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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist