INTERVIEW: Lee Chee Tian on Winning the Asia TV Forum & Market Chinese Pitch4 min read
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Asia TV Forum & Market just wrapped up its various ATF pitches last week. The ATF Chinese pitch provides a platform for talents around the world to expand into Chinese-speaking territories. Three winners from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore were chosen from amongst the submissions. Local Singaporean Lee Chee Tian was one of the winners of the inaugural ATF Chinese pitch with his story titled Mulan, The Robot Girl. With an intriguing title like that, it’s no wonder his idea came up top.
The most well-known story of Hua Mulan, it can be argued, is Disney’s adaptation of it into an animation in 1998. However, the inspiration that Lee quoted for his story was not Mulan, but in fact, another Disney adaptation. That is — the story of Pinocchio, which needs no introduction. Another inspiration of significant importance that Lee mentioned was the manga, Dr. Slump. For Lee, it was a childhood favourite comic of his that he had always hoped to develop into a live action movie. The protagonist of that manga, Arale, is a young robot girl built by her creator, Senbei Norimaki. Drawing on this similarity with Pinocchio, Lee hopes to create a story weaving these ideas together, to form a new take on Mulan that would hopefully “emerge as another worldwide icon like its predecessors”. Lee believes that “changing the lead character from a wooden puppet boy to a robot girl with artificial intelligence” would make it more relatable in the face of “current technological advancements” of the 21st century.
When asked how he prepared for the ATF Chinese pitch, Lee modestly replied that “since the story has been in [his] head for so many years already, [he] basically told it to the judges like [telling his] children a well-memorised and countlessly-repeated bedtime story”. Prior to that, Lee confesses, there was very minimal face-to-face interaction with the ATF judges. The first few rounds of selection merely needed the participants to submit their written text documents online to the competition organiser. It was only in the final round, which occured on 5th December, that Lee was called to pitch his story idea in person.
As an engineering graduate, it may be hard for some to imagine Lee as the established screenwriter and producer that he is now. His desire to “be creative and to tell stories”, however, had him seeking out “whatever filmmaking opportunities that [he] could remotely chance upon”. Indeed, Lee admits that it was not always a straight and easy path for him. His break ultimately came when he enrolled in a scriptwriting course and partnered up with a professional filmmaker for a class project, with whom he made a short film with. The film, Colours, went on to be selected by more than 40 film festivals across over 20 countries, cinching Best Film Award at several of those international festivals. Lee has been on the filmmaking path ever since. His collection of short films, aptly titled Wayang ABC, include works such as Anchovies, Beam, Colours, and Wa is for Wayang. Following the success of Colours, his other short films have also scored various international awards and recognition.
For budding filmmakers, Lee believes the best advice he can give is to “work hard, but also work smart”. Not many people can juggle all the aspects of filmmaking, and it is important to “identify which role in the production chain you can best perform in” — and work hard to become the best at that. Until then, it is more often than not better for the production to leave parts of the filmmaking process to others. Lee had started hoping he could be a writer-director too, but eventually grew to realise writing was his stronger suit. Now, he is “fully at peace and functioning perfectly well just being a writer, and occasionally a producer, leaving the director job to other more capable hands” which, to him, is “more important than fulfilling [his] own ego.”
Currently, Lee is waiting for Mulan, The Robot Girl to be greenlit for production. The sponsor of the competition, G.H.Y Culture & Media, will be in charge of the development of the winning scripts. With their access to potential investors in the larger China market as compared to the relatively fewer options here in Singapore, Lee hopes that the development of the film will commence soon, and allow smaller filmmakers to expand into Chinese-speaking territories. For now, we can only sit and wait for Mulan, The Robot Girl to come to cinemas near us…
