstages in six days.
“We find it interesting that we can just as easily shoot a movie in Qingdao as we do elsewhere around the world,” Weiss said.
And the fact that the locations are just a few minutes’ walk from each other saves the crew a lot of time, he said.
Jia Hao, a veteran director specialising in water sequences, thinks the state-of-the-art tanks at the Qingdao facility will help stars feel safer and more comfortable in water.
The filmmaker behind the water scenes of Painted Skin: The
Resurrection and Wolf Warrior 2 recently shot an underwater scene in one of the two huge tanks in the studios.
One is an indoor tank with the temperature maintained about 32 C. The other, with a storage capacity of up to 13,100 cubic yards, has tracks to allow heavy cameras to operate underwater and a dedicated room for directors to guide the action at the bottom of the tank.
“There used only to be a few tanks in China, and they were mostly unheated,” Jia said. “Stars were reluctant to stay in the water for a long time. The Wanda tanks have raised the bar for filming water sequences.”
Operators from Wanda estimate that more than 500 film and television companies in China will move into the complex over the next three years and will shoot or produce about 100 movies and television series every year.