Chapter 830: The Bad Habits of Bad Movie Directors

Although this was the China-US Film Forum, it had inevitably morphed into a forum on Chinese cinema. Duke sat quietly, listening closely to the speeches from these top figures in the Chinese film industry. It served as an excellent opportunity to gain a fuller understanding of the Chinese market.

During the discussions, it became clear that directors were largely to blame for the low quality of Chinese films.

Ever since the Chinese film industry commercialized, it had largely adopted the director-centric system passed over from Hong Kong, rather than the producer-centric model popular in Hollywood. The current trend in China was to slap the words "A Film by Director So-and-So" on the screen during the opening or closing credits, making it seem as though everyone besides the director was completely irrelevant.

No matter how awful the actual movie was, the vast majority of directors would swear in interviews that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the work. They would declare how much they loved the script and how sincerely they had approached the shoot.

Along with claiming all the credit, these directors almost invariably complained about their hardships—how grueling the shooting conditions were, or how much danger the actors faced. But from the audience's perspective, how could hardship and danger excuse an incomprehensible movie?

Once playing the victim stopped working, many directors of these terrible films started complaining about other things. The most classic excuse was privately shifting the blame onto the cast—specifically, complaining about their salaries. Late last year, news broke that a certain actress had demanded ten million per film, scaring off many filmmakers who wanted to cast her.

One director privately griped that he had originally wanted to cast a specific A-lister, but the star's asking price was simply too high. A massive chunk of the production budget went straight toward paying that salary, leaving little for anything else. As a result, several planned special effects and set pieces had to be scrapped, and the film's overall quality naturally suffered.

Recently, "exorbitant salaries" had become a universally condemned phenomenon, prompting many actors to fire back and declare it standard "market behavior":

"Even the price of pork goes up, so why can't an actor's salary?" they argued. "We ask for high pay because the market demands it."

The actors' complaints held some truth, of course. Certain star actors and directors had built up enough goodwill from past films to guarantee a strong box office draw, and some young idols boasted massive fan bases that left many production companies envious.

Aside from blaming the cast, many directors habitually shifted the blame to the screenwriters. They claimed that China currently lacked good writers; the few decent ones left charged exorbitant rates and turned in rushed drafts, with dialogue that hadn't been polished at all.

Some directors even offered an analysis: the wave of commercialization in Chinese cinema had only truly begun at the turn of the century. Over the past dozen years, the older generation of screenwriters hadn't been able to adapt their creative thinking to meet current commercial demands, while the younger generation had no idea how to structure dramatic tension and conflict. As a result, the scripts they produced were basically nonsense, forcing the directors to rewrite them from scratch. However, since very few directors actually had academic backgrounds in literature, their revised stories inevitably ended up full of flaws.

From the screenwriters' perspective, these claims were absolutely ridiculous.

Wang Xingdong, the president of the China Film Literature Association, was present at the forum and repeatedly emphasized the importance of protecting screenwriters' rights. In his view, the current crop of directors constantly butchered scripts, turning wonderful stories into total messes. He noted that in many films—including some of his own—directors altered the plot to suit their own whims without the screenwriter's consent. This not only stripped away meaningful content but damaged the script itself.

Furthermore, Wang Xingdong complained that among all the stages of film production, screenwriters were already paid the least.

"For a film with a budget in the tens of millions, the screenwriter might get two or three hundred thousand at most, and even that's considered high. But compared to the salaries of the actors and the director, it's pocket change. It's not even enough to cover the cost of a single press conference. And even then, many production crews still owe their writers money."

He practically stood up to condemn the producers. "This phenomenon is already widespread in the industry. Which screenwriter out there isn't burdened with chasing down an unpaid debt? So, the reason Chinese films are bad isn't because the writers are talentless or charge too much. It's because the entire industry fails to respect their labor, which kills any motivation they might have to actually get things done."

No problem was ever entirely one-sided. Duke had once struggled and fought his way through this country's film circle, and he had tasked people with monitoring the Chinese market and gathering relevant data for years now. He understood the situation quite well.

Another theory regarding the low quality of Chinese cinema was that the overall environment for the industry was currently too good, attracting an influx of idle capital into film and television. Most of this "hot money" operated strictly from an "investment" perspective, aiming only for short-term profit returns.

