markets. For the Hollywood producers- when it came to it and although they really liked the version of the film that they viewed – it was explained to us that they werelooking at it from a different point of view. For example, they did not like the original score which was a little too “Eastern” so we had to have a complete change of the music score for the US version. And for the States there won’t be any sensitive issues and so all of the scenes should be accessible for the US version however, it was still thought that some of the scenes could be heavily edited and so that’s how the Hollywood version came into play. Then when we came to the distribution in Hong Kong, it was suggested that wehave a “cinematic” version for them because they said that the Hong Kong audience won’t have the patience to watch the film festival version which is 109 mins in length. Hong Kong residents all live in this hustle and bustle! So it was suggested that they might lose interest in the first fifteen minutes and in fact most of the film festivals preferred to have this cinematic version – to help keep the audiences engaged. FF: It just shows how remarkable it is that the same film can be so different for several overseas territories! JY: Of course Kenny (Chan - the producer behind “Million Loves In Me”) and I knew it would be a lot of work and it was quite tedious having to create all these different versions but you have to remember that if you want your film to be shown in Hong Kong, you really have to do a cinematic version.
FF: Perhaps you could explain the situation that you have now found yourselves in relation to another film that has been released that may have caused a copyright infringement against “Million Loves In Me” as this may offer some valuable advice to other filmmakers. JY: Its very unfortunate, we came across this from friends on Facebook that had seen this other film and all of sudden there were some images that I viewed which were very, very similar to the images in “Million Loves In Me” and then of course I researched further online and then this film also talked about OCD (which is a central part of our film). And, in most of the publications and press releases and synopsis about our film we have talked or mentioned extensively about OCD and then we realised that someone had made this film behind our back. Then we began to dig deeper into what had happened and in particular into the roots about what had been going on and of course we were able to find out more because what I would like to say is that the images in our film are an original creation. “Million Loves In Me” is based on a true story which I was actually personally involved in as a lawyer on the case, but the images are the actual costumes / clothes worn by my real life client when she was handling the pets on a daily basis! As it happens, the costume has nothing to do with OCD but however, the lawyers acting for the other side stated that the similar costume in the other film is an OCD type of costume which is common to the public! We were very surprised because there is never an OCD costume and it is very funny how they would use OCD costume as a defence.
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