Hong Kong Auteurs Ready To Roll On Coproductions

Collaborations with the Chinese mainland are all the rage in the city's movie industry, whose comedy and action brands are drawing audiences on both sides of the border, as Honey Tsang reports from Hong Kong.

The on-and-off courtships, witty banter and ribald puns exchanged between a couple in the rom-com Love off the Cuff is currently tickling viewers' fancies across the border.

The movie stars Hong Kong's Miriam Yeung Chin-wah and Shawn Yue Man-lok as the sparring sweethearts. Directed by local auteur Pang Ho-cheung and coproduced with mainland companies, it's the second movie in Pang's Love in a Puff series. It gave Pang by far his most lucrative opening day of all his movies - raking in more than HK$1.8 million ($231,000) in ticket sales when it premiered on April 27.

While Hong Kong moviegoers guffaw at Pang's Cantonese wordplay, crowds in the Chinese mainland - undeterred by the colloquial differences - are also enamored of the gags. The movie took more than 172 million yuan ($25.3 million) in ticket sales during its 17-day screening period in mainland theaters.

Love off the Cuff represents one of the many Hong Kong-mainland coproductions that have lately pulled in hefty receipts and made hay across the border.

In recent years, the commingling of China's movie markets has accelerated. The inclination of Hong Kong's filmmakers to serve mainland audiences has been fueled by the mainland's rapidly growing film market, which is now the world's second-largest in terms of box-office receipts and is forecast to overtake the United States in a few years.

Last year, a record 89 Hong Kong pictures were granted coproduction permits - a rise of 11 percent from 2015 - by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the government body responsible for regulating policies on Chinese coproductions.

Altogether, 54 joint cross-border films were produced last year, a huge step up from the pre-2004 annual average of 10 titles.

Hong Kong-mainland productions have often fared well in mainland theaters, with many achieving nationwide blockbuster status. Last year, seven of the top 20 blockbusters in the Chinese mainland were joint ventures with Hong Kong.

Comedy vehicles always have the potential to be hits with mainland audiences, according to Tam Yee-lok, lecturer and program director of the Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing for Film, Television and New Media at the Hong Kong Baptist University, who has analyzed the city's movie industry for decades.

Annual mainland box-office receipts appear to indicate such a preference. Of the seven cross-border films screened last year, The Mermaid, a huge comedy hit directed by Stephen Chow, was the highest-grossing coproduction, earning 3.4 billion yuan.

"In the Chinese mainland, there's a growing middle class. Most of them go for comedies, which have been a strong suit for Hong Kong filmmakers," Tam said.

Reel change

For decades, Hong Kong had one of the most potent cinema industries in the world. It was at its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Tam, the good times started to fade after the release of the Hollywood megahit Jurassic Park in 1993. It was a time when Hong Kong producers began to see themselves as being pitted against Hollywood.

The SARS epidemic and the economic downturn became a double whammy for the city's movie industry, dragging it further into a downward spiral, Tam said.

According to research conducted by Chung Po-yin, professor at the department of history at HKBU, the overseas box office for Hong Kong movies dropped by more than 80 percent from a pinnacle of HK$1,860 million in 1992 to just HK$300 million in 2014.

The Hong Kong-mainland coproduction mechanism has picked up steam since the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement in 2003 - an agreement which grants Hong Kong filmmakers quota-free access to the mainland market.

At the time, the partnership was a boon that invigorated the waning industry. Subsequently, it has allowed industry players to tap highly profitable box-office revenue in the mainland.

Currently, the mainland movie market is 27 times bigger than Hong Kong's, and also the fastest growing in the world. From 2012 to last year, the mainland's total box-office receipts went through the roof, boasting a rise of 168 percent. By comparison, box-office revenue in the US expanded modestly, with a rise of just 5 percent.

Amy Liu, partner at EntGroup, a mainland researcher, described the growth in the mainland cinema business as "meteoric".

