China seeks Hollywood star power Nanjing Massacre

China seeks Hollywood star power Nanjing Massacre

By H. Asher Bolande

NANJING, China (AFP): China has begun negotiations with Hollywood's top stars and producers in hopes of making an award- winning Schindler's List of its own to dramatize the horrific 1937 Nanjing Massacre.

Domestic backing and a draft script are already in place for Rabe's Diary -- based on the recently published memoirs of German civilian John Rabe, who saved thousands of Chinese refugees from the six-week orgy of rape and mass killing carried out here by Japanese troops.

Co-director Xie Yang told reporters the production was targeting famous actors to play the title role and other leads in order to assure a world-class film.

"We don't just want the movie to be released, we want to get an Oscar," he said on Monday.

Actors who have both won and received nominations for the U.S. Academy of Motion Pictures award have expressed "tremendous interest" in the part of Rabe, he said.

However, as negotiations were still incomplete, it was impossible to reveal their identity, said Xie, who will share the director's chair with his father, legendary Chinese director Xie Jin, 75.

One-half of the film's dialogue would be in English, he said, adding the film would also require a foreign star to play the female lead, an American professor.

Officials close to the project -- which has strong support from the city of Nanjing as well as the provincial and national governments -- refuse to estimate a budget.

But Xie Yang said it would be at least as big as that of his father's US$9.6 million Opium War, which was released last year to coincide with Hong Kong's handback to China

"It very much depends on casting," he said, adding such celebrated actors' paychecks alone can double the cost of making a film.

Xie Yang, who was trained in film production at New York University, said he is personally seeking U.S. film companies as "financial backers" for the movie.

Although the producer will still be Chinese, these companies' financing will obviously hinge on their approval of both the cast and the final script, he said.

"I will raise probably one-half of the budget from the U.S.," he said.

For historical accuracy, the film must be shot on location in Nanjing and during the winter, so all money issues must be settled in the coming months, he said.

Chinese officials hope to release the film in May 2000.

Japanese imperial troops killed between 140,000 and 300,000 Chinese during the weeks after they captured this eastern Chinese city, then China's capital, in December 1937.

The atrocities, aimed at terrorizing China into submission, also included the rape or gang-rape of at least 20,000 women and girls, according to local historians.

By recording the brutality in his diary, Rabe -- a long-time representative of Siemens in China -- provided historians with one of the most detailed and objective known accounts.

The 2,000-page memoirs were all but forgotten for more than 50 years in a home of one of his descendants but emerged unscathed in the early 1990s and last year were published in English for the first time by Little, Brown and Co.

Rabe reportedly saved 300,000 people from the rampage by organizing an "international safety zone" together with other foreign nationals.

He even packed his home and its walled compound -- over which flew Nazi Germany's swastika-emblazoned flag -- with disarmed Chinese soldiers and refugees to protect them.

The film would arrive amid growing worldwide interest in the events. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, written by Iris Chang, a Chinese-American descendant of survivors, hit the international best-seller lists last year.

Beijing is particularly keen to promote such awareness in the context of what it views as insufficient efforts by Tokyo to apologize and repent its aggression during World War II.

Howls of indignation erupted in China last year at the release of Pride, an Instant in a Lifetime, a Japanese film that lionized convicted war criminal General Hideki Tojo and denied that the massacre took place.