While few film links have thus far been forged between B.C. and China, a handful of local film producers are trying to tap into China’s capital and vast market.
“The potential there is just fantastic,” said Paul Wu, a producer with Brightlight Pictures, which recently landed its first Chinese co-production: a sci-fi TV series set to start filming in the spring near Shanghai.
Wu said for B.C.’s cash-strapped producers, Chinese film deals offer both financing and access to a huge market. He noted that China’s market is big enough to finance a film project based solely on domestic box office returns, which would not be possibility in Canada.
From the perspective of Chinese producers, Wu said Canadian co-productions also present opportunities.
“Right now, their film and TV is growing, but they’re still looking for technical expertise and assistance.”
Wu added that China sees opportunities in more Western-targeted content, because exported Chinese films have generally had “limited popularity” abroad.
But despite opportunities on both sides, Wu said it took Brightlight nearly four years to land its co-production deal.
“There have been some difficulties just because of cultural gaps, language gaps, differences in the way projects are greenlit in both countries,” he said.
Wu noted, for example, that project timelines are far shorter in China, where producers come with cash in hand, than in Canada, where producers need locked-in projects before they can attract financing.
The lag on the Canadian end, he said, can scuttle deals.
“For [Chinese companies], they’re like: ‘Eight months from now we don’t know what we’ll be doing; we might be three movies into something else.’”
He also emphasized the time required to build up business relationships and trust with Chinese companies.
But Wu said his company is banking on its efforts paying off in the long run.
“Brightlight has taken the approach that it’s more of a long-term investment,” he said.
Local producer Wesley Lowe, principal of Wesley Lowe Productions Inc., is also chasing opportunities with China’s film industry.
A couple of years ago, Lowe helped dream up the Anji Bridge Fund to generate investor returns from financing film co-productions with China.
“In the movie industry, if you make 10 movies, one of them is going to make money, but you don’t know which one it’s going to be,” he said. “That was the idea.”
Also behind the fund plan is Raymond Massey, the producer of Iron Road, the biggest-budget Canada-Chinese co-production to date.
But Lowe said the fund has yet to get off the ground, in part because the Chinese co-production business model has yet to be proven profitable.
Lowe is trying to generate that proof with his own project, which he’s trying to get entirely financed out of China. But he said while he’s found various Chinese backers to fund 50% of the film, he has yet to find two Chinese parties that are willing to be partners on the project.
“That’s the thing that’s been driving me crazy,” he said.
A few trade missions aside, the challenge of forging links between the film industries in B.C. and China is falling primarily to individual producers.
An exception is a recently announced script competition out of Whistler that aims to be the catalyst for deals between Canadian filmmakers and Chinese production companies.
The China Canada Script Competition is a joint program created by the Whistler Film Festival Society (WFFS), Telefilm Canada and China Film Group, China’s largest and most influential state-run enterprise. The competition will select a short list of projects to be pitched to Chinese production companies at the 2012 Whistler Summit.
But B.C.’s producers are largely on their own when it comes to building business relationships in China.
Vancouver producer Shan Tam is perhaps one of Vancouver’s most experienced players at building links between the film industries in Canada and China. Tam came to Vancouver in 1989 from Hong Kong with a background in film production.
In the 1990s, Tam helped bring Hong Kong productions to film in B.C. Her company, Maple Ridge Films, provides services for those productions. They included Rumble in the Bronx, a 1995 Jackie Chan film.
Since about 2005, Tam has worked with Vancouver’s Reunion Pictures and some American companies to bring Western film projects to film in China.
Tam, now a partner with Reunion Asia, said the key for B.C. producers trying to establish business relationships in China is demonstrating genuine interest in the Chinese film industry.
“When you talk to the investors and the companies there, it always helps to show you took an interest in the industry and you actually understand what’s going on there as well,” she said. “Not just: ‘I show up here, where’s the money?’” •
