Asian stars team-up to battle Hollywood, pirates
Showbiz Desk

BUSAN (South Korea)—With multinational casts of stars culled from Bollywood, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, Asian filmmakers have begun pooling talent as well as cash to take on the might of Hollywood blockbusters at the box office.
Jackie Chan’s “The Myth”, co-starring South Korean beauty Kim Hee-seon and Bollywood bombshell Mallika Sherawat, is the latest in a slew of pan-Asian films aimed at opening multiple markets and also stemming industry losses through piracy.
While it’s not unusual to find British, American, European and Australian actors in the same Hollywood movie, Asian countries have traditionally had a more insular approach to film-making.
But with film financing increasingly coming from several different countries, directors have started to mix and match big names from around the region — even though some of them don’t even speak the same language.
“Whether it’s a film made in Korea, Hong Kong or China, all films have to compete against the big money that is Hollywood films,” Stanley Tong, director of “The Myth”, said ahead of its screening at the Pusan International Film Festival here.
While Hollywood lavished tens of millions of dollars on special effects and production, there was a limit to how individual Asian countries could compete in the international market, Tong said. “This pooling of resources by countries other than Hollywood will continue in future,” Tong predicted. “If actors, producers and directors come together it will serve to advance non-Hollywood film industries.”
Despite winning much critical acclaim overseas, movies made in Hong Kong, South Korea and other Asian film centres have struggled to outgun Hollywood’s big-budget films at their domestic box offices. Bollywood, the world’s most prolific filmmaking centre, has also fallen on hard times with only a handful of releases this year turning a profit.
Action superstar Chan, Asia’s biggest Hollywood star, said the US had the edge on the rest of the world because a lot of Americans watched films at the cinema. “Asia has a population of two billion so why isn’t (Asian film) thriving? It’s because of piracy and the Internet and piracy,” Chan told reporters Friday before the film’s festival screening.
Chan said South Korean films had made their mark on the world stage in recent years because they were supported by local moviegoers, while audiences elsewhere in Asia were being lost to pirated DVDs and Internet downloading. “May we all co-operate and join this war on pirates,” Chan said.
With enforcement of intellectual property rights patchy at best across the region, many directors see cross-border collaboration as a way to claw back lost revenues. China’s big-budget contender for an Oscar next year, Chen Kaige’s historical epic “The Promise”, stars Korean actor Jang Dong-kun, Hong Kong’s Cecilia Cheung, Hiroyuki Sanada of Japan.
And the two major Asian premieres at the Venice Film Festival last month were Tsui Hark’s “Seven Swords”, which pitted Korean Kim So-yeon into a mostly Hong Kong and Chinese cast, and Peter Chan’s musical “Perhaps Love”, featuring mainland star Zhou Xun, Taiwan actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung and Korean actor Ji Jin-hee.
“The reason Japan, Hong Kong and Korea is doing jobs together is to get more power in the market,” Kim Ji-seok, programmer of the Pusan International Film Festival, told newsmen in an interview. “The money Asian countries spend is too large compared to their domestic market. It makes it more affordable.”
But Kim said such collaborations weren’t necessarily a good thing artistically as the films lost their national identity. “I don’t think it can be as creative. It’s more commercial,” Kim said.
Kung-fu king Chan, however, insisted the fact several of the cast of “The Myth” didn’t speak the same language had not been a problem. “Film is the common language of humanity, so if we are working on a film we don’t need verbal language to communicate,” he said.