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Hollywood embraces China as a film location
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IN the 2013 film “Her,” Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) walks through an overpass to work and then returns home to his love interest, the intelligent computer system he named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).
The story was set in a futuristic world that many thought was Los Angeles. Well, mostly. Yet the overpass and space-age skyscraper scenes were shot in Pudong on Shanghai’s east bank.
Now, with China poised to become the world’s largest movie market by 2020, film producers are increasingly anxious to tap into the hearts and minds of Chinese audiences by using scenes from their own backyards in production sites.
Of course, cinema is nothing new to Shanghai, which was once the movie capital of the East.
Long before the age of Hollywood blockbusters, the city hosted many film productions capturing the interwoven Oriental and Western themes that made Shanghai so intriguing. They mirrored much of East-meets-West confluence of ideas, art, architecture and lifestyle.
The traditional shikumen (stone-gate) houses, of Shanghai, for example, were heavily influenced by Western-style row houses. And the Art Deco style that flourished internationally in the 1920s to 1940s is still preserved in often hidden buildings and alleyways in the city.
There’s no landmark in Shanghai more popular with filmmakers than the Bund. Its history as the elegant home of some of the most famous companies in the world in the 1930s has never been far from the camera lens.
Small wonder that Steven Spielberg persevered through a year of negotiations to secure permission to shoot on location in Shanghai for his 1987 movie “Empire of the Sun,” starring young Christian Bale as the wealthy British schoolboy who ended up as a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp during the occupation of the city.
In the movie, Spielberg had crowds of Chinese and foreigners running along the Bund to reconstruct the hustle and bustle of Shanghai in the 1940s, when it was known as the Paris of the Orient.
Ang Lee’s acclaimed 2007 film “Lust, Caution” was set in the same period. The espionage thriller, based on a novella by Chinese author Eileen Chang, takes place during the Japanese occupation. Scenes were shot throughout the city, including the Majestic Theater on Nanjing Road W., where Wong Chia-Chi (Tang Wei) meets one of her classmates, and the water town of Xinchang in suburban Shanghai, with its characteristic ancient bridges and canals.
Chinese moviegoers seem to like a bit of their own culture and country appearing on the Hollywood silver screen. In some cases, filming here helps a movie company fulfill the requirements of a coproduction, allowing the finished film a waiver from the annual China quota of 34 imported films.
When Tom Cruise was seen jumping off the 53-story Bank of China Tower in the Lujiazui financial zone of Pudong in “Mission: Impossible III” (2006), the movie became a hot topic in China before it actually was screened here.
The movie was a big success in the fiercely competitive summer holiday season and was the third best-selling foreign film in China that year. Its success certainly paved the way for the next two in the series, with last year’s “Mission: Impossible V” amassing more than 100 million yuan (US$15.22 million) at the box office in China on its first day.
With those kinds of numbers, could James Bond be far behind?
“Skyfall” in 2012, the 23rd movie in the Bond series, also had its China moments, featuring breathtaking nighttime aerial footage of the city’s Lujiazui area. Never mind that all the ground-level scenes in Shanghai were actually filmed in London.
Shanghai has no end of interesting landmarks to draw the attention of filmmakers. Other popular locations include the Xujiahui Catholic Cathedral, the Peace Hotel, the shikumen houses, and the longtang, or back alley lanes.
As more Chinese companies enter into coproduction pacts with film studios around the world, expect to see a lot more international film crews on the streets of Shanghai.
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