The opening sequence of Chinese Box depicts a tony New Year's Eve party in Hong Kong, as we're getting on toward midnight on December 31, 1996. It's a lavish affair attended by politicians, journalists and businessmen, but there's an electric charge of tension in the air. This is far more significant New Year's than it may appear to be: the last day of the last full year of British colonial rule over the territory. Six months late, to the day, on July 30th, 1997, Hong Kong will revert to Chinese control, and a 156 year chapter of world history will roll to a close.
A dramatic feature film set against a documentary background, Wayne Wang's Chinese Box charts the often subtle effects of a turning point event of recent history — the return of the former British colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule — upon a vivid assortment of fictional characters, over the months leading up to and immediately following the changeover.
John (Jeremy Irons) is a British journalist who has lived in Hong Kong for fifteen years. Stricken with a catastrophic illness, he is struggling to come to terms with the changes enforced by fate and history upon his relationship with the city he has learned to love.
Vivian (Gong Li) is the woman John has loved silently for years, the fiancee of a close friend. She has perfected a serene, controlled demeanor of hardened glamour to pave over the psychic scars inflicted by her struggle to survive in a society in which wealth is everything and a human being is just another commodity.
Jean (Maggie Cheung) wears her scars on the outside. A girl from a middle-class family with a private school education, her life was torn apart by the social conflicts of colonial society. She is now a street-person, a Dickensian eccentric, and her bristling energy semms to embody the true spirit of everyday Hong Kong.
Chang (Michael Hui), Vivian's fiancee and John's closest Chinese friend, is a businessman with solid Mainland connections, exactly the sort of Hong Kong native who can be expected to fare best after the Handover — if his emotions in his relationships with John and Vivian don't overwhelm his cold-blooded business sense.
Filmed on the spot in Hong Kong last year, as the events of the Handover were actually unfolding, Wayne Wang's Chinese Box is a witness to history that is also an intimate dramatic film about the intertwined lives of several individuals. It is an indirect view of cosmic shift, like the image of an eclipse cast upon a sheet of paper.
"A decision that became clear to me during the research of the film," Wayne Wang says, "was not to focus on the politics or specifics of the changeover. I wanted to use it only as an emotional canvas. I wanted to tell the story of four individuals, and to have these characters play out their emotional lives and make decisions about their uncertain future during this period, so that we get a better picture of how Hong Kong as a city might deal with 1997."
A Trimark Entertainment release of an NDF International & Pony Canyon, Inc. and Le Studio Canal + presentation of a Wayne Wang Film, Chinese Box, starring Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Michael Hui, Maggie Cheung and Ruben Blades, produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Jean-Louis Piel, screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Larry Gross, story by Jean-Claude Carrière, Paul Theroux and Wayne Wang, directed by Wayne Wang.
Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière calls Chinese Box, "Wayne Wang's love letter to Hong Kong." It's that, and more, the fulfillment of a promise the director made to himself almost a decade ago.
Wang's third film, Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989) had been mostly filmed in the colony, even though it's setting was New York's Chinatown in the 1940s. It just turned out that distant Hong Kong looked a lot more like the Chinatown of old than the area did itself in its current incarnation. Wang had been born and raised in Hong Kong, but he had left the city at 18 to study and live in the US. He responded powerfully to the experience of returning for an extended stay. The low-budget Life is Cheap...But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1994) was put together as a very simple and direct response to those complex feelings.
"That film was made very emotionally," Wang reflects, "but it was a sketch. I always knew I would have to come back some day and make a real movie about the effects of the 1997 Handover."
The phrase "life is cheap" still resonates for him with the essence of Hong Kong, Wang says:
"It is very evident, just about everywhere you look. From the sight of an old woman painfully dragging a heavy load up the street, to the prevalence of prostitution. There are still areas where blocks and blocks of storefronts are occupied by brothels. It is a place that worships money to the exclusion of almost everything else."
