Craig McCourry of Battle Ground spent years chasing stories across the globe, from Hong Kong to China and India. Today, he’s sharing that cinematic ambition through Banyan Tree Movies, his Southwest Washington studio.
Born in Eugene, McCourry studied film at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. He later faced a choice many ambitious creatives in the area must confront: Portland or Los Angeles. Knowing he would never run out of film aspirants, he chose the latter, which pushed him to a path that took him around the world.
As a cinematographer and cameraman, he gravitated toward travel-heavy work, including documentaries, commercials and especially the stock footage industry.
“I would actually literally sometimes be on the road for six months out of the year going from city to city and filming those locations,” McCourry said.
He shot cities across continents, building libraries for agencies such as Getty Images, all while chasing what he calls “another way to see the world and meet interesting people.”
Documentary work pulled him further. He filmed steam railways in China and India and profiled foreign correspondents in Press Pass to the World.
“They themselves enjoyed journalism because they get to meet a lot of different people … It fed their curiosity,” he said, noting he shared a similar ambition.
That same hunger eventually brought him to Hong Kong, one of the world’s densest cinematic ecosystems.
Falling for Hong Kong
McCourry first visited the city while shooting projects abroad, which immediately caught him.
“I always loved the city. I always thought it was one of the most fascinating cities in the world … an amazing photographic city.”
Its vertical intensity, neon haze and compressed streets struck him as “somewhat of the ambiance of Blade Runner.”
Hong Kong is also where he met the woman who would change his life and career trajectory. Shortly after moving into an apartment in Hong Kong, he met Grace, a professor of Chinese literature and film studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Grace was also a scriptwriter for local cinema, a film critic who wrote books on the subject matter.
“I met her at a cafe on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong of all places,” he laughed.
Their shared connection to storytelling, cinema and place built a life together. For more than a decade, they remained in Hong Kong, while McCourry shifted into historical dramas, creating “Christmas at the Royal Hotel,” “Hong Kong 1942” and “Battle Box,” historical dramas set in Hong Kong. But the political climate tightened year by year, and the stories he wanted to tell became harder to make due to China’s hold on the city.
He explained that, while filmmakers did not receive direct orders, pressure came with understanding that certain filmmaking carried consequences.
“It’s not like the government has to force you to do something. You already know … you’re gonna have problems if you do certain things,” he said, noting that people helping on a film disliked by the government could be blacklisted. “Chinese history is very fraught with … certain dangers … You have to talk about it in a certain way.”
As an American telling stories about Chinese and British history, the guardrails narrowed fast.
“To continue staying in Hong Kong, I’d have to start to change my way of doing things … basically by self-censoring what I would potentially talk about story-wise,” he said.
By 2023, he and Grace left for the U.S.
“You have to make a calculation of when you have to jump ship and start in a new direction.”
Landing in Clark County
Relocating wasn’t simple. They needed affordability, access to a major airport and enough space for a home studio. The Portland metro area hit every mark.
“It [was] an hour drive of the Portland airport … and I quickly found that Clark County had a lot of different potential opportunities,” he said.
By May last year, they were living in Battle Ground. Within months, McCourry’s habit of building networks kicked in. He started Battle Ground Film House, a free group for independent filmmakers and those interested in the subject.
The group still meets at SixEight Church bi-monthly and can be found online at shorturl.at/gYcE5.
The gatherings quickly revealed just how much hidden film talent lived in the county. Editors, cinematographers, actors and writers can be found quietly “siloed in their own projects.”
People in Battle Ground, he points out, rarely imagine themselves becoming filmmakers because they’ve never had the exposure or infrastructure. McCourry aims to change that stereotype.
On their new property, Craig and Grace established a modest but functional home base: Banyan Tree Movies. The name comes from a symbol that still anchors his past.
“The banyan trees always symbolize Hong Kong or Southeast Asia to me,” he said.
The studio is a pole barn that serves as a storage space for props when needed. But it’s dry, flexible and big enough to build micro-sets and stage scenes.
Their specialty remains historical dramas set between the 1930s and 1960s, often with East or Southeast Asian storylines. The challenge in North America, he explains, is the lack of sets and wardrobes. The long-term plan is to change that through “time-rich, budget-smart craftsmanship.”
“We want to build film sets that have a kind of authenticity … by spending a lot more time, sourcing the props over many months or even a year or two and then building out the film set over a period of time, at a lower cost than could be done in Los Angeles,” he said.
This model of flexible space and long prep windows could make Clark County attractive to indie productions priced out of Los Angeles.
“The film industry is in very serious, deadly bad shape … The cost structures are just not very sustainable,” he said.
A first proof of concept
McCourry began shooting his first Clark County production, “The Singularity Protocol,” last week. The two-day shoot brought in actors from New York, while the entire crew came from the network he built through the Battle Ground Film House Meetup. The project delivered paid work to local filmmakers and pumped business into Battle Ground hotels and restaurants.
The short centers on two British soldiers isolated in a remote outpost who communicate with an artificial intelligence from the future through aging equipment. The story reflects McCourry’s view of the moment we’re in: a world negotiating the line between human instinct and machine logic.
For McCourry, exploring AI through a historical frame gives the issue a longer arc. It lets him ask what control and communication mean when the voice at the other end isn’t human and how that tension ties into the broader uncertainty artists feel today.
McCourry was still undecided last week on whether he would use artificial intelligence in the film’s production to some extent, whether through the AI character’s voice or through post-production visuals.
He is already planning his next film, “Falling Petals of Shanghai,” a story in which three middle-aged women face a rapidly changing China under communist rule and must decide whether to leave.
In the long term, McCourry’s goal is to create an ecosystem where people know one another, share skills and see filmmaking as something possible here, not only in Hollywood.
Readers can find his past work at banyantreemovies.studio.
