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Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim, which was released in July, even earned more in China than in North America. The box-office boom has prompted the inclusion of Chinese elements in Hollywood's tentpole films. Transformers 4 was set in at least four Chinese locations, and the producers of Iron Man 3 created a special version for Chinese audiences.

Chinese elements in Gravity should be eye-catching for local audiences, too: Inside the Chinese space ship is a small Buddha statue and a ping-pong paddle. Cuaron also put a pair of Chinese-made shoes inside the ship, but the shot was not included in the final cut of the film.

The setting, Cuaron says, is attributed to his Chinese consultants, who suggested "what elements should be there to convince audiences Chinese people have lived there".

He says the incorporation of Chinese elements in his film is organic, unlike the often clumsy and surgical use of 3-D.

"There are a handful of films that use 3-D organically, but most 3-D films were 2-D films converted to 3-D for commercial purposes," he says. "In the case of Gravity, the original storyline was from the Hubble Space Telescope to the ISS - to the Tiangong, because that's what existed in space at that time."

When asked what he would do if he could travel to space one day, Cuaron says he hopes to see the Earth without man-made borders.

"I hope Chinese authorities send me to space in their mission in the near future," he says, "and the first thing I would do is to look at our beautiful planet from above, to see the beautiful masses of water and land, and you don't see the silly colors we put on the maps."

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