Sci-fi romance
Li Bingbing stars in coproduction about prehistoric predator
It was a hot summer’s afternoon in Shanghai. After making my way across the city for an interview at an upmarket hotel about the upcoming sci-fi blockbuster The Meg, I was told my interview with Jason Statham and director Jon Turteltaub would be cut to just eight minutes.
“Give us more minutes, please,” abruptly appealed Statham, with a warm smile, despite the fact the two were due to catch a flight.
And without warning, Turteltaub quickly kicked off his shoes and socks and began to make himself comfortable on the chair opposite me, barefoot and all. “I hurt my foot,” he explained.
It was perhaps one of the more unusual starts to an interview, but it did show that the two stars were relaxed and ready for questions.
One of the summer’s most anticipated blockbusters, The Meg is due to hit Chinese theaters in 2D, 3D and IMAX formats, as well as the homegrown giant-screen DMAX on Aug 10.
Jointly produced by Chinese film company Gravity Pictures and Warner Bros, the Sino-US coproduction has been adapted from American author Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror.
Calling the book as “a beautiful and imaginative work,” Turteltaub says: “Novels are about thought and feelings. Movies are about images and action. My job is not to film the novel, but to make a great movie based on the novel.”
The movie is set at a science research station lying 300 kilometers off the coast of southern China, and the story revolves around the discovery a 75-foot-long megalodon, a prehistoric predator which is believed to have become extinct around 1.5 million years ago.
After the beast attacks a submersible and causes the vehicle and its crew to become trapped at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a deepsea diver — played by Statham — embarks on an extremely dangerous rescue mission.
Chinese A-lister Li Bingbing plays a scientist who has a romance with the diver, and the cast also includes Jessica McNamee, Rainn Wilson, Winston Chao and Cliff Curtis. Li, alongside Turteltaub and Statham, attended a promotional event in Shanghai on July 17.
Arguably one of the best-known Chinese actresses in the West, Li said she had to put in a lot of English practice to perform the dialogue fluently. She also revealed that she came close to drowning after staying underwater too long during the shooting of one complex scene.
The movie was filmed in Auckland, New Zealand and Sanya, in South China’s Hainan province.
The two trailers released for the domestic and international markets both feature the landmark Guanyin of Nanshan, a 108-meter statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin — the Buddhist goddess of mercy.
Beside the scenes involving the megalodon, the movie also features some rarely-seen oceanic animals such as a giant deep-sea squid and glowing jellyfish.
To prepare for the underwater sequences, Statham, a former athlete with the British national diving team, went to Fiji to swim with dozens of bull sharks, a species famous for their aggressive nature.
“I wanted to feel the fear and anxiety. I wanted to come face to face with these creatures. I just thought it was a necessary thing to do. We are doing a movie about the ocean, so let’s get into the ocean,” he says.
Being pushed by his staff to draw the interview to a close, Statham insisted on taking out his tablet and showing me a video of his daredevil swimming with the nearly 3-meterlong “killers.”
Wearing a diving suit and sporting an iron glove — just in case there was “an accident” — the 50-year-old action star took to the water without the protection of a cage.
“It was a phenomenal thing to do. The diving instructors hand-feed them,” Statham says, pointing to a container filled with tuna-fish heads.
But even with its visual feast of underwater stunts, The Meg will still be up against some fierce competition in the world’s second-largest movie market this summer.
In recent months, Chinese audiences have been fed a diet of special effects-fueled monster movies, such as Dwayne Johnson’s Rampage, which features a giant gorilla and other gigantic beasts, and Universal Pictures’s Jurassic World 2.
Classifying these movies more as fantasy stories, Statham believes
The Meg is a different proposition altogether, as it will spark audiences to think about the future of our oceans, which cover two-thirds of the planet.
“The megalodon is a real creature that once existed. Oceans are still the most uncharted areas of the planet. You cannot tell what is down there. We have seen their fossils and teeth, but we don’t know if they are still there,” says the actor, who is well-known in China for his roles in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Turteltaub echoes his views. “No one knows what lies beneath the oceans. As humans, we feel the need to explore them.”
“What fascinated me was not that the characters in the movie are seeing a prehistoric creature for the first time, it’s that this poor prehistoric creature is seeing them. It doesn’t know who we are and what human beings are,” adds Turteltaub, whose previous directing credits include Cool Runnings and the National Treasure series.
The movie also aims to raise public awareness of environmental issues and re-examine the relationship between nature and humankind.
“It’s somewhat of a sad subject that we are destroying the planet. Two-thirds of the animals in the world’s jungles have disappeared during the last 50 years. I think people don’t respect nature,” Turteltaub says.