Crawdads Sing a hopeful lament

Depicting Lee as a brilliant director with a strong vision to clearly know how to turn words into a screenplay and movie, she recalls that the four-year production journey of Life of Pi was full of hard moments, varying from the use of real tigers to tailoring a lot of computer generated imagery and spending a lot of time in the water.

"The biggest thing was who was going to play the boy (the titular role, Pi Patel). The director interviewed many young actors. Suraj Sharma was not an actor, but was attending the audition with his brother, and all he wanted was to get a hamburger after the audition. But they said: 'Why don't you try the part, too?' So, he did it and that's how Ang picked him," recalls Gabler.

Graduating with a major in English literature from University of California, Santa Barbara, Gabler is known in Hollywood for her preference for, and excellence in, adapting best-selling books into films.

Klara and the Sun, the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, has been acquired by 3000 Pictures and will also be adapted into a movie.

"I do look for really interesting stories that feature very diverse cultures. And I believe in casting diverse actors as well … I would love to have a Chinese actress play the role of Klara, for example," she says.

Currently, with Where the Crawdads Sing being screened in cinemas, the most special and comforting thing for the Hollywood veteran is to see the movie bring audiences back to theaters.

However, with more than half of the country's cinemas still closed due to pandemic, coupled with James Cameron's long-awaited tent-pole Avatar: The Shape of Water, set to be imported in a couple of weeks, the market prospect of Where the Crawdads Sing in China remains uncertain.

Currently, the movie has earned a high score of 7.7 points out of 10 on the popular Chinese review aggregator Douban, but, as of Tuesday, according to the live tracker Beacon, its box-office takings have stood at a mere 3.5 million yuan ($488,250).