Daniel Hsia spent months in China before writing Shanghai Calling so he had plenty of real-life inspiration for the movie's characters, including a British expat working as a private investigator. Hsia, '01, had come to know just such a person during his research.
But Chinese censors returned his screenplay with a dreaded note. There's no such thing as a foreign gumshoe in Shanghai, they wrote; such an enterprise would be highly illegal.
Hsia went back to his keyboard, all the while muffling his instinct to protest that the facts were on his side. "You just can't beat the Note," he says. "There is no way to reason your way out of it so you have to deal with it."
Making a movie in China—even an innocent romantic comedy—requires patience and flexibility. Hsia guesses his script underwent 30 rewrites anticipating and responding to censors' concerns. "There were times I was banging my head on the wall."
Even so, Hsia says he was able to make the movie he wanted, a lighthearted story about a swaggering Chinese-American lawyer tasked with sorting out a factory apparently knocking off his client's cell phone design. (The high-voltage word "piracy" is never uttered.) He is soon overwhelmed by misunderstandings. Hsia's fish-out-of-water plot was inspired by a Stanford classmate, David Vance Wagner, '01, who had regaled friends with stories about his move to Beijing.
Filming in China allowed Hsia, a television writer with credits on Psych and Four Kings, the chance to make his directorial debut. He assured producers that he alone had the language and cultural skills to do right by the script, oversee a bilingual cast and crew and appeal to audiences on both sides of the Pacific.
Score one for Hsia's parents, Shanghai natives, who forced their son to Sunday Chinese classes when Daniel was growing up in Illinois and Southern California. "It's a little bit strange for them because they spent many years building a life here and, sure enough, I went halfway around the world back to where they were born to direct my first movie," Hsia says.
Filmed for less than $3 million, Shanghai Calling earned Hsia honors as best new director at the 2012 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, best screenwriter at the Shanghai International Film Festival and kudos from Variety, which praised his "fizzy, sure-footed screenplay." (The Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, found the film too much of an ad for Shanghai.) The movie, whose cast includes Hollywood veteran Bill Paxton and up-and-comer Eliza Coupe, from TV's Happy Endings, had its U.S. premiere in San Francisco in February.
Sam Scott is a senior writer for Stanford.
