Taiwan-based Equinox Film and New Zealand Silver Screen Films on Monday announced a plan to co-produce the classic Chinese mythical tale Lady White Snake (
The two companies signed the contract in Taipei on Monday, announcing the joint venture for the US$40 million project. Each side is responsible for raising 50 percent of the funds for the movie. If it proceeds as planned, the project will be the largest-budget movie in Taiwan's filmmaking history.
"We are very excited about this project. This joint venture has set up a framework for New Zealand and Taiwan filmmaking and we hope that this will help us move into a higher level of producing higher quality films," Lewis Holden, deputy minister of New Zealand's Ministry of Economic Development, said on Monday in Wellington through a video conference held in Taipei.
PHOTO: CHEN YI-CHUAN, TAIPEI TIMES
"We are pleased to be involved in this project," said Don Reynolds, CEO of Silver Screen Films. "When I read the story of Lady White Snake I was much intrigued and liked the story so much. For me, it's a good love story with well-developed characters," Reynolds said at the video conference.
The project was initiated two years ago by Richard Hou (
Over the past two years, Hou took the script to Hollywood and Japanese studios. "In the end, we decided to work with Silver Screen Films because it had the offer that we thought most beneficial for Taiwan's film industry as a whole," Hou said.
According to the contract, apart from co-producing the film with Equinox, Silver Screen Films' post-production wing Oktobor will also help Dragon Digital, its post-production counterpart in Taiwan, to set up a production line for special effects work and 3D animation.
The benefit for New Zealand is that the project will follow the precedents of The Last Samurai and the Lord of the Rings movies and have the film shot entirely in New Zealand.
"We will re-create the Hangzhou West Lake and the Gold Mountain Temple in the story of the Lady White Snake in New Zealand," Hou said.
Lady White Snake will be the first English-language film adaptation of the legend. The tale is about a white snake fairy transforming herself into a beautiful woman who then falls in love with a young scholar. But the romance is forbidden by the human world and also hindered by a malicious Buddhist monk.
The first film adaptation of the story was the Japanese-language Madame White Snake (1956) by director Shiro Toyoda. In 1962, there was Mandarin Hong Kong movie of a similar story. The most recent adaptation has been Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's (
Because the movie will be in English, Reynolds said the cast would have to be internationally known actors.
According to Hou, the first candidate for the monk Fa-hai (
Shooting is scheduled to start in 2006, at the latest.
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS