Chapter 514: Interaction

Today's Hollywood films had already pried open the markets of most countries. It was no exaggeration to say they were sweeping the globe. The first question raised by these students was entirely within Duke's expectations and pertained exactly to this.

The question came from a girl wearing glasses in the third row.

"Hello, Director Rosenberg. My name is Zhuang Qiwen, a student from the Academy of Social Sciences," she said. "I'd like to ask, why are Hollywood movies able to achieve success on a global scale?"

Taking the microphone a staff member handed him, Duke didn't answer immediately. Instead, he asked in Chinese, "What do you all think?"

"Constant innovation!" a boy in the front row said. "Continuously turning imaginative ideas into movies!"

"Hollywood has a lot of people who work hard and persist!" the girl next to him said.

"It is undeniable that what you've all mentioned are among the reasons for Hollywood's success, but they aren't the key," Duke said.

After a slight pause, Duke quickly organized his thoughts. Under countless curious gazes, he said, "From what I've experienced over my years of work, the key to Hollywood's success lies in its industrialized, procedural production model, along with comprehensive marketing operations covering the entire industry chain—from production to screening to merchandise. In other words, the success of a Hollywood film is inseparable from its assembly-line production model."

This answer was clearly unexpected. A few students in the front row stared blankly for a moment.

"Are you a part of that too?" one of them suddenly asked.

"You're absolutely right," Duke said with a laugh. "The professional critics in North America don't like me. They attack me and my films, calling them assembly-line products."

"Hollywood cinema has never developed as a form of artistic creation," Duke said without shying away from the truth, "but rather as an entertainment industry."

"Hollywood soothes people's traumatic experiences by showcasing elements the public loves to see, such as karmic justice and happy endings. It provides collective fantasies for audiences through 'Cinderella' and 'male Cinderella' stories where lovers finally get married. It stimulates people's audiovisual habits with spectacular scenes and intense sound effects. This has formed the traditional framework of Hollywood movies: distinctive dream-making mechanisms, melodramatic structures, a spectacle-driven style, sensationalist rhetoric, and popular narrative tropes. All of these constitute a part of the assembly line."

"Decades have passed. Society changes, one generation ages, and another grows up, yet Hollywood has always adhered to this mass-market assembly-line model."

A student raised his hand, and Duke nodded at him.

Taking the microphone passed to him, the student said, "But art films exist in Hollywood too."

Duke kept his explanation as simple as possible. "Hollywood can package popular films as art films, and use popular films to drive broader cinematic trends. This allows Hollywood movies to maintain a certain level of artistry while remaining mainstream, thereby catering to the audience's psychological drive to keep consuming!"

Hollywood was universally recognized as the world's movie factory, and it truly lived up to the name!

"The male student with glasses in the second row," Duke called out.

The host selected the second formal questioner.

He stood up and asked, "Director Rosenberg, Chinese cinema is still lagging behind. What needs to be done to push it onto the global stage as quickly as possible? We have a saying here: 'What is national is global.' Is that the only way to achieve success?"

"Do you all know Mr. Ang Lee?"

Duke waited until sounds of affirmation echoed through the auditorium before speaking. "I believe that as a Chinese man, Mr. Ang Lee understands Chinese cinema far better than I do. When he visited Warner Studios two years ago, he did an interview where several journalists from China asked him this very question. I believe his perspective is much more persuasive than mine."

Duke then began to paraphrase what Ang Lee had said back then. "Mr. Ang Lee has visited all the major Hollywood studios, including Warner. Everywhere he went, he asked one question: Why can American films drive straight into any corner of the world without resistance?"

"I remember very clearly what he said during that interview with the Chinese journalists: 'The answers I received were almost identical. They said that when making a film, they never even think about whether it should have American characteristics.' In other words, Hollywood does not agree with the idea that 'what is national is global.' Many people constantly emphasize that films must be shot with national characteristics. This is an ideological difference, but it's a phenomenon well worth our study. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have national characteristics, but rather that we can't force national characteristics just for the sake of having them. Films made like that are like experimental films; no matter how much attention they get, they will only ever be niche movies."

"I might not be expressing some of the vocabulary perfectly accurately," Duke added, "but the meaning is correct."

The reason Duke had been present during that interview was that Ang Lee was selecting an appropriate soundstage for Hulk.

Even though he knew Ang Lee wasn't suited for the film, Duke had been unable to stop it. Long before he invested in Marvel, the film rights to Hulk had been sold to Universal Pictures. With superhero movies becoming increasingly popular these days, Marvel was eager to reclaim the rights, but there was no way Universal Pictures would easily let them go.

