The upcoming Pacific Rim sequel takes influences from Hong Kong cinema, features Chinese actors and was partly shot in Qingdao. Xu Fan reports.

When Steven S. DeKnight was young, he often went to cinemas to watch Hong Kong action movies by the iconic Shaw Brothers studio. And one of his favorites was Jimmy Wang Yu's martial-arts classic, Master of the Flying Guillotine.

During the American director's recent Beijing tour to promote his upcoming sci-fi film, Pacific Rim Uprising, he says Chinese audiences will see the influence of Hong Kong cinema in the movie.

The special-effects-studded movie will simultaneously open in China and North America on March 23.

The new film takes up the story 10 years after the end of the first movie, Pacific Rim (2013), by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, director of The Shape of Water (the Oscars' Best Picture for 2018).

The latest 110-minute installment is about a new generation of Jaeger (a kind of robot) pilots who fight alien invaders from the deep sea.

For sci-fi fans, the Pacific Rim franchise is a combination of Transformers and Godzilla.

DeKnight says: "We wanted each creature to be loosely based on an animal you can find in real life. We wanted every monster to be clearly different."

He also says that he and the visual-effects team studied a lot of Chinese and Japanese mythology and researched animals, such as the rhinoceros, to seek inspiration while creating the monsters.

DeKnight, who is known for his work on hit television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Spartacus, says his experience in the TV industry helped him when he was making the big-budget movie.

"For the television shows, we always had a writers' room where all the writers worked together to 'break' the story. 'Breaking' means figuring out everything. And I did the same thing for this movie."

Despite this, the path to approval for the script was not smooth.

When Pacific Rim lead actor Charlie Hunnam left the project and joined the remake of the 1974 biographical movie Papillon, DeKnight had to dump his original story.

Thanks to a suggestion from del Toro, who is Pacific Rim Uprising's producer, DeKnight made the sequel with John Boyega starring as Jake, the son of Stacker Pentecost, the commander of the pilot team, a role played by English actor Idris Elba in the first movie.

In the sequel, Jake is a hooligan who realizes the error of his ways and goes on to lead a new generation of pilots.

Scott Eastwood, the youngest son of Academy Award-winning actor-director Clint Eastwood, also appears.

The 31-year-old American actor stars as Nate Lambert, a pilot who fights alongside Jake.

Eastwood, who was with DeKnight and Chinese actress Jing Tian in Beijing to promote the film last week, says: "I was a fan of monster movies while growing up. And the first time I saw Godzilla, I was around 10 years old. It was my first experience of the monster cinematic universe. It was something really cool."

The $150 million movie, jointly produced by Legendary Pictures, Universal Pictures and the Shenzhen-based Shanwei Film Industry, also has other Chinese stars like action star Zhang Jin, known for Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster, as well as Huang Kaijie, Ji Li, Lan Yingying, Yu Xiaowei and Chen Zitong.

Speaking about his impressions of Shandong province's Qingdao, where the film was partly shot, Eastwood says the sets were "incredible".

"It (Qingdao) is full of history. They (Wanda Studios, the largest of its kind in China) built some amazing sets. We shot a lot of the indoor sequences there," he says.

The filming at the studio began with a typical Chinese ceremony with DeKnight alongside Boyega and other actors. They held burning incense and prayed for a success. The ceremony was followed by fireworks.

"I loved it. It (the ceremony) felt special," DeKnight says.

So, will the Chinese "magic" secure the film's box-office success in the world's second-largest market?

When the first Pacific Rim was released in 2013, it was a flop in the West, but surprisingly earned around 700 million yuan ($110.6 million) on the Chinese mainland, making it the first Hollywood movie to earn more in China than it did in North America.

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(China Daily 03/22/2018 page19)