As for the financing of the ambitious project, Schwankert revealed that The Six is completely a Chinese production. At first, he and Jones paid for bits of travel and research on their own, before LP Films of Shanghai and producer Luo Tong took on the project and QC Media later joined as a producer and distributor, he said.
Schwankert traveled around different continents and countries -- the United States, Canada, Britain, and China -- to learn what had happened to the Chinese survivors after their rescue. Notebook in hand, he asks probing questions and acts as a sympathetic bystander and active participant, journalist and even detective to painstakingly piece together the puzzles of the fates of the six Chinese survivors.
As opposed to the other Titanic survivors, the fates of the six Chinese men were shrouded in mystery. Before they boarded the ill-fated ship, little was known about them, and after they were rescued, people believed they had behaved dishonorably by taking away seats from women and children in the lifeboats. But Schwankert set the record straight.
"Many people believe the Chinese men on 'Titanic' were stowaways, either on the ship itself or in lifeboats; they were not. Nor were they part of 'Titanic''s crew. They were fare-paying passengers, just like every other third-class passenger. There are other claims that they dressed as women to enter lifeboats. There is no evidence of that, even as the claim has persisted for over 100 years," Schwankert said.
Some of the research methods Schwankert and his team used to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the six Chinese survivors, like tracking down their descendants, figuring out the survivors' escape means and their later whereabouts were compelling. For example, to prove some of his hypotheses, Schwankert agreed to an experiment to see himself what it is like to experience hypothermia and had a lifeboat reconstructed at a school in Beijing with some students playing "stowaways" by hiding under the benches.
Regarding the most pressing challenges he faced when making "The Six," Schwankert explained that it involved identifying the six survivors at the outset.
"The biggest challenge was beginning with a list of names that really told us nothing. We had Chinese names that were romanized, so we didn't know where these men were from, what dialect of Chinese they spoke, or what their Chinese names were. That made our progress quite slow when we started out," he said. But he and his team persisted, identified the six men, and traced their whereabouts after the rescue.
"By the time we were finished, about 20 researchers had assisted us with our work. That included genealogists, and researchers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Arthur (Jones) and I are historical optimists: We believe we're going to find material when we set out to find it. We never believe anything is 'lost to history' -- that's just an excuse that people use instead of admitting they ran out of resources or time," Schwankert said.