Some striking visual motifs embodying this theme are carried over directly from Life is Cheap: documentary images (collected in this case by Box cinematographer Vilko Filac) of the public slaughter of animals used for food. Another is the parallel existence of a separate, shadow-Hong Kong of poverty and homelessness — an underclass landscape that emerges as John, responding to his own encroaching illness, begins to explore areas of the city he's neglected in his work as a journalist. This is the aspect of the city personified by Jean (Cheung), an outcast victim of the city's elite culture.
One element of the project that Wayne Wang was sure of from the start was that his protagonist would be an émigré Englishman rather than a Chinese native, an acclimated foreigner. "As much as I may deny it," he says, "I was brought up as a colonial citizen and the English side of me is as much a part of me as my Chinese side. I was raised there, but when I go back I feel like an outsider in many ways. John's point of view feels very natural to me."
When Wang decided it was time to get to work in earnest on Chinese Box, he recruited the novelist and acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux (My Other Life) to work with him on a draft screenplay. Writer and director spent several weeks together exploring the city, and while in the end the script Theroux produced was not used, he receives a story credit on the finished film.
For Theroux, those research sessions paid an unexpected dividend: they provided the inspiration for his most recent novel, Kowloon Tong, an account of the Handover from the point of view of a British businessman whose complacent existence is threatened. In that sense the novel can be seen as a companion piece to Chinese Box.
An early participant in the process was the Hong Kong based French producer Jean-Louis Piel (Monsieur Hire), who introduced Wang to the revered screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, a frequent collaborator of Luis Bunuel, Volker Schlondorff and Peter Brook who had worked with Piel on Jean-Paul Rappeneau's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu.
It was Carrière who told Wang an anecdote about Bunuel that unexpectedly provided the kernel of the Chinese Box screenplay. During the shooting of one their collaborations, the Spanish auteur had fallen in love with sweet-looking young actress in the cast. Like the old-world gentleman he was, Bunuel approached this woman with great propriety, taking her to fine restaurants in formal attire. On the set one day, overhearing some grips discussing the actress, Bunuel learned the startling truth: almost every functional male on the crew had already slept with her.
For Wang, this story — "of a man obsessed with a woman who turns out to be a whore" — provided a perfect metaphor for the dilemma of his central character, a besotted Englishman wrestling with his complicated feelings about the city, and the woman, that he's fallen for.
"The obsession of an Englishman with the beautiful exterior of a Chinese woman is what fascinates me," Wang admits. "It's a wonderful example of how foreigners in Hong Kong often misread the facade of the Chinese locals. Hong Kong people seldom talk about their personal pasts and many of them have lived very complicated lives in order to survive."
Wang was also struck by a short story by Rachel Ingalls, "Last Act: The Madhouse," about young lovers whose parents discover their secret passion and pull them apart: "I thought that the young woman's character would be very appropriate to transfer to a middle-class Hong Kong teenager who grew up under colonial rule, attending an English private school and falling in love with an English boy. During high school in Hong Kong I heard many stories similar to this one about relationships between Chinese and English kids, and most of them ended sadly — not because of anything the young people did themselves but because of the opposition of their parents and of society to interracial relationships."
The girl in the Ingalls story became the character of the disfigured street-girl, Jean, played by Maggie Cheung. Jean is a headlong, reckless personality and, Wang says, "she is in some ways the most important character in the film. She is the one who comes closest to embodying the true spirit of Hong Kong, for me."
With all of these elements in place, it began to seem possible to attempt a second version of the screenplay. After joining Wang in Hong Kong for several weeks of discussions and research, Carrière produced an initial treatment for Chinese Box is just seven days, working out of a hotel room in Kowloon. Even for a veteran like Carrière, developing a full script over the next few months, while commuting between Paris and Hong Kong, was a new kind of challange:
"It was a totally new type of collaboration with a director," he says. "We knew from the very beginning that the film needed a certain sense of urgency, a certain tension. We had to build a feeling of emergency into the process. We couldn't make this film in a relaxed way. We had to foster in ourselves the same state of mind as the people of Hong Kong, a certain spirit that was in the air."
