The perfect blend

Alina Y. Qiu has come a long way since stumbling into the shoes of a producer by accident. She shares her views on combining Chinese and Hollywood productions with Liu Wei.

With her experience in both China and Hollywood, Qiu Yan - aka Alina Y. Qiu - has found producing films in between to be harder than she thought.

Qiu became a film producer by accident.

Not long after graduating from college, the Beijing native decided that the typical white-collar career path at a Fortune 500 company was not her passion. In 2002, while planning a soul-searching trip to the south of China, she received a call from a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

It turned out that Quentin Tarantino was going to film Kill Bill Vol. 1 in Beijing and the set was desperately in need of bilingual staff members to do coordination work.

His crew turned to college English teachers for help. Knowing nothing about filmmaking but needing money for the trip, Qiu took the offer.

Initially, she worked at the production office but later was sent to different departments whenever there was a shortage, including a two-week assignment to assist Tarantino on the set.

After eight months of what she calls "an extended summer camp", she realized she had found her career direction.

"The experience opened my eyes and changed my life," she says. "And it was so much fun."

After Kill Bill, she went on working on the set for a couple more international productions and at the same time co-translated a travel book. She finally got away for the much delayed trip to Yunnan province in Southwest China and Thailand.

During the trip, the Peking University English language and literature major decided to study for a business management degree with special focus on the entertainment industry.

She received offers from the University of Southern California and the University of Cambridge. She chose the latter without hesitation. "Studying is not just about the major. To be a Cambridge grad is a lifetime honor," she says.

She believed her bilingual skills with a degree in business management would help her do more than just coordinating on a film set.

After working in London for a short while, she joined a venture capital firm in Beijing to explore the entertainment industry from the investment perspective. In the meantime, she worked with Hollywood consultants to develop and produce films with local content.

Qiu went on to work on a more mixed project, Inseparable. It was a dramatic comedy directed by China-born, US-educated Dayyan Eng, starring two-time Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey and Hong Kong-based actor Daniel Wu.

After locking down Spacey, the producers had just a few months to raise funds. She worked with the team around the clock to make it happen.

"The fundraising was challenging," Qiu says. "The Chinese investors were conservative. A bankable cast meant more to them than how many awards your cast has accumulated."

Spacey is now a household name in China, thanks to House of Cards, which boasts tens of millions of clicks on China's video-streaming websites. But back in 2010 he did not have the overwhelming star power among the Chinese audience.

Spacey often walked around town in Guangzhou without being recognized. And yet Peter Stormare, a cameo in the film who played a villain in Prison Break, the most popular US TV show in China at that time, was often approached for autographs on Guangzhou's streets.

"Maybe we were a bit ahead of time," Qiu says, laughing. "If we released Inseparable this year, it would be much easier to promote it."

The film was released in 2012 during the same period as Hollywood blockbusters The Avengers and Titanic 3-D so the viewership suffered. But it was a brave showing from a team of international filmmakers to make real Hollywood-type independent films in China.

"Inseparable is a China-financed domestic film, and the way it was being made is different from the typical co-productions," Qiu says. "I got involved with many co-production projects for many years but most of them never materialized."

The ones that got made rarely succeeded in both markets. And the number of co-productions has been shrinking.

One of the biggest challenges is to obtain the co-production permit from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

In China, 34 foreign films are permitted for theatrical release annually. The foreign production companies take in 25 percent from the box office revenue, but co-productions are exempt from the quota and treated as domestic films. That's why co-production became a popular concept for Western film companies to break into and bank on in the exploding China film market.

But in 2012, the administration tightened its control.

"A completely US story, some Chinese money, a few Chinese faces and some Chinese elements - these kind of films are not real co-productions," Zhang Pimin, then deputy chief of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, said in 2012.

Zhang reiterated that in an officially acknowledged co-production, at least one-third of the lead cast should be Chinese, the story should have Chinese elements and there should be Chinese investors.

"Because there is no rating system in China, the filmmakers have to make sure the content can be seen by an audience aged from 4 to 80," Qiu says.

"On top of that, co-productions have to have organically integrated Chinese elements in the story. It takes a long time to get a script approved. But often, investors are not that patient."

And what's even more difficult is to find a story that appeals to both markets.

Qiu often reads scripts featuring awkward jokes or cultural references that are neither realistic nor appealing.

"In one script, a Wall Street executive is relocated to Shanghai only to find a squat toilet that he doesn't know how to use in a luxury apartment. By the way, the story happens in Shanghai today, not in the '30s," she says.

"In other scripts, Chinese-American boys who do not speak a word of Chinese fall in love with Caucasian girls. In most cases for romantic comedies, the audience would prefer to see love stories between their own people, because they can relate to that better. Cross-cultural romance does exist but it's not mainstream."

With the boom of Chinese domestic films and the difficulties of co-productions, Hollywood studios have changed strategies.

Besides exporting franchise blockbuster-type quota films to China, they have been trying to invest in Chinese domestic films targeted at the Chinese market, such as Hot Summer Days by 20th Century Fox and Gone With the Bullets by Sony.

In the meantime, more Chinese film companies and investors have started stepping out of their comfort zone, where they were only willing to invest for China rights in co-productions. Now an increasing number of them are willing to finance Hollywood films with or without Chinese elements.

With the diminishing charm of co-productions, bilingual producers have gone through a tough time. But Qiu is optimistic and believes new opportunities are arising.

"Bilingual producers should make good use of their specialties to make Chinese films with Hollywood standards, or make English-language films with China financing."

Right now, she is working on a slate of film projects. Among them are a dramatic comedy shot in the United States but targeted at the Chinese market with mixed cast, crew and dialogue, and an English-language 3-D science fiction fantasy targeting the Western market with Chinese financing and import potential.

Qiu has found a group of talented filmmakers she would like to work with as a result of her frequent trips to Los Angeles in recent years.

Educated at top US film schools, many of the filmmakers and Oscar-level visual-effect teams are bilingual and bicultural.

"I love movies with human elements - Sideways, Slumdog Millionaire, The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine," she says.

"Producers are all about striking a balance between money and content. My goal is to tell stories that not only sell but also inspire and enlighten people, no matter what nationalities they are."

Contact the writer at liuw@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily USA 04/28/2014 page8)