Movie Mogul

Sid Ganis, the veteran Hollywood film producer Photo: Cai Xianmin/GT

The ongoing 16th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) has been welcoming a plethora of filmmakers and celebrities from home and abroad. Among them is Sid Ganis, the successful Hollywood producer and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose trip to Shanghai has given him a closer look at the Chinese film market.

With decades of experience as a senior executive at a number of major American film companies and studios, including Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Ganis has worked behind the scenes on a string of box-office hits, including The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of The Lost Ark (1981), Ghost (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), Big Daddy (1999), and Mr. Deeds (2002).

Last year, Ganis founded Jiaflix Enterprises, a joint venture with China Movie Channel (m1905.com)/CCTV6 to bring Hollywood flicks to Chinese Web users via a streaming service. Jiaflix is currently working with Paramount on the forthcoming Transformers 4, set for release in 2014. As chairman of Jiaflix, Ganis is playing an active role in casting the Chinese faces that will appear in the fourth installment of the Michael Bay-directed franchise.

Chinese elements

"Transformers 4 is very popular in China and all around the world. What's happening to make it different is that Michael Bay is concentrating on the Chinese story. A part of the Transformers 4 story will be a Chinese story - it will take place in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, which is very important and closely related to the whole storyline," Ganis told the Global Times.

Six Chinese actors will be cast in Transformers 4 - two established movie stars (Li Bingbing is the one of the two confirmed), and four selected from the public via a reality TV show and online voting.

The casting campaign has already begun the preliminary selection process on the China Movie Channel website at t4.m1905.com. The final winners will be announced in August.

Ganis is one of six judges who will help discover fresh Chinese talent. "The acting talent we select has to have the charisma, the 'stuff' necessary to play small but important roles in the film. They have to be pros in their outlook," he said.

Ganis told the Global Times that audiences will also see Chinese-branded cars in Transformers 4.

"Even though China is a gigantic country with a large population, the rest of the world still doesn't know very much about the country. Here we are, with this film in our hands, able to express to the rest of the world something about the Chinese culture, the Chinese people and their feelings, which are new territory for big blockbuster movies," he said.

Ganis also told the Global Times that he plans to co-produce a film with a Chinese partner in the near future, with the majority of scenes to be set in China with a story specific to modern day China.

A young dreamer

During a forum at the opening ceremony of the China Movie Channel Media Awards at SIFF, Ganis spoke alongside Guo Jingming, a young Chinese writer and director. Giving high praise to Guo, Ganis remarked that he is getting to see more and more Chinese films and know more and more Chinese filmmakers. He is fascinated by contemporary Chinese cinema.

The 73-year-old film veteran shared his own experience of working in the industry. "I was fascinated by films and movie stars when I was a kid. So I asked, 'How in the world can I be part of them?'" he said. Born in 1940 in New York, Ganis got his first job in his second year of college as an office boy for Lee Solters, a legendary press agent whose many celebrity clients included Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant.

Ganis' job involved running myriad errands, including getting Solters his coffee in the morning. "That experience as a young 18 or 19-year-old man took me to places that I had never been before - took me to The New York Times, took me backstage at the theater delivering a message to an actor or actress," he said.

"There were times when I would go home thinking, 'No, I can't do it, I can't do it.' And then I would still do it. I don't know how, but step by step I got to where I am now. I would like to say, as hard as it seems, keep trying," he said.

"For me, any kind of film which creates a kind of emotional excitement is good," he said. "And being a movie star is about being an artist. The quality of a star is indefinable except that a good actor has to stop the viewer dead in their tracks and compel the viewer to believe what he or she is seeing."