Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling

THIRTEEN

Regional vs. International Perspectives

Universalizing Regional Stories

China and Japan

Lu Wei, co-screenwriter of Farewell, My Concubine (China/Hong Kong, 1993) and To Live (China/Hong Kong, 1994) – both huge successes at the Cannes Film Festival – read Robert McKee’s Story¹ in the early 1980s. Critic Wang Tianbing’s long-time friend Lu Wei was amazed that McKee’s book didn’t focus on the miserable fates suffered by literary geniuses, like so many Chinese books about writing; instead it taught practical writing skills: “Such a thing could only come from American culture, he thought.”²

Lu Wei went on to write “possibly the only writing guidebook that has many practical functions written by a Chinese writer,” developed from Wang Tianbing ...