MCLC: James Cameron on Chinese film

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: James Cameron on Chinese film
*******************************************

Source: NYT (5/5/10):
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/james-cameron-on-chinese-f
ilmmakers-censorship-and-potential-co-productions/

James Cameron on Chinese Filmmakers, Censorship and Potential
Co-Productions
By EDWARD WONG 

BEIJING ­ James Cameron, director of "Titanic" and "Avatar," among other
well-known movies, visited Beijing in mid-April for the Beijing
International Film Festival. The festival was screening the 3-D version of
"Titanic," which had recently opened in theaters here. More important, Mr.
Cameron was here to meet with people in the Chinese film industry to talk
about doing joint productions and getting greater distribution for his 3-D
films, which use technology developed by Cameron Pace Group, or C.P.G.

China has a strict limit on the number of foreign films allowed to be
shown in theaters here, although that number was raised in February when
Chinese officials announced an agreement with Hollywood studio executives
during a trip to the United States by Xi Jinping, the vice president and
presumed next leader of China (and reportedly a fan of Hollywood World War
II films).

On April 22, the day after his arrival in Beijing, Mr. Cameron talked
about his projects and the Chinese film industry in an interview with The
New York Times and The Economist. (The interview took place before it was
reported 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/business/global/sec-asks-if-hollywood-pa
id-bribes-in-china.html?pagewanted=all>that regulators in the United
States were looking into whether American studios might have made improper
payments to Chinese officials, so that was not a topic of discussion).
Edited and condensed excerpts from the interview follow.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your interactions with the Chinese
film industry? I know you're here partly to promote the technology and to
see where the Chinese filmmaking landscape is in terms of using this
technology.

A. Not just filmmaking but broadcast. Everybody just assumes, probably most
people know me internationally as a filmmaker, but domestically in the
U.S. as co-chairman of C.P.G., most of our business is broadcast. And
China has potentially this enormous 3-D broadcast market < unexplored as
of right now, to my knowledge, and I just need to know more. I need to
know more about it and find out if there are people here who believe as I
do that this is where broadcast can and should be going.

Q. Xi Jinping is a movie buff. He¹s talked about American war movies. So
are you meeting with him?

A. I¹m not saying anything about who I¹m meeting with, but I am in
meetings and explorations on a couple of subjects. One is 3-D, both for
the filmmaking community and for the broadcast community. And these are
very, very preliminary, from my perspective anyway. And the other one is a
possibility of co-production here, possibly even to the extent of some
kind of technology exchange < bringing over our 3-D technology and things
like that.There are a lot of things I want to look at as possibilities.
Because it's such an exciting market that¹s growing so rapidly. There¹s a
lot that I also have to know about ­ government restrictions and so on.
That would apply to the co-production issues, with respect to content,
censorship, content requirements, Chinese content and so on.

Q. As everybody has already seen, you experienced a small taste of that
with "Titanic."

A. Well, "Titanic" is actually censored less this time than it was in ¹97.
Because it was their second bite at the apple. It¹s gotten much wider and
we¹re seeing it being less restrictive. So we're moving in the right
direction. The quotas for international films coming in now, it's a higher
quota, the percentage of revenue is higher, so everything is moving in the
right direction. You see the market opening up. And I think that that¹s
having a beneficial effect in that it¹s growing the exhibition market
internally, if you look at how rapidly theaters are being built here.
Eight a day, I've been told? Eight theaters a day?

Q. Are you a fan of Chinese filmmakers? Do you have a few that you like?

A. I think I like the ones that everybody likes, that we know in the West.
You know, Zhang Yimou and, I can never remember, Chen Kaige. But I'm not a
student.

Q. I¹m interested in storytellers that you admire. They don't have to be
Chinese. If you could talk a little bit about the films that you are
looking to these days, whatever you find inspirational. S

A. I don't find my inspiration in movies. I find my inspiration in life ­
in the natural world, in daily life. There are filmmakers that come along
that are quite iconoclastic. And that I¹m in awe of, frankly. Zack
Snyder's "300." I think that was a really revolutionary film, because it
was a completely deconstructive form of filmmaking in a way that nobody
had done before, other than maybe Robert Rodriguez. That¹s inspirational
to me. Zhang Yimou's films are inspirational to me. I have to see them
multiple times to really see how he¹s doing it and what exactly he's doing
that seems to work so well. So as a fan of film, there are certain films
that come along that are just stunning to me, and I¹ll study them.

Q. Who are you in awe of?

A. I just gave you three examples. You know, there's the old guard. You
know, Spielberg, Kubrick and all that sort of thing. But in terms of new
filmmakers, up and coming, I haven¹t seen anybody that blew me away in the
last year or so.

Q. What about scripts that you¹re looking at? Is there a project that
you¹re working on right now? Or subject matters or general areas of
interest that you¹re looking at?

A. That's interesting. I've divided my time over the last 16 years over
deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I¹ve made two movies in 16 years,
and I¹ve done eight expeditions. Last year I basically completely
disbanded my production company¹s development arm. So I'm not interested
in developing anything. I'm in the "Avatar" business. Period. That¹s it.
I'm making "Avatar 2," "Avatar 3," maybe "Avatar 4," and I'm not going to
produce other people's movies for them. I'm not interested in taking
scripts. And that all sounds I suppose a little bit restricted, but the
point is I think within the "Avatar" landscape I can say everything I need
to say that I think needs to be said, in terms of the state of the world
and what I think we need to be doing about it. And doing it in an
entertaining way. And anything I can't say in that area, I want to say
through documentaries, which I'm continuing. I've done five documentaries
in the last 10 years, and I'll hopefully do a lot more. In fact, I'm doing
one right now, which is on this, the Deep Sea Challenge project that we
just completed the first expedition. So that'll be a film that'll get made
this year and come out first quarter of next year.

