(China Plus) The Thunder, a 48-episode TV drama series, will premiere on May 7th. It details how over 3,000 police officers busted drug rings in one night in Guangdong province in southern China, a region plagued with rampant production and trafficking in 2013.
Fu Dongyu is the director. In an exclusive interview with CRI, he talked about what he thought of reading the screenplay for the first time.
"The screenplay explores the deep reason as to why the large-scale prohibition of drug-making doesn't work. Is it simply because of the officials' umbrella of protection or corruption? From the perspective of an artist, the writer tried to elaborate his thinking through the drama. I felt astonished when I first read this screenplay."
The screenplay was adapted from a real case that marked the biggest-ever bust in the province. Thousands of police officers busted 18 drug cartels in Shanwei, a key base of meth manufacturing and trafficking.
They also confiscated almost 3,000 kilograms of meth, 260 kilograms of ketamine, and over 100 tons of raw materials during that operation.
However, The Thunder is more than "a cat and mouse game". It also explores the complicated relationships among those involved with the bust.
Fu Dongyu added:
"The protagonist is a police officer who witnesses the killing of his colleague and also his closest friend by a drug dealer. However, all other people were misguided to believe that the police officer is the murderer. Another plot of the story is a senior police officer using his son to entice suspects. So the complexity in their relationship is designed artfully."
Lufeng, a major center of drugs, sits by the South China Sea, where local dealers cooked more than a third of the meth trafficked in China between 2011 and 2013.
Crystal meth has also been smuggled overseas, to places like Australia, once a hotbed for imported meth. But last year, only one case was tied to Chinese traffickers, according to one officer.
Fu said production crews had originally planned to shoot in Australia, but for some reason changed the locations to Japan and France. He also disclosed that thanks to more cooperation between China and other nations in the film industry, shooting in other nations has become smoother and simpler.
"The shooting overseas is not so complicated for us as it used to be. In the past, we were totally unaware of what rules we should observe when shooting took place overseas. Now that there is a detailed plan, including the shooting duration, the number of actors involved and what assistance is needed, it could be easily realized. We signed cooperation deals with local shooting assistant companies which may help deal with all these issues."
Actors Huang Jingyu, Wang Jinsong and veteran Hong Kong actor Simon Yam costar in 'The Thunder'. It will air on both CCTV of China Media Group and iQiyi, a popular video-streaming platform.
Source: China Plus