In the end, the film couldn't escape the fate of flopping at the box office. According to a supplementary clause in their adaptation agreement, if the movie's reception was too poor, Marvel had the right to reclaim the copyright at a relatively low cost. The two sides were currently negotiating, and bringing Hulk back into the fold wouldn't be too difficult.

Actually, this was a very simple issue. When it came to film, what was national was, most of the time, not global.

Cultural differences were absolutely not as simple as just talking about them.

Anyone with even a little bit of sense could see that China was rapidly rising, but for now, this was still a world dominated by Western culture.

By borrowing Ang Lee's words, Duke merely wanted to express this in a more tactful manner.

Zuo Qiang and Jiang Qingfeng had raised their hands several times earlier but hadn't been picked. They couldn't help but wink and signal at the host. The host was an acquaintance of theirs, and they had communicated beforehand, so when it came time for the next question, Jiang Qingfeng's name was called.

"Director Rosenberg, my name is Jiang Qingfeng. I'm from the College of Literature, and I'm a huge movie fan."

Looking at the short-statured young man, Duke nodded.

"Hello, Jiang."

Jiang Qingfeng asked the question he had in mind.

"I'm interested in developing a career in screenwriting, but from what I understand, the status of screenwriters in the Chinese film industry isn't very high. In Hollywood, do screenwriters and scripts receive much value and attention?"

"Of course they do. Anyone who can contribute to a movie's success is valued."

Hearing this, Jiang Qingfeng quickly added, "What about new screenwriters? I've read a lot of rumors and articles saying that when a screenwriter writes an outstanding script, it often sparks a bidding war among major Hollywood studios. Is that true?"

"That is indeed a possibility, but the prerequisite is..." Duke held up a single finger. "...that the screenwriter is a gold-medal writer in the industry! As for new screenwriters..."

Duke shook his head. "Let me put it another way. I'm a shareholder and executive director at Warner, so I know a bit about this. Every year, roughly 5,000 to 6,000 scripts are submitted to Warner. Warner's adoption rate is less than 0.05 percent, and the chances of a new screenwriter's work being picked up are less than one in ten thousand..."

"Hollywood never lacks scripts. In Warner Brothers' script library, there are at least thirty thousand scripts just sitting there gathering mold. Many of them might contain fresh ideas and groundbreaking creativity, but the chances of them being used are incredibly low. Let's just say, trying to move a movie studio solely with a script is basically a pipe dream."

"There's something you all might not be aware of. When seeking funding, many Hollywood projects are nothing more than an idea and a plan—there is no script at all. It's only after famous producers find interested investors and partners that they seek out renowned screenwriters to draft an appropriate script. Furthermore, every Hollywood project undergoes extremely strict reviews. Not even the CEO of a film studio has the authority to independently greenlight a project."

"Therefore, don't expect to impress Hollywood with a single script, and definitely don't imagine that Hollywood will hail someone as a genius just because of one script."

Zuo Qiang snatched the microphone from Jiang Qingfeng's hands and asked, "If your company encountered a highly creative script from a newcomer, would you use it?"

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, no!" Duke said calmly. "My company only produces commercial films. When it comes to Hollywood-style commercial cinema, innovation equates to massive risk. It means we might fail to recoup an investment totaling tens of millions of dollars."

This could be called the harsh reality of Hollywood. Production companies would rather use the mediocre ideas of famous screenwriters and producers than the highly creative scripts of newcomers.

On the famous creative script ranking—the Black List—many scripts languished for years without any company willing to pick them up. For the tiny fraction that did get made into movies, their commercial performance could only be described as exceedingly average.

This was China, and Duke was a world-renowned film director, so the topic invariably returned to Chinese cinema.

Thus, the next male student to ask a question brought it up.

"Who are your favorite Chinese movie and film director?" he asked.

"My favorite movie is Farewell My Concubine. The male actor who played Consort Yu still amazes me to this day." Duke thought about it for a moment. "My favorite director is Zhang Yimou. The use of color in his film Hero is deeply impressive."

Another person stood up and asked, "Director Rosenberg, will you ever direct a film with a purely Chinese style in the future?"

"Probably not."

Speaking up to here, Duke shifted his tone. "Nowadays, a growing number of Hollywood films are starting to experiment with blending cultural and national elements from all over the world into their creative styles. Diversification and the integration of other outstanding cultural elements have always been the developmental trend of Hollywood cinema. I personally really like Chinese culture, and I've also been absorbing elements of it to use in my movies, such as the Kung Fu in The Matrix. I will continue experimenting in this direction in the future."

The live interaction lasted for roughly twenty minutes. With the conclusion of this event, Duke's trip to China also drew to a close. He prepared to return to North America to begin the preliminary prep work for Batman.