A few months ago, I was asked if “Star Wars” was an American franchise. It was a fascinating question and my reply via text was novel-length. One might automatically answer: “Yes, of course, ‘Star Wars’ is an American franchise.” It’s iconically American. Obviously, this is true to a certain extent—“Star Wars” is a crucial part of American pop culture.

But what actually makes a film American? (Or French, or Indian or Nigerian?) Is it the director’s nationality? Where it was filmed? The heritage of the actors? Where the funding came from? Who produced it? What the salient themes are?

Brandon Wilburn | Student Life

This used to be an easy question with an easy answer. French films were French because the director was French, the funding came from France, they filmed in France and the actors were French. Simple. But with the snowballing globalization of all industries, including film, this is no longer the case. Films are increasingly made by production companies, casts and crews from many different countries. This is called international coproduction.

Take “Rogue One” for example. (This is the last time I’ll write about it, I swear.) Gareth Edwards, the director, is British. Only one member of the main cast is American (Alan Tudyk, the voice of the droid). It was filmed on location in the Maldives, Jordan and Iceland, and in studio in England (like all other “Star Wars” films). The story is set in another galaxy in the past. What makes this movie American? The production company is the only American thing about it, if you define a company’s nationality by where it was founded and is located. It’s made by Lucasfilm, which is located in San Francisco and distributed by Disney.

The rest of the franchise is only slightly more American, production-wise. The other directors are American, but the movies aren’t filmed in America and not all the lead actors are from the U.S. Lucasfilm is American, though, and that seems to be the deciding factor.

So it’s the production company that determines a film’s nationality?

Not always.

Consider “The Great Wall” which was released in the U.S. this past weekend. It’s that movie in which Matt Damon fights aliens on the Great Wall of China in the 11th century. The film received a lot of criticism when the first trailer came out because it looked like another whitewashed Hollywood movie. What a lot of us didn’t understand at the time is that this is not an American movie appropriating Chinese history to sell tickets. This is a Chinese(-American?) movie appropriating Matt Damon to sell tickets. “The Great Wall” is directed by an internationally acclaimed Chinese director, Zhang Yimou. He’s won awards at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and directed the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “The Great Wall” is filmed in China with a Chinese cast apart from Damon, Willem Dafoe and Pedro Pascal.

Whether or not it plays into the white savior narrative, the film is an attempt to get Chinese movies to sell abroad by using a famous American actor as bait.

Hollywood blockbusters now make a good chunk of their profit abroad, most prominently in China. In fact, films have even altered their material to cater to China (the “Doctor Strange” Tibet debacle, for instance). Just as China is a huge market for Hollywood, America could be a huge market for China. So, it makes sense that China would be interested in attracting American audiences.

The production companies behind “The Great Wall” are Legendary Pictures (recently acquired by a Chinese company), Le Vision Pictures (a Chinese-American company), Atlas Entertainment (just American) and China Film Group (just Chinese). So is “The Great Wall” American or Chinese? It’s in English, with an American star and a Chinese director, filmed in China and produced by both Chinese and American companies. The film could easily be American, but it’s still distinctly Chinese. It must be Zhang Yimou’s role that decides the nationality of “The Great Wall.”

So the director’s home country is the film’s nationality?

Not very often.

Take Guillermo del Toro, for example. Del Toro is the Mexican director famous for his gothic horror films in both English and Spanish. His 2004 film “Hellboy” is considered American, according to Wikipedia. “Hellboy” starred American actors, was filmed in the Czech Republic and was made by American production companies. If Zhang Yimou made “The Great Wall” a Chinese film, del Toro should have made “Hellboy” a Mexican film but didn’t. Del Toro’s other films are even more multinational. “Pacific Rim” (2013), the giant monster versus giant robots masterpiece, draws heavily on the Japanese Kaiju genre, is set in Hong Kong, stars English and Japanese actors, was filmed in Canada in English with some Japanese and was made by Legendary Pictures (before the Chinese bought it) and del Toro’s own production company DDY. On Wikipedia it’s listed as American and Mexican, which only kind of makes sense.

By this fourth example, the web becomes too tangled to unravel. (I didn’t even get to the South Korean-Czech-American/British? film “Snowpiercer” or distribution practices.) Every example has a counterexample; every answer needs an addendum.

As Americans, we have a tendency to assume that every film in English that we see is made by and for us, since we claim Hollywood as our own. But there are so many more layers to what makes a film American than just the language or where it’s playing. Clearly production companies can often be the deciding factor, as that’s what Wikipedia seems to use, but so can directors or creators. There’s no single way to define a film’s nationality.

In some ways, it doesn’t matter. Audiences are still going to show up to movies they find interesting, without knowing the different nations involved in production. I’d like to say that in the end, a movie is just a movie, but that is an oversimplified politicization of a $38 billion industry. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes during preproduction and production, so many economic negotiations that we will never be privy to. International coproduction isn’t a new thing, in the broad meaning of the term, but it will likely become a lot more publicly recognized as we continue to globalize. And if it brings us good movies, who cares what the country listed on Wikipedia is?