strategy+business^ issue^96120
Bruce Feirstein
is a journalist and filmmaker
known for, among other things,
writing or cowriting the James
Bond films GoldenEye, Tomorrow
Never Dies, and The World Is Not
Enough. His most recent Chinese
film, The Jade Pendant, will be
released in China in 2019.The night before my talk, I went to the TV broadcast of the festival’s Gold-
en Eagle Awards ceremony, which is sort of like the American People’s Choice
awards, in that the winners are chosen by popular vote across China. The TV
audience that night, I’d later learn, was 304 million. I didn’t understand a word
of the show. But as I sat there, watching the musical acts perform on a stage
filled with lasers and pyrotechnics, I was struck by what I interpreted as a West-
ern influence on Chinese pop culture. There was the Chinese Bruce Springs-
teen, a working man in construction boots and a leather vest; the Chinese Tom
Jones, an aging Lothario with his shirt unbuttoned to his waist; the Chinese
Spice Girls; the Chinese boy band; and the Chinese Alanis Morissette, singing
of heartbreak and revenge.
It would be five years before I realized that I was wrong in my interpreta-
tion. But on that night, thinking about how much culture we shared, I decided
to begin my talk the next day with a joke.
“Allow me to say that I am both ‘shaken and stirred’ by the warmth of your
greeting,” I said, to a hotel ballroom filled with filmmakers and media execu-
tives. “Changsha is such a beautiful city that I hope I can come back here one
day with 007, and blow half of it up. And I mean that as a great compliment.”
For a moment, the response to this was dead silence. Then, as the translation
sank in, a wave of laughter rolled through the audience. Clearly, I was among
friends — media colleagues — who all shared the same apocalyptic sense of hu-
mor, the world over.
Following this, I showed the opening sequence from a James Bond videofea
ture (^)
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