Chinese studios to produce Kurosawa's shelved script

Nearly two decades after the death of iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, Chinese producers will make a film based on his shelved script, The Mask of the Black Death.

Beijing-based studio Huayi Brothers Media Corp and Taiwan filmmaker Chen Kuo-fu's CKF Pictures announced the joint project last week.

The Mask of the Black Death is expected to hit theaters during the weeklong National Day holiday in 2020. The holiday is the other most profitable period at the Chinese box office, with Spring Festival being the first.

Kurosawa, the first Asian to win the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival for Rashomon in 1951, influenced Hollywood greats such as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

Originally, The Mask of the Black Death was penned for Kurosawa's second production with a former Soviet studio, after his first such coproduction, Dersu Uzala, won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1976. Dersu Uzala was his first non-Japanese film, based on the memoir of a Russian explorer.

Kurosawa wrote the script for The Mask of the Black Death in the late 1970s but he didn't make it into a film before his death in 1998. Since then, filmmakers have wanted to make it.

The script is based on American author Edgar Allan Poe's gothic fiction The Masque of the Red Death, which was adapted for cinema by Roger Corman in 1964.

The book's story is about a prince who along with his nobles hides inside a castle to stay away from a deadly disease that's killing common people.

Wang Zhonglei, co-founder and CEO of Huayi, says he first heard of Kurosawa's script from a Chinese artist in Japan. He then visited the director's family to obtain the copyright for adaptation.

"We are feeling both fortunate and nervous," he says of the opportunity.

Chen, known for producing commercial hits, says he hopes the late Japanese master's script will boost Chinese-language movies.

Ye Ning, vice-president of Huayi, says the country's lackluster market last year has prompted filmmakers at home to focus more on content and quality.

More big projects to be jointly produced by the two Chinese studios were unveiled at last week's media conference in Beijing.

Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings, the third installment in the Detective Dee film series, will hit the big screen during the Spring Festival holiday in February next year. A tale about the Tang Dynasty (618-907) detective Di Renjie, the new movie will see actors Mark Chao, Feng Shaofeng, Lin Gengxin and actress Carina Lau reprise their roles.

Zhang Jialu, the screenwriter for all the three Detective Dee movies, says Tsui Hark, the director, is now working on building the story in Taiwan.

Mojin Returns, a sequel to the 2015 hit Mojin: The Lost Legend, will show the new adventures of three tomb explorers. The feature will be released in 2019.

Other big movies to be coproduced by Huayi and CKF include Painted Skin Prequel, in 2019, and Onmyoji, next year.

The previous Painted Skin movies, released in 2008 and 2012, center on a bittersweet romance between a human and a fox.

Onmyoji, which is set in a fictional world where humans and ghosts coexist, is based on a cellphone game by the same name.

The game attracts more than 10 million players on average daily since it was released in September.

Chen Kun, the A-list actor who leads the cast in both Painted Skin Prequel and Mojin Returns, says China's rapidly evolving movie industry is making it very attractive to actors and actresses.

He says the lineup of the five movies, for example, shows that Chinese movie industry is increasing its budget and scale.

xufan@chinadaily.com.cn