On top of that, the Chinese mainland had 41,179 movie screens last year - a 30-percent increase from 31,627 in 2015. It overtook the US, the previous multiplex king, with 40,759 screens. Liu said this made the Chinese mainland the world's leading cinema-going territory.

Cross-border benefits

Throughout the changes, Hong Kong filmmakers have turned to the mainland for finance. This collaboration has resulted in some "indie" movies, such as Pang's Love in a Puff series, becoming famous overseas. In return, the mainland has acquired the know-how of Hong Kong filmmaking talent.

Ann An, founder and chairman of Desen International Media, a renowned producer and distributor in the Chinese mainland, said the mainland's movie industry has always looked for creative talents from Hong Kong and overseas.

"The Chinese mainland movie industry has only been commercialized for 10 years. In terms of filming techniques, it still hasn't yet become full-blown, particularly when compared with Hollywood which has a history of more than 100 years," An added.

Coproduction offers a platform for movie makers to learn and exchange skills and ideas. And comedy is not Hong Kong's only strong suit.

The filmmaking techniques employed in the city's action movies are highly valued by mainland audiences.

Last year, action movies took four positions among seven Hong Kong-mainland coproductions in the top 20 blockbusters list.

Hong Kong director Dante Lam's Operation Mekong was the most prominent, pocketing 1.18 billion yuan.

Chen Tak-sum, a veteran Hong Kong action movie director, has embraced the dynamics of cross-border productions: "Action films are a relatively good fit when it comes to cross-cultural productions."

Chen's latest cross-border title Kung Fu Jungle, starring Donnie Yen and Wang Baoqiang, did well with global audiences, generating more than $100 million in worldwide box-office revenue, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks box-office records.

This is especially true for the mainland. "The (martial) arts fights between characters, together with a reasonably straightforward storyline, can break the language and cultural barriers across the border," he said.

Crafting a whole

As much as many coproductions are setting the bar for plentiful returns in the mainland, filmmakers never consider them easy money.

Looking back, not all epic coproductions have been a guarantee of success. The Great Wall, the Sino-US movie directed by Zhang Yimou with a budget of more than $150 million, wound up a box-office flop. Industry observers believe it lost more than $75 million.

"The crux of making bestselling, cross-cultural movies is to find a topic global audiences really care about and are interested in," said Chen Yiqi, chairman of the Sil-Metropole Organisation, a Hong Kong production company.

"You can't simply win over viewers from other parts of the world just by casting a mixture of actors from the mainland and abroad."

At the China Daily Asia Leadership Roundtable Panel on March 16, themed the "Sino-Foreign Coproduction Films Summit", Yip Chai-tuck, executive director of Media Asia Group Holdings, a leading Hong Kong production and distribution company responsible for the production of Love off the Cuff, stressed that movies are craft in nature.

"Discerning viewers never judge a film by whether it's a coproduction or not," Yip said.

While many enjoy penetrating the flourishing movie market in the Chinese mainland, some Hong Kong filmmakers think coproductions might also entail a few wrinkles - such as what they called the "pandering" issue. They are concerned that collaboration could stymie creativity because some content is inserted to cater for mainland audiences.

In response, film director Teddy Chen said a nicely-written screenplay can meld different components into one that can charm audiences from a range of cultural backgrounds.

Such an outlook is also evident in Love off the Cuff, which has succeeded in allowing audiences across the border to enjoy Cantonese repartee and an urban love story set in Hong Kong.

"The magic comes once you have the ability to capture those little components everyone loves and can relate to," said Dagan Potter, production lead at Oriental Dreamworks, which produced the Sino-US animation Kung Fu Panda 3.

When asked about the recipe for a winning coproduction, Potter said: "We're just one big team, such that we don't even think it's a coproduction." Instead, they just think of themselves as filmmakers.

"It's really bringing talents together, and ultimately, creating one big team that has a singular vision - and delivering on that."

Contact the writer at honeytsang@chinadailyhk.com