Netflix’s Marco Polo targets global audience
$90M series may take company into the realm of ‘prestige’ TV
This week, Netflix unspools its most expensive and expansive production to date. Made at a reported cost of $90 million, the 10-episode, Weinstein company co-produced epic Marco Polo sets the video streaming company’s sights squarely on the big game of prestige television (that would be of the Game of Thrones variety) and, perhaps more importantly, on the international market — which goes a long way to explain why it is both marvellous and, more often than not, marvellously frustrating.
In viewing the first four episodes, it’s not hard to see where the money went. Marco Polo, which in its initial season sets up the relationship between the Venetian merchant (newbie Lorenzo Richelmy) and Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong), avoids the obvious CGI flourishes in favour of hundreds of actual humans, meticulously choreographed scenes and exotic filming locales including Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia — think History’s Vikings but with much more nudity, impressive cinematography and minor political interplay. And it portrays the glory and gory nature of 13th century China with deft homages to Chopsocky cinema, all blind Kung Fu masters and stilted dialogue.
Suffice to Marco Polo plays fast and loose with history which, depending on your interest in Eastern politics and kick-ass fighting scenes, is either intriguing or confusing.
According to co-executive producer Patrick Macmanus, the series’ historical fiction is a direct hat-tip to the real Polo’s own deathbed admission: “I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.”
“It hung above the writer’s room door,” Macmanus recalled during an interview in Toronto. “We were told to use the historical references in The Travels of Marco Polo as our sign posts, but all of the in-between — the relationships, the romances, the espionage — that’s all stuff that we shaded in, which was so freeing.”
Sitting next to Macmanus, Vancouver-based actress Olivia Cheng, who plays concubine Mei Lin, admitted that when she first heard of the show she had obvious reservations about its appropriation of Eastern culture, but those worries were put to rest when she met series creator John Fusco.
“Since he was 12 years old, John has had an utter fascination with the East,” Macmanus explained. “He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge that I would challenge most people of the East to challenge.”
“I learned things about my culture and history from John (Fusco).” OLIVIA CHENG
“I learned things about my culture and history from John,” Cheng said. “As started to read more in to the historical references and learned about what (the writers) were pulling from, and the respect, reverence and care that was really put into it ... I think even if naysayers want to criticize, I was there, I know these people, I know what their intentions were and I stand behind it.”
Cheng cited Marco Polo’s portrayal of courtesans as political operators rather than simple pleasure givers.
“It’s a piece of history that’s not well understood in contemporary times,” she said. “Concubines had the power to shape political decisions because they literally could bend the ear of the men who could execute certain choices, so it was an interesting dichotomy because they were both reviled and revered. It ... could be a fall from grace or a rise in society.
“The most successful women were kind of like the rock stars of their time. My character is the Rihanna of China 800 years ago and the fact this women really existed is even cooler for me.”
Macmanus recalled predicting that a scene in which a nude Cheng takes on three soldiers sent by her brother to rape her would be the show’s first real talking point.
“I said to you in Malaysia that once people see that scene they’ll be hooked,” he recalled, turning toward Cheng.
“It was a lot of fun to shoot,” she responded. “I felt a responsibility for that scene to be able to convince audiences that I’m this Kung Fu master that really could kill three men ... naked. It shows you what an incredibly vulnerable position she’s constantly in as a woman in a very Machiavellian man’s world. And yet you see her resourcefulness ... her strength on every level.”