The continuing courtship between Hollywood and China reached a new milestone last Friday with the release in China of “The Great Wall,” the much buzzed-about movie directed by Zhang Yimou and backed by Legendary Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Le Vision Pictures and China Film Group. With a budget of more than $150 million, the blockbuster epic, which features Matt Damon and Andy Lau fighting monsters on the iconic Great Wall, is the biggest co-production to date for the United States and China and probably the most expensive movie ever shot exclusively in China.



Along with those attributes come high expectations. Many are looking to see whether the film can help Hollywood further penetrate the fast-growing Chinese film market while fulfilling China’s longstanding ambition to make a global cinematic hit. If it succeeds, industry analysts say this type of big-budget, cross-cultural movie could be a model for future co-productions between China and the United States, the world’s top two film markets.

That will not become clear until after Feb. 17, when the film is released in the United States. In an interview, Peter Loehr, chief executive of Legendary East, the China subsidiary of Legendary Entertainment, and one of the movie’s producers, discussed what Hollywood and China could learn from each other and why he rejected accusations of the film’s “whitewashing” in the casting of Mr. Damon.

How did you get involved in making this film?

I got involved about four years ago when I joined Legendary. The movie was about to shoot, and we were looking at the budget and the story. The story seemed pretty cliché and not exactly what we wanted to do, and we weren’t able to hit a budget number that we wanted to hit. So we hit a pause button, and we started to rework the script. Then we showed it to Zhang Yimou. He was the first and the only person we showed it to.