ENGINEER-TURNED-director Liu Xiaoguang took as much delight in the online clip satirising Chen Kaige's big-budget epic The Promise as other mainland viewers who felt let down by the overblown production, but Liu felt the skewering didn't go far enough.
Taking a cue from hit American spoof Scary Movie, Liu came up with the idea of a full-length send-up of Chinese cinema's recent fixation on lavish, effects-laden productions at the expense of convincing plot and dialogue. The result is Big Movie: Tens of Millions.
The first such production on the mainland, Big Movie spoofs 17 big-budget films, including House of Flying Daggers, Infernal Affairs, Kung Fu Hustle and The Matrix. But unlike previous send-ups, which were circulated on the internet, Big Movie goes on theatrical release today.
Liu, 44, credits his achievement to the mainland's fast-growing number of e-gao, or internet satire. 'E-gao gives us a weapon to fight the dominance of elite culture,' Liu says. 'There are so many things that we can't criticise directly. At last, we have a way to challenge the authorities.'
Reflecting his identification with people at the grass-roots, the self-taught director calls himself Ah Gan, the Chinese transliteration for Forrest Gump. Liu views himself as an ordinary person who succeeds against the odds.
The graduate in electronic engineering from Xian picked up filmmaking skills while working for a post-production company in Shenzhen and became one of the first directors of horror films in socialist China, producing thrillers such as Ghosts (2002) and Wink Murder (2004).