China’s film industry has grown exponentially over the last few years, both in terms of the movies produced and the size of the box office. As a result, Hollywood has tried to inliftrate the market with a slew of Asia oriented movies, but China isn’t letting Tinsel Town take over, placing limits of the number of foreign films allowed to be released in the country and heavily backing its own filmmakers.
Indeed, they’re now actually starting to fight back and rival Hollywood with the scale of some of their productions, with John Woo’s Red Cliff costing $90 million to make, and now Yang Zhimou (Hero, House Of Flying Daggers, and the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony) announcing the similarly budgeted Nanjing Heroes, about the Nanjing Massacre. While it’s a fully Chinese movie, they’re reaching out to the west to ensure the movie is top notch, employing the Hollywood effects team behind Saving Private Ryan and The Dark Knight, and now they’ve signed up Christian Bale to star in the movie.
Although still a controversial event and a source of tension in Chinese-Japanese relations, the Nanjing massacre has become a defining moment in modern Chinese history and has been the subject of numerous movies over the years. While the exact number of death is disputed, it’s generally accepted that when Japanese troops entered the city in 1937, it led to hundreds of thousands of rapes and deaths. Many of the movies about the massacre have featured John Rabe, a German businessman who helped save hundreds of Chinese refugees. However according to THR, Bale will instead play an American priest called John who helps a great number of Chinese escape certain death.
The film will be shot about 40% in English and the rest in Mandarin Chinese, suggesting that while it is a Chinese movie with no foreign investment, the know they need to reach out to western audiences if they hope to recoup the costs. The movie will start shooting January 10th.
Nanjing Heroes could act as an interesting counterpoint to Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun, which of course saw a miniature Christian Bale dealing with the Japanese taking over Shanghai, and the aftermath of that.