Given the current state of Chinese film, it typically took only six months to a year to take a movie from principal photography to completion. If pre-production didn't require building new sets, moving from script acquisition to official project approval took a mere matter of weeks. The director's post-production and the official review by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television could generally be knocked out in around four months.

Once released, most films were pulled from theaters within a month. Therefore, if a project focused exclusively on the mainland market without bothering with overseas distribution, a solid box office run meant investors could fully recoup their funds in just a year and a half at most.

Looking at this timeline, creators were left with very little time. Creating a high-quality film on such a tight schedule was practically impossible.

Yet, many private investors forcefully defended this "fast-return" approach to making a quick buck: they were there to invest, and investments naturally required returns. Making cinematic masterpieces was a job for artists, and audience reception was the director's problem. For a businessman, making a profit was enough.

Looking at the types of terrible Chinese movies produced over the past two years, the vast majority fell into three genres: thrillers, romances, and comedies. Market research showed that these three genres currently required the lowest initial investment while most easily generating box office returns.

Just like in Hollywood, thrillers generally required very little capital. There was even a saying floating around the local industry: thrillers never lose money.

The same went for romances. As long as the right idols were cast and the marketing was handled well, even a blatant remake of a Korean drama would draw in hordes of swooning young girls. Comedies, on the other hand, relied heavily on their release window. Hong Kong directors like Huang Baiming might face universal panning for every comedy they made, but because they reliably secured spots during the New Year release season, they practically never lost a dime.

Because these low-budget, low-grade projects could still turn a profit, domestic investors gradually lowered their standards for local commercial films. Commercial investments always carried risks. Rather than taking a massive financial gamble to produce a high-quality commercial blockbuster, it made more sense to spend less money on a terrible movie. It might be unwatchable, but it still made a profit.

The most glaring counterexample to this trend was National Master Zhang's The Flowers of War. Rumors suggested his investors cut ties with him precisely because The Flowers of War had cost hundreds of millions of yuan to produce, only to bomb spectacularly at the box office. The businessmen backing the project found the loss unacceptable and began pivoting toward a lower-risk formula.

It was perfectly understandable for businessmen to chase profits, but this investment mindset would inevitably stunt the development of Chinese cinema. Everyone knew that if Chinese films truly wanted to break into the global market, thrillers, romances, and comedies wouldn't get them very far.

This line of thinking was already undermining the diversity of Chinese film. The most typical example was the fact that China had yet to produce a genuine science fiction movie. Meanwhile, of the Hollywood films that successfully dominated the global box office, at least half featured obvious sci-fi concepts or elements.

The prolonged absence of a globally viable Chinese sci-fi film wasn't just because the director community lacked a background in STEM; the most important reason was that investors were unwilling to stomach the financial risk.

Sci-fi movies demanded extensive special effects and long post-production cycles, and predicting the box-office competition two or three years down the line was practically impossible. Furthermore, computer effects were the ultimate example of "you get what you pay for." Trying to scrape by on a low budget only yielded cheap, "fifty-cent" effects; producing genuinely impressive visual effects on the cheap was impossible.

"We watch airplanes fly overhead all day long, but we've never actually been on one. That's the state of Chinese cinema."

Jiang Xiaojun's words were undoubtedly representative of the industry. "Our technical understanding keeps us grounded. It's not that we don't want to fly; it's that we lack the technology, the concepts, and the money. Missing even one means we can't get off the ground!"

While his statement might have been a bit exaggerated, it wasn't unreasonable. If Chinese cinema truly wanted to reach a global audience, it couldn't rely on isolated efforts in a single area, much less be solved simply by importing a few Hollywood-style scripts.

Just as Duke had said, Hollywood's global dominance was never purely about the scripts, nor was it solely the result of raw creativity and innovation. It was a comprehensive, multi-faceted phenomenon.

Later on, someone steered the topic toward Duke, and he took the opportunity to offer a few words. "I'm just a director, so I can only look at the issue from a director's perspective. In my view, many of your newly rising commercial directors need to avoid picking up certain bad habits..."

It wasn't appropriate for Duke to dive too deeply into the specifics. Otherwise, as an outsider, he would inevitably be seen as sowing discord.

In his view, the bad habits of many terrible Chinese directors had been caught from certain directors over in Hong Kong.