1993

A director's Dream An actor's Nightmare

Director wong Kar-wai is making a masterpiece: Dong Xie Xi Du (Evil in the East, Poison in the West).   But with the time taken and the scenes rewritten, the actors are taking the strain, says SCARLET CHENG.

ART is long, but film-making is brief. Especially in Hong Kong, where intense commercialism forces pictures to be shot and delivered at dizzying speeds ~ last year's Tsui Hark hit Once Upon a Time in China II was reputedly wrapped-up in a month.

This leaves little room for "art film" directors, but Wong Kar-wai, whose Days of Being Wild (1990) is a cult favourite, is going strong ~ albeit staggering from the weight of his latest, most ambitious enterprise, Dong Xie Xi Du (Evil in the East, Poison in the West). And maybe his own perfectionism as well.

Behind schedule and over budget, Wong has been shooting in Yu Lin, a beautiful, remote region of Shaanxi province. Production staff from Hong Kong began arriving two months ago.

Thanks to Wong's continuing revisions of story and script, segments shot earlier this year are now unusable. "What's this story about?" is a frequent question. Few know, and they aren't telling. When asked, production manager Chen Pwei-hwa smiles.

Basically, the movie seems to be a martial arts film with a psychological bent ~ maybe Yojimbo meets Three Faces of Eve ~ with Wang shooting the dramatic segments and veteran Sammo Hung Kam-bo handling the blood-spurting action stuff.

To complete the principal photography, superstars Lin Ching-hsia, Leslie Cheung and both Tony Leungs ~ Kar-fai and Chiu-wai ~ were flown in at the start of the month. They arrived unsure of who they were playing or how their stories linked.

Art director William Cheung says simply: "It's a story about love; different kinds of love."

Hmm. Not healthy love, as everybody in the film wants to do someone else in. Lin, for instance, plays a schizophrenic who thinks she is also her brother. She wants to kill him because he is insanely possessive, while he wants to kill her lover. Confusing?

Neither does it help that, in the usual Hong Kong fashion, she and the other actors get their script for the day just before they go before the camera.

IT IS Monday, and we arrive at a series of caves dug into the cliff of a river gorge. Inside one small chamber of yellow stone, 20 to 30 people are squeezed during shooting  half of them smoking. Shooting synch sound and doing take after take, the atmosphere becomes stifling and tense. "An Jin!" "Quiet!"

On the set, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, Wong is tall, lanky and slow of speech.

True to his reputation -and to cinema as art ~ Wang gets ideas as he shoots, changing camera movements and angles, constantly adjusting the actor's reactions and delivery. Compared with other Hong Kong directors, he is painfully slow.

Furthermore, he is writing as he goes, sometimes rewriting yesterday's scenes to be reshot today ~ a director's dream but an actor's nightmare. Leslie Cheung is depressed that almost a month of previous shooting has been thrown out the window.

"We should buy up the discarded footage," Lin joked, "and cut another film with it."

The film, from watching the video recording of the takes and the still shots by the staff photographer, looks wonderful. Days of Being Wild looked wonderful, too, but suffered from a meandering storyline. Some of the confusion was supposed to be explained in a sequel, but Wang shot so much and so long he ran out of money to make it.

On Tuesday, cast and crew go to an abandoned mud settlement, built on a small hill in the desert. Cheung and Tony Leung Kar-fai are shooting a scene at the lookout post, but the cold drizzle that started in the afternoon is getting worse. Leung has a skin rash brought on by cold rain, and becomes so miserable shooting has to stop.

In the car, Cheung, Leung Kar-fai and Lin are commiserating with each other over working under round-the-clock conditions, then having to reshoot perfectly good scenes when the director decides to rewrite. "They'd better finish shooting my scenes before I leave," says Leung Kar-fai, who is making 15 to 16 movies this year. "I really don't have any more time."

ON WEDNESDAY, it rains so hard shooting is halted; roads leading to the sites have been washed out.

Finally, in the afternoon, the rain lets up and the roads are clear again. That night, the team is still at the caves at 3 am, and no one knows how much longer the shooting will last. Suddenly, Cheung is stung in the neck ~ by a scorpion. Shooting comes to an abrupt halt as the actor is rushed back to the town clinic. They manage to wake up a local doctor who tells them, to their astonishment, that "we don't have a treatment for this".

The actor survives a sleepless night. "I knew it wasn't a poisonous scorpion," someone says. Later, up river at a dam, Cheung sighs and says: "The Hong Kong movie business! Three days of this kind of schedule destroys three months of rest!"

Although Lin and Leung Kar-fai are making a dozen-plus films each this year, Cheung is concentrating on a handful and plans a holiday in Italy. Next year he will do perhaps one film ~ he hints at an American project.

Lin remains a trooper, but wonders about her role. Dressed up as the brother and sitting on the banks of the river, she dutifully repeats her lines to Cheung, who's playing a mercenary: "I want you to kill someone for me ..."

Wong and cinematographer Chris Doyle, who did the mesmerising photography for Days of Being Wild, are never satisfied with a few takes ~ and each scene must be taken from multiple angles. In between takes Lin asks: "What do these lines mean, anyway? Why am I saying these things?" No one answers her.

Furthermore, while walking around, Wong is intrigued by the falls further down and decides Lin should do a mad scene atop the rocks in the midst of rushing waters. Lin agrees to this impromptu scene. It is sunset, night is quickly falling, and they set up the giant spotlight.

A human chain guides Lin to the rock where, in the midst of the roaring water, she stands, hair dishevelled, Hailing her arms about and shouting. Afterwards, she says: "That was rather dangerous, wasn't it?" The next day she extracts an assurance from Wong that the scene will be used: some way, somehow.

Then, until Sunday, all is work and more work, with brief rest periods. The most difficult for Lin has been saved for the last, a dramatic scene with Cheung ~ and after 15 takes, Wong calls out to her: "Can we get something more in the eyes?" Lin is getting aggravated.

The irony is, despite her exhaustion ~ perhaps because of it ~ her character's edgy paranoia is palpable. A hush falls over the crew, watching a performance so intense it could be real.

Location shooting is scheduled to wrap at the end of this week. Only one thing is for sure: when completed, Dong Xie Xi Du will look and feel like no other martial arts film before it. Whether it will make sense is another question.

(Scarlet Cheng is managing editor of Asian Art News)

South China Morning Post