BangBang Picture’s founder John Dietz is a respected visual effects supervisor, producer and executive level manager. He has led teams in the USA, Australia, and China on movies that range from studio blockbusters to micro budget independents. John has worked in Beijing since 2012 and has creatively produced, supervised or consulted on projects such Jiang Wen’s “Gone With The Bullets”, Sun Zhou’s “Impossible”, John Woo’s “The Crossing”, Xu Zheng’s “Lost In Hong Kong”, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Wolf Totem”, and Renny Harlin’s “Skiptrace”. John is now onto his 15th feature film in mainland China.
John began his career with Oscar winning studio Rhythm & Hues in Los Angeles on films such as Babe, Mouse Hunt, Green Mile and Hollow Man. John later joined Rising Sun Pictures, where he became the Senior VFX Supervisor, as well as time spent in the roles of Head of Production and VFX Producer on “The Harry Potter Series”, “Charlotte’s Web”, “Where The Wild Things Are”, “Terminator 4”, “28 Weeks Later”, “Hunger Games”, “Wolverine” and many more.
CFM: How did you participate in the visual effects production of ANIMAL WORLD?
John Dietz: BangBang came onto Animal World in early pre-production, all the way until the very final delivery of the DCP. Along with the director we were the first ones in and last ones out.
CFM: What role did Bang Bang play?
John Dietz: We supervised and managed everything that had to do with Visual Effects for the film so the director and producers ONLY had to communicate with us. We did the rest.
CFM: How did you manage the visual effects production in ANIMAL WORLD?
John Dietz: We have a team and a process that we’ve been developing that makes it easier for us to break a film into smaller challenges, find the right solutions and then bring the work back together. Breaking a show into many components and shipping them around the world to the best value collaborators becomes a huge burden creatively, technically, culturally, business, organizationally, and communication management. But that’s what we do.
CFM: How did you cooperate with other visual effects companies?
John Dietz: We have a process that uses different tech tools, like cinesync and zoom for Communication. We organize information with Shotgun. We also manage a conform of the edit ourselves, which centralizes the work from a product perspective. Like we are building something, in this case piece-by-piece we are assembling a movie. We also have an internal DI suite so we QC everything from the vendors in Da Vinci.
CFM: What is the biggest difficulty and challenge you have encountered?
John Dietz: There are many many many challenges in doing VFX films for China. There are communication issues, lack of process from the production side, lack of budgets and time, lack of professionalism all around… But you need to sort through this haze of confusion to make the movie better, that’s the job. The real challenge is culturally how do we make a big VFX film that connects with the Chinese audience on a very deep and important level. Animal World has great VFX, but as a film it’s not relatable to the audience. At the same time Dying To Survive came out, and it’s an important movie for audiences. The real challenge in the China market is how to do both great VFX and tell a story the Chinese audience can relate to in the same film. That’s the challenge, and to do that there are so many pieces moving around China and the world that cultural storytelling, business, filmmaking, everything needs to work together. But that’s why we do this… to make something memorable for the audience.
CFM: Drawing from your experience working in both China and Hollywood, what is the difference in visual effects production and management between Chinese visual effects industry and Hollywood?
John Dietz: Hollywood is over-systemized and has too much waste, but the abilities are truly amazing. China is under-experienced and under-resourced so it feels more chaotic. But chaos leads to innovative solutions technically, creatively and in business.
People think we are copying Hollywood moviemaking in China, but that’s not going to work. What we need is to build a new system that takes the best from Hollywood and the best from China and becomes our own way. I feel that’s what BangBang is doing here.
CFM: What do you think China could learn from Hollywood?
John Dietz: Some of the system and process of Hollywood is useful. The VFX tools, like software, should be learned from Hollywood, but the process of how we actually make a Chinese film and how we tell the story needs to be our own.
We should look at Hollywood and how much they waste, and learn how not to do that.
CFM: What are our own advantages?
John Dietz: I mentioned it in a previous answer that the chaos of the Chinese market leads to innovative solutions. Also, China is a new chance to get the business of VFX right, Hollywood Studios and VFX Vendors did a bad job from the beginning of VFX in establishing their relationship to each other.
Culturally we will know much better what the Chinese audience will want. Westerners are on a completely different mindset, so assumptions are always way off and most the time will flat out not work here.
CFM: How do you see the relationship between storytelling and visual effects production?
John Dietz: Inseparable…
Unfortunately most don’t see it that way. And if they do, they may not be capable of doing something about it. It’s easy to say “It’s all about story”, but much different to live story and ultimately deliver story.
CFM: What is your thought on the development of Chinese visual effects market today?
John Dietz: Patience. Little by little we are getting better. I think as a market we need to pay more attention to what the audience wants, and use vfx to deliver that. My belief is that we keep pushing high-concept/genre type films in China, and they’ll continue to improve. Once the audience starts driving the quality demands even higher then we’ll have some great movies that western culture will want to consume. Then we will truly be crossing over into the west with our movies.
I personally don’t think you can develop films for both China and Hollywood markets. It’s like pushing Chinese Movies onto the west; it’s just not going to happen consistently. But if you make great high-concept movies for China consistently, then the west will begin to pull them into their culture.
I believe there is a deep desire to experience Chinese culture in the west; it just comes down to the packaging. You can’t force culture down someone’s throat like medicine. You need to deliver it in a sugarcoated way that the consumer wants, and usually that sugarcoated way is good ideas and good concepts executed well. There’s no reason high-concept Chinese films can’t go out to the rest of the world from China. I think it’s very much like Hollywood after World War II, when Hollywood was seen as so cool from the rest of the world, I feel we are just getting to that place in China. That’s why it’s interesting here.
CFM: What is your expectation for its future?
John Dietz: Great domestic Chinese films that have great VFX and are thematically important to Chinese audiences that growingly become attractive to western audiences.
CFM: What is your vision for BangBang? What do you expect BangBang to achieve in China?
John Dietz: We’ll keep working with the best filmmakers in China on their films, and we are making our own movies and content as well. So we see ourselves as becoming a successful Chinese Movie Studio.
CFM: What projects will BangBang take part in after ANIMAL WORLD?
John Dietz: We are working on GuanHu’s BaBai. ZhengXiaoLong’s Turandot, XiaoYang’s Airpocolypse, and our own web series which we’ll shoot later this year.
On top of this we are talking with many films moving into pre-production.
CFM: What is your plan for BangBang’s future development?
John Dietz: Keep working on great Chinese projects, including a push to become more of producers on our shows with the filmmakers. We will also focus much more on producing our own work, which will always have great VFX/High-concept but be material the Chinese audiences really want.
Our goal is to make Chinese movies the top entertainment in China, and in doing so also make it the top entertainment around the world. We are soon to be the biggest film market in the world, why can’t we also be the best?