The director who made a flawed film on Tibet (Seven Years in Tibet) is being received with open arms via a $30 million production being set up by producer Bill Kong. For those who haven’t noticed, Jean-Jacques Annaud is a go to guy for films featuring animals in feature films. The Hollywood Reporter reports that after bears, tigers and God knows what else, Annaud will get his rabies shot and feature packs of wolves in a big screen adaptation for the Chinese novel Wolf Totem. The film is about a Chinese student who trains a wolf in Inner Mongolia in the 1970s. Apparently the director went location scouting with the author who once worked with the pseudonym Jiang Rong. Here is a section I’ve pulled from Wiki which gives us an idea of the stature of the project.
In August 2004, the Beijing Forbidden City Film Company purchased the movie rights to the novel for one million RMB; the Beijing Youth Daily described the movie version as China’s highest-budget film as of 2005, and noted that the same special effects team which worked on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy had been contracted to work on the special effects for Wolf Totem. Overseas, Penguin Books paid US$100,000 for the world-wide English rights, setting a record for the highest amount ever paid for the translation rights to a Chinese book; an unspecified Tokyo publisher paid US$300,000 for the rights to publish a manga adaptation.
