China effect won’t be big, director says
BEIJING — Although Hollywood may be benefiting by adding Chinese elements to its films, it won’t be making wholesale changes to the way it tells stories on the screen just to cater to China’s massive audience, a director said Wednesday.
“There will be co-operations, there will be all kinds of stuff, but will it affect the movie so much? I don’t think so, because China doesn’t also want to only see movies about China, they want to see movies about other things in the world,” said Roland Emmerich, who was in China to promote his action film White House Down.
Hollywood has set its sights on the nation of 1.3 billion, which is now the world’s second-biggest movie market. But foreign films are limited in the Chinese market and must pass censors, who reject movies in part or whole if they show China in a bad light or are too sexually explicit.
Earlier this year, some Chinese moviegoers were left confused because of awkward cuts to the James Bond feature Skyfall that included unflattering references to the sex trade in the Chinese territory of Macau. Then Cloud Atlas was shown in Chinese cinemas minus 38 minutes that included gay and straight love scenes.
China is even getting Hollywood studios to sanction alternative versions of films specially tailored for Chinese audiences, such as Iron Man 3. The Chinese version features Chinese heartthrob Fan Bingbing — absent from the version shown abroad — and lengthy clips of Chinese scenery.
“The China element is sometimes important, but it has to make sense for the story, you cannot kind of just prop a Chinese element in and think, ‘Oh, this movie will work great in China’ — you have to still come up with a story that makes sense,” Emmerich said.
The German director’s disaster film 2012 was a hit in China with a plot that was gold for patriotic Chinese audiences: As the Earth’s core overheats, world leaders build an ark in the mountains of central China to house people and animals that can repopulate the planet.
Scenes feature a U.S. military officer saying that only the Chinese could build an ark of such a scale so quickly. It was seen in China as a refreshing change for audiences after decades of unflattering portrayals of the communist nation in Hollywood movies.
China has become the second-biggest movie market behind the U.S. The government allows in only 34 foreign films per year.