Hollywood has been not-so-subtly featuring Asian actors and locations in many of its recent blockbusters to appeal to a wider market. One imagines that in China, the advertising will tell a different story, and the poster won’t be as Damon-dominant. But Damon speaks the only lines, and is the only actor billed, despite the presence of Chinese-language cinema legends like Andy Lau and Zhang Hanyu. The film’s trailer is by all accounts spectacular Zhang is known as one of Chinese cinema’s greatest visual stylists for a reason. Now, less than a year later, the man who lectured the African-American producer Effie Brown over the limits of diversity in Hollywood is the face of a film that embodies all of the industry’s worst tendencies, by yet again putting a white American actor at the center of another culture’s story.
The Great Wall is now the most dramatic example of whitewashing: Though it’s rooted in Chinese history and culture, and is made by a Chinese director and studio, the film is already relying solely on the face of a well-known white American actor to sell its story.ĭamon is, by all accounts, a well-meaning guy with left-leaning politics, but he’s already once been embroiled in a debate over Hollywood’s institutional racism after a much-discussed episode of his HBO filmmaking show Project Greenlight. As China becomes a bigger and bigger part of the overall box-office market, it makes sense that Hollywood would produce more films designed to appeal directly to the country’s audiences.īut the poster alone has sparked an outcry that the film’s creators should have seen coming from 5,500 miles away-especially given all the recent attention paid to the industry’s lack of diversity in front of and behind the camera. The Great Wall, with a budget of $135 million, is the most expensive Chinese film ever made. I will be genuinely shocked.The Great Wall may well represent the next step in Hollywood economics: A film made by one of the country’s greatest directors (Zhang Yimou), shot on location in China and telling a story about the Northern Song Dynasty, while starring one of Hollywood’s biggest names. I will be surprised if people see this movie and have that reaction. If people see this movie and feel like there is somehow whitewashing involved in a creature feature that we made up, I will listen to that with my whole heart and I will think about that and I will try to learn from that. So, there's a lot of pipe they're trying to lay in that 30 seconds. So, they're trying to establish all these things. "Don't worry, they speak English in this movie, right? So, you hear my voice speaking English," Damon went on to say. There is a Chinese crew, stars that some of the western world knows, but not a lot."ĭamon also explained the teaser was intended to convey a lot of information in a short amount of time, including that the film was directed by the " Steven Spielberg of China," but would still be accessible to moviegoers unfamiliar with his work. There are actors we haven't met that are from China. It is a big, fantastical, popcorn, entertainment movie, but it has a visual style that is very, very much his and his only. "And we don't want people to be kept from work that they wouldn't have the opportunity, otherwise, to see that is very, very specifically Chinese," Pascal added. That's a serious thing," Damon acknowledged. "It was nice to react a little sarcastically because we were wounded by it.