A coproduct of Chinese cinema and Hollywood is slated to be released on video streaming websites later in the year, Han Bingbin reports.

China, the world's second-largest movie market, isn't just a source of big money for Hollywood. Growing numbers of moviemakers are being inspired by China's culture and rich history.

The first Sino-Hollywood sci-fi production, the short movie Log Out is an attempt to tell a completely China-based futuristic story.

It is helmed by US director Austin Smithard, who earlier worked with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, and depicts a time in the near future when people become unprecedentedly reliant on technology and live in a world with little interpersonal communication.

Modern technology is given a rather redemptive role in the film, eventually helping to bring people together.

And as expected, the awakening accomplishes - first and foremost - the bonding of two lovers.

The couple are played by Chinese actor Shawn Dou, who rose to fame after his lead role in Zhang Yimou's nostalgic romance Under the Hawthorn Tree, and Gossip Girl star and new Hollywood fashion icon Blake Lively.

The two young celebrities are cast alongside Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody in Log Out.

Brody plays the role of a cold-hearted scientist, the creator of the movie's key artificial-intelligence character Mozi. Borrowing its name from one of China's greatest ancient philosophers, the AI, too, shoulders a philosophical function of its own.

"Usually we have people fighting for people, but here you have an entity coming into its own, with a lot of philosophical concepts questioning what's happening," says Toni Piech, CEO of PAE Pictures, the producer of Log Out.

Relevant topic

"Urban angst" is the expression used by Piech to sum up this future crisis of people drifting away from each other and feeling enormously lonely.

He finds the topic particularly relevant to China. Because "it's easy to forget what's important (about life) when you run at this pace", he says of the change in Chinese society along with rapid development.

"China is a place that has a lot of interesting, meaningful and clever things buried under the surface of what's happening," Piech says.

As the kickoff for a future PAE "sci-fi franchise", the movie is expected to be available this fall via China's leading video streaming website iQiyi.

It will also be distributed by Yahoo, Dailymotion and Youtube in other parts of Asia, the company says.

In the next one or two years, by working with Chinese and US scriptwriters, the company plans to also release an HBO-style miniseries - an investigative thriller - and looks to distribute it via China's major satellite TV channels.

Derivative content will also be developed from the thriller, such as graphic novels and games.

The company has started to work on a script for a full-length feature that Piech says he hopes will be popular in China and then go global.

If Log Out is well received in China, it could be developed into a feature movie, he adds.

"I think it (Chinese market) is at the perfect stage for innovation. It is mature enough to start to do things at a global level," he says.

Big challenge

Despite the producer's ambitions in China, he says the biggest challenge today is the conservative attitude of moviemakers in China.

The movie industry in China is now in a phase where it only believes in what are considered realistic possibilities, Piech says, adding that this is at odds with the maturity the market has already achieved.

"But when I say, 'we are doing an HBO-style miniseries for a satellite TV station', even my own people tell me I am crazy," Piech says.

"I say they are crazy because this type of content is exactly what people here are looking for."

Brody shares Piech's vision of China's movie market.

The actor became a producer last year, with the launch of his own company, Fable House, with investments in part from Sparkle Roll Culture Media, a Beijing-based production group that's 50 percent owned by Jackie Chan, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Growing up watching a lot of 1970s and '80s Hong Kong martial arts movies in New York's China Town area, Brody's connection with Chinese cinema has strengthened in the past few years with his major appearance in director Feng Xiaogang's historical epic 1942 and Chan's latest kung fu hit, Dragon Blade.

Brody says his company is in the process of creating Chinese content with the sensibilities that he can bring from a lifetime in the movie industry.

"Rather than the Hollywood idea of bringing something that may fit into the Chinese market, my intention is to help China build something that has the full depth of storytelling, with the infrastructure and the might that this nation has to bring those ideas to creation, and have that appeal to the world market."

Contact the writer at hanbingbin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 05/14/2015 page8)