Shanghai

Period drama set in Shanghai 1941, releases in China June 17

With John Cusack, Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li at the helm, Shanghai was one of the biggest recent productions to shoot in Thailand.

The story of ‘Shanghai’ is set in China just before Pearl Harbor when most of the country has been taken over by the Japanese. John Cusack plays an American spy, Paul Soames, who arrives in the Shanghai to meet up with his colleague, only to find that he has been killed. He soon finds out that his colleague had been investigating Anthony Lanting, a local drug lord, played by Chow Yun Fat. The deeper Paul enters into the social fabric of the city, the more he realizes that nothing and nobody is what it seems. Antony’s beautiful wife, played by Gong Li, is loyal spouse and Chinese resistant fighter in one. Everybody in the city seems to be a double agent struggling to find their way in a cruel time, where their personal needs and desires often clash with the harsh divisions imposed by the impending war.

Creating Shanghai circa 1941 in Bangkok the biggest challenge of the film, and in order to do so, we ended up building one of the largest back lot sets ever built in South East Asia. With amazing production design by Jim Clay (“Children of Men”) we put together the best Thai construction team possible to build the set which included 12 separate buildings (some five stories tall), two intersections and a water tank to house the Shanghai port.

As one of the largest scale period epic dramas to shoot in Thailand, the preparations included finding dozens of period vehicles from private collectors all around Thailand, creating thousands of period costumes, fabricating Chinese period props, rickshaws and enough period set dressing to fill our extensive sets.

In the end, the production of “Shanghai” in Thailand was a huge success. The film is currently in post production in London and the release date should be announced soon.