SFG, Medavoy plan for epic film, miniseries

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Production News

Hollywood heavyweight Mike Medavoy and the Shanghai Film Group have announced plans to jointly produce a China set feature film and make a linked TV miniseries.

Both works will have at their heart the experience of Jews in China during the 1939-49 period.

The untitled film will be scripted by Nicholas Meyer as a loose adaptation of the novel, The Cursed Piano by Chinese author Bei La. The six-part series may keep the title Tears of the Sparrow, a novel by Daniella Kuhn from which it is adapted.

Speaking at a press conference in Shanghai, Medavoy said that the two works will be made in parallel and have common characters. The miniseries will be more intimate and deal more with the lives of the Jewish population in Shanghai, while the feature film will take a broader approach.

Medavoy said that he could not disclose the budget of the project pair until a screenplay is completed and the two separate directors and cast are assembled, though he said that the film would be mounted on a large scale. "I want to make a film that David Lean would have been proud of making," a reference to the legendary director of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over The River Kwai.

Whether the film is financed through the independent market or the studio sector is also currently unclear, though development finance is being provided by SFG. The Chinese major may also be a dominant backer of the TV series, though one of its sister companies within the Shanghai Media Group.

Meyer, who previously wrote Elegy, The Human Stain and Sommersby, shot down questions that suggested he needed to be Chinese to write the screenplay. "Do you need to be a murderer to write about murder?" he said. "We are going to be making a film that doesn't depend on anyone having read the novel. It can exist on its own. We are not doing the illustrated version of the book."

Medavoy said that the film will likely see the Chinese-language used between native speakers and English used for most other situations.

Medavoy, whose credits include One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and the recent Black Swan, made it clear that this is a passion project for him. His parents fled the Pogroms of east Europe and travelled to China where, as Russian passport holders, they witnessed more brutality at the hands of Japanese troops.

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