One of his final projects was writing a three-hour-long adaptation of André Malraux's 1933 novel Man's Fate, about the early days of the Chinese Revolution. The story was to have focused on several Europeans living in Shanghai during the tragic turmoil that characterized the onset of China's Communist regime. "The screenplay, I think, is the best one I've ever done," Cimino once said, adding that he had "half the money; [we're] trying to raise the other half." The roughly $25 million project was to be filmed wholly on location in Shanghai and would have benefited from the support of China's government, which said it would provide some $2 million worth of local labor costs. Cimino had been scouting locations in China since 2001. "There was never a better time to try to do Man's Fate", Cimino said, "because Man's Fate is what it's all about right now. It's about the nature of love, of friendship, the nature of honor and dignity. How fragile and important all of those things are in a time of crisis." Martha De Laurentiis, who with her husband Dino helped produce Year of the Dragon and Desperate Hours with Cimino, read his script for Man's Fate and passed on it. "If you edit it down, it could be a very tight, beautiful, sensational movie," she said, "but violent, and ultimately a subject matter that I don't think America is that interested in."