125typical of any business startup. On Monday we’d all sign off on the Chinese
domestic film strategy, and on Wednesday someone would ask, “Why aren’t we
making international movies with Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg?” Other
snags seemed to be more rooted in cultural differences. Sometimes it seemed
as if any signed contract could be renegotiated by invoking the phrase “things
changed.” Even the style, and mind-set, behind negotiations was foreign to me.
In the U.S., you’d begin to negotiate for talent based on the “ask” from their
last picture — say, $350,000 for a director. In China, my colleagues would
regularly counter this “ask” at 10 percent, or $35,000. Sometimes we made a
deal, sometimes we didn’t. But if someone had tried this negotiating tactic in
Hollywood — short of having a shelf filled with Oscars — no one would take
that person seriously.
Still, we managed to make our first movie. Hutong Days was a $3 million
domestic comedy, set in present-day Beijing. It told the story of a young architect
who loses his job when his wife goes away on a business trip, and learns to be a
better father, and a better husband, when he’s forced to search for new employ-
ment while caring for their 7-year-old son.
The movie did modestly well; the story seemed to resonate with the audi-
ence. But for me, the more pertinent lesson took place offscreen. The director
spoke no English, and I barely had any Mandarin. Yet as we worked together,
tweaking the script, staging the scenes, and editing the footage, we discovered
that we shared a mutual language of film and storytelling. We eventually under-
stood each other well enough to communicate just with hand signals. (You can
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