The Hollywood of Asia
Posted: Sunday, September 02, 2007 6:24 PM
Filed Under:
Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
HENGDIAN, Zhejiang Province --- The paint was still drying when we showed up at 7 a.m. Dozens of film crew workers swarmed around the set: an 1880s Canadian "mansion" that had sprouted in a single day. (What normally takes three to four days to construct in Hollywood or a Canadian studio took just one day on this Hengdian movie lot.)
Teams of Chinese workmen were adjusting studio lights, hanging European oil landscape paintings, and screwing on door hinges.
"This window, this curtain is off camera here," said Attila Szalay, the director of photography for the movie, "Iron Road." He was speaking to his first assistant director, Sylvia Liu, a Chinese from Hong Kong, who nodded and said something to a colleague in Mandarin.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Actors in a period Chinese movie await their cue. |
They were overseeing the final touches before the next crew came into block the first scene of the day.
Wandering through the spacious rooms punctuated with colonial details - crystal sherry glasses, a porcelain tea set, even the doilies on the wood tables - we had a hard time reconciling what we were seeing with the world just beyond the walls: rice paddies and mountains.
'Iron Road'
The crew have been filming a feature, "Iron Road," which is only the second China-Canada joint venture to be created under a co-production treaty established in the 1960s. In addition to the Canadians and mainland Chinese, there's also a sizable Hong Kong contingent led by the denim-dressed director, David Wu, who first made his celluloid mark as John Woo's editor.
Since the end of April, the $10 million co-production has been based around this site, where the mantra, "Only 25 per cent of the movie is set in China, but we're shooting 75 per cent of it here," has become part of correspondent Mark Mullen's standup.
For the Canadians, it was their first time working in China.
"They really want to please, and that was their biggest problem," said Margo McKenzie, the set painter, of her team of Chinese painters who were trained to re-create European oil artwork. "If I ask them can they do that, they say, yes, yes, yes. But when we started doing it at the beginning, it was mostly painted brown. Wrong color!"
But the Chinese crews' work ethic helped to ease the pain over cultural misunderstandings.
Chinese work ethic
"These guys will put in 16-hour days without a single complaint," observed producer Raymond Massey. "As long as we gave them a decent lunch. Even when we didn't give them a good lunch - and there were a couple - they still worked hard without complaining."
Not only was there plenty of evidence of hard work but also a keen desire to improve.
Dozens of members of the lighting crew hovered around our cameraman, Marcus O'Brien, taking note of the NBC lighting kit. Some were especially impressed by his small HMI (a high-powered light) and an accompanying diffusion hood.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| A replica of the Forbidden City, to scale, sits on old farmland in Hengdian. |
"Chimera?" asked Zhang Xiao Jun, the handsome 51-year old Shanghainese gaffer, in broken English, referring to the brand of a hood used to diffuse light.
Zhang, who doesn't look a day over 28, has been working in film for three decades. He said China's movie industry has picked up noticeably the past few years, particularly in Hengdian, where he now works on average on three different productions a year.
But he also wishes for more foreign productions so that "we can grow as an industry," he said. "I want to become better in my field. You know, when those crews come from Canada or America, we learn so many...new technologies."
Acting for a better living
Hengdian also draws performers and extras - both from near and afar.
Driving past Guangzhou Street, a permanent backdrop used for colonial Chinese movies, we stumbled on three wise men. One of them, Pan Hai San, is a 71-year-old Hengdian farmer who has been working as a movie extra for six years.
"It's good work," he said, displaying a surprisingly intact set of yellowed teeth. "You can earn 30 to 50 kuai (U.S.$4-6) a day. Plus you get lunch."
Pan, who still tills the land when he isn't working on a movie set, said he'd like to keep doing this job as long as his health holds out.
Zhang Guo Fu is a Xinjiang native who graduated just last year from university in Henan province, where he studied music. With his head shaved and sporting a Chinese queue affixed with glue, he spent the time in between his scenes for "Iron Road" sending text messages from his cell phone.
"I've been here one month," said Zhang. "You can find a lot of work here. It's better than being in Xinjiang (a remote northwestern province)."
Everybody's a critic
As Asia's largest film lot, Hengdian increasingly attracts big-name productions in addition to the steady inflow of tv shows and low-budget movies.
The biggest movie shot here is Zhang Yi-mou's "Curse of the Golden Flower," which was set in an impressive life-size reproduction of the Forbidden City.
Everyone in Hengdian knows the film. A café waiter serving our crew drinks and Chinese sausage told us that it was China's costliest movie ($45 million).
I asked him whether he saw the movie and what he thought. "It was China's biggest investment," he said.
He paused as I looked at him expectantly. "Not my kind of movie."
Everybody's a critic.
