The film is led by superstar actors Huang Bo, Shen Teng and Xu Zheng, who are big box-office draws.

It's loosely inspired by Hugo Award-winning writer Liu Cixin's 2001 short fictional story, The Rural Teacher, about the final wish of a village schoolteacher, who has cancer, to teach his students about Newton's laws of motion-an effort that unexpectedly ends up saving humankind.

Ning read the story about nine years ago.

"I really like Liu's novels," he says.

"I started to read them one by one. After seriously chewing through all of his works, I can see they boast a variety of flavors, including epic narration, localized backgrounds, bold imagination and values."

Ning has long wished to adapt one of Liu's works into a feature-length film.

He ultimately decided upon The Rural Teacher because its absurdism fitted the theme he was seeking for his next film.

But the story of Crazy Alien, penned by five screenwriters, including Sun Xiaohang and Wu Nan, is completely different from the book.

Two best friends, played by Shen and Huang, struggle to become rich in an unnamed coastal Chinese city. But they're thrown for a loop by an extraterrestrial, who also catches the attention of a mysterious Western force.