Q. "Avatar," of course, said a few things in terms of your world view,
including on the environment. And here of course, it was interpreted
differently as being about China. Some people online and fans took a kind
of political overlay that applied here.

A. Yeah, I'm not too aware of the nuances of that. Other than that there
was speculation that it might be problematic for the government, seen as
criticism of a resource-hungry nation. Except all the developing or
developed nations on the planet are resource-hungry. So the same
perspective was in Russia, Europe, Canada and the U.S. I got the biggest
political blowback in the U.S., because frankly the U.S. is the most
medieval right now when it comes to climate change and the role of
business in compromising and devastating the natural world. Way behind
Europe.

Q. How far are you along in working on the "Avatar" sequels?

A. We've spent the last year and a half on software development and
pipeline development. The virtual production methodology was extremely
prototypical on the first film. As then, no one had ever done it before
and we didn't even know for two and half years into it and $100 million
into it if it was going to work. So we just wanted to make our lives a
whole lot easier so that we can spend a little more of our brainpower on
creativity. It was a very, very uphill battle on the first film. So we've
been mostly working on the tool set, the production pipeline, setting up
the new stages in Los Angeles, setting up the new visual effects pipeline
in New Zealand, that sort of thing. And, by the way, writing. We haven't
gotten to the design stage yet. That'll be the next.

Q. Would any part of the sequels ­ I mean two, three, or a possible four ­
be done partly in China?

A. It's conceivable. You know, one of the things I want to explore while
I'm here is the idea of co-production on those films, but it's a slightly
different case because they're studio films. There were zero ... I can't
say
zero exteriors. We did one night in the parking lot next to the sound
stage. But there were no locations.

Q. So what's the advantage of doing a co-production at all in China? I
mean, your movie's going to make money, you don't need the financing.

A. It's a major market. Possibly within this time scope of these two
films, certainly by the time of the third film, it may rival the U.S.
domestic market, if not surpass it. And there are economic advantages with
respect to the percentage of gross revenue that flows back. So that needs
to be weighed off against what it would cost us to set up our capability
here. We'd have to take our capability with us to do the virtual
production. The 3-D production is easy. That's flight-ready to go anywhere
in the world, so that's not an issue. When I say 3-D, I'm talking about
the cameras. With my C.P.G. hat on, my Cameron Pace Group hat on, we can
put fly packs anywhere in the world to support up to 30 or 40 cameras. We
can do it right now. Mobile units and all that sort of thing. So that's
not an issue. That could come here easily, and that might be very
beneficial to the Chinese resident film community because the crews would
get trained up on this equipment. They would have access to cutting-edge
stuff, so that's partly how we sell our position. But we'd have to bring
over our virtual production capability with us. And again, that's mobile.
We took it with us to New Zealand last time. So it's all doable. It's just
looking at the numbers.

Q. Some American businesses have expressed reluctance in doing technology
transfer here in China because then they'll lose the proprietary
technology. And they feel the Chinese competitors might create products
that compete with theirs in the market. You're so closely associated with
this technology, so I'm just wondering whether you have any thoughts on
this?

A. I think that there's certainly always that danger. But we've found that
people have tried to imitate us in the past and it usually comes to grief,
because they can't continuously invest in R.&D. So they'll create a rig.
Well that rig then becomes fixed in time at the moment they create it.
We've got many, many clients across broadcast and cinema. So that allows
us to continuously do engineering development of the next generation. And
our generations are three to six months apart. Nobody can compete with
that. So what we find is that our partners just say, "Look it's better for
us to just do business with you because you're already ahead." We've seen
people buy rigs and then be mired three or four years down the line in
that moment of technology, and we've gone four generations past that. If
it's embraced here and there's a big enough market for it, there may be
other companies that spring up. But you're not going to be able to replace
12 years of experience overnight. So I think it's a question of being
first to market with quality and good, solid partnerships. And after that
we just have to see where it goes.

Q. Is it fair to say then that when you¹re exploring the possibility of
co-production, that includes the next one, "Avatar 2?"

A. Yeah, absolutely. Sure.

Q. You must have had people talk to you to give you a briefing on the
censorship process, about how it works or how it's affected certain films
here. Do you have any general thoughts on that?

A. As an artist, I'm always against censorship. But censorship's a
reality, even in the U.S. We have a form of it there. We used to have the
Hays commission. We now have the M.P.A.A. ratings system, which is
basically a self-censorship process that prevents government from doing
it. But the economic imperatives are that if you get an R rating, the
studio won't make a film that looks like it's headed toward an R rating,
and if you get a R you've got to cut it yourself to comply with PG-13. So
it's really just a form of censorship indirectly.

Q. Do you consider that the same as Chinese censorship?

A. You've got a little more choice in it. It's not as draconian. But I
can't be judgmental about another cultures' process. I don't think that¹s
healthy.

Q. Did you talk to other filmmakers -- your peers -- about Chinese
censorship?

A. No. I'm not interested in their reality. My reality is that I've made
two films in the last 15 years that both have been resounding successes
here, and this is an important market for me. And so I'm going to do
what's necessary to continue having this be an important market for my
films. And I'm going to play by the rules that are internal to this
market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my
breath but I'm not going to change people's minds that way. Now I do feel
that everything is trending in the right direction right now, as I
mentioned earlier.

Transcribed by Anastasia Taber