Backers of the massive Huairou Film Base near Beijing include industry pillar Universal Studios
ABOUT ONE hour’s drive from Beijing you can find armies of kung fu specialists being put through their paces by China’s top directors, as Nationalist KMT soldiers march through 1920s Shanghai, not far from a full-size model of Beijing’s Gate of Heaven.
Welcome to Huairou Film Base, which in a few short years has emerged as the centre of the Chinese film world and home to some of the biggest productions in a rapidly expanding market.
Also going through his paces here is Keanu Reeves. His latest project, Man of Tai Chi, a €24 million contemporary kung fu and tai chi action movie, is being shot here at Huairou with a cast including Tiger Chen, Karen Mok and Reeves himself as a bad guy, apparently, with martial arts choreography by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping. And it’s in Chinese.
Getting a big-name star like Reeves to shoot here marks a major coup, but these days everyone wants a piece of the Chinese film business.
Chinese box office receipts surged past €1.5 billion for the first time in 2011, according to the government’s film bureau, a 29 per cent hike on the previous year. This has been driven by an explosion in the number of cinemas, which are being built as part of the wave of shopping malls springing up around the country.
Last year the number of screens nationwide exceeded 9,200, up 33 per cent on 2010, while the number of cinemas increased 29 per cent to 2,800, most of them in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The building of cinemas has coincided with the emergence of going to the cinema as a leisure activity among China’s newly moneyed middle classes.
The Communist Party recently said culture was a “pillar industry” to be nurtured and promoted. The official seal of approval means all kinds of projects are being made.
Nearly 800 films were made in China last year, but only a tiny percentage make it to the screen, while an even smaller share of those make a profit.
The biggest local film was Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale, which Chinese audiences did go to see but which did not do well overseas.
Finding a Chinese film that translates to foreign tastes is a challenge. Local directors complain that over-zealous censorship makes it impossible to make movies that work with both Chinese and foreign viewers.
The base is a venue that is set to become a pivotal destination since the Chinese government announced it is prepared to open up more to Hollywood, allowing more movies in and giving overseas producers more of the take from their films here.
“Every year we have 200 projects, including TV shows and films. This year we had around 120 features films and the rest were TV shows,” says Zhang Hongtao, a spokesman for the Huairou Film Base information department.
Huairou Film Base is the largest of its kind in Asia. It covers 131 acres and cost €220 million to develop. It is cleanly landscaped and provides facilities for all aspects of production and post-production.
You drive through a gate proclaiming “China Film” and to your right is an arrangement of artillery weapons, as well as what looks like a Blackhawk helicopter.
The facility has provided such backgrounds as Ningrong Street for the epic A Dream of the Red Chamber, as well as the cave where Mao Zedong lived during the Chinese civil war.
Since it opened, its fortunes have reflected the boom in the Chinese film industry. Revenues last year were about €1 billion yuan (€120 million).
“This is the first stop,” Zhang adds. “All the projects made here come here first. We organise not only shooting, but also development and catering and hotels and services for producers.”
Among the films made here which proved hits in China in recent years were Let the Bullets Fly and Forever Enthralled.
Now the studio is looking further afield for future growth. One of the backers of Man of Tai Chi is China Film Group, the Chinese state film colossus that is also behind Huairou Film Base.
Other backers include Hollywood entities such as Village Roadshow Entertainment Group Asia and Universal, as well as Wanda Media – an offshoot of a real estate conglomerate.
Hollywood has been looking for ways into this market ever since James Cameron’s 3-D smash Avatar made €160 million in China.
Hollywood films are dominating the Chinese market, despite all the restrictions. Transformers: Dark of the Moon took a hefty €128 million, making it the biggest-earning movie in China last year, followed by Kung Fu Panda 2, which took €71 million.
Nearby Xiantai village is enjoying a boom as it provides extras for the studios and its people also provide security workers and cleaning staff. About 2,000 people make their living from the studio.
They include Lu Hongxu (25), a law graduate who guides people around the site.
Hong Kong legend Chow Yun-fat was the most famous actor she has spotted on the base, she says.
The regular employment is some consolation for people who have had farming land taken over by the government to build the facility.
In June this year, the base will open a five-star hotel so Hollywood’s finest can hold on to their creature comforts. June is the merely the official opening, as the hotel is already in use.
“In the future we want to get more projects involved, and we will train up the locals better,” Zhang says. “This is a studio for producers, with all the services from the development side to post-production.”
The costume warehouse is like a trip through Chinese history. There are costumes from Confucius, the biopic of the venerable ancient philosopher, which starred Chow Yun-fat, as well as some of the light suits from the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in 2008.
Here too is Gong Li’s outfit for Curse of the Golden Flower and a real throne used by the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Pu Yi, whom western audiences probably know best from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. The throne is a present from the Culture Ministry.
At the other side is a poster with pictures of the various small weapons at your disposal when you make a movie here. At sound stage No 7 there is a mock-up of the jungle, but this is not used for films but mainly to attract tourists – another major function of the base is to generate revenue as a film theme park.
Just outside, some serious villa development is going on, including a Netherlands-themed estate complete with windmill. No, it’s not a set, it really is a villa development. In China these days, life is constantly imitating art.