Because Carrière's first language is French and most of the movie's dialogue is in either English or Cantonese, veteran Hollywood screenwriter, Larry Gross (48 HRS), was also hired. "Jean-Claude was the senior writer on the film," reports Wang, "but Larry did a lot of very good work polishing all the dialogue, especially the dialogue of Jean. He became the major writer of the Jean sequences. Larry also contributed some really interesting ideas that helped extend the central themes of the story."
It was Gross who happened to catch a Marlene Dietrich film on television in his hotel room one night and suggested the scene in which Vivian (Gong Li) watches Dietrich on TV and imitates her mannerisms. No single episode in the movie tells us as much about how Vivian sees herself, or about the painstaking care with which she's assembled her seemingly flawless facade.
"In the complex of stories told in Chinese Box," Gross says, "Wayne plots the unexpected paths that individuals take in the quest for fulfillment. He merges the visual style of free-wheeling documentary and a narrative that is almost operatic, making perhaps his most personal statement about the many cultural forces that shaped him."
The documentary look of the film was certainly no accident. Wang felt a strong desire to work in an "organic" way, he says, and to be able to respond to historical events as they unfolded and incorporate them into the film: "We would shoot in sequence and integrate real events, and we were able to change the story as we went along in response to those things, which is degree of freedom that is very rare in the film industry today."
"Wayne kept the process open," agrees producer Lydia Dean Pilcher, "so that he was able to make use of an environment that was constantly changing."
As an attempt to mix fictional characters and situations with actual historical events that were unfolding around the film crew as the movie was being, Chinese Box has few precedents. Director and co-writer Wayne Wang can think of only one fully comparable case, Haskell Wexler's 1967 counterculture classic Medium Cool, filmed during the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Actor Robert Forster, playing a TV news reporter, mingled with delegates and journalists on the convention floor, and witnessed actual clashes between demonstrators and police.
One scene in Chinese Box, Wang says, is a direct homage to a sequence in Medium Cool, in which Forster mingled with a group of real-life journalists discussing the convention in unscripted exchanges. Wang filmed several scenes at the International Press Club in Hong Kong, in which Irons, in character, participates in the unrehearsed discussions of real-life reporters and local businessmen.
"I was very lucky to have Jeremy Irons join me in this organic process," Wang adds. "Jeremy has a certain intelligence, a certain toughness, and a complexity to him, in everything he does. He is so experienced from his stage and film work that he was able to take his character into any situation that arose, and rise to the occasion."
Irons says he accepted the demanding role partly as an invigorating personal challenge: "I knew it was going to be an improvisation. In a way, I was committing to the unknown, and that was very exciting. The more you do as an actor, the easier it is to take risks, and I'm always looking for things that I think may be difficult. This seemed to fit the bill."
A film like Chinese Box, which is set not just in a location but in a particular historical period, presented special challenges in terms of casting. Gong Li was Wang's first and only choice for the role of Vivian, in part because the Chinese star of such international successes as Jou Dou and Raise the Red Lantern brought an imposing iconic presence to the role, the glamour and charisma of an old-time movie star: she already represented a "classical woman from China" (in Wang's phrase) to many people in the audience.
Wang also decided at an early stage to cast actors in the other Chinese-speaking roles who were Hong Kong natives and veterans of the local movie industry, people who could bring a sense of bone-deep authenticity to their portrayals of Hong Kong characters. Maggie Cheung and Michael Hui, established stars of Hong Kong cinema, were ideal choices for their respective roles. Cheung had played dozens of fast-talking modern Hong Kong women in both comedic and dramatic vehicles, and Michael Hui had established himself as a middle-class everyman in a series of hugely popular satiric comedies that he also wrote and directed.
Ruben Blades, an accomplished Panamanian-American actor who is also a pioneering superstar in the field of salsa music star, was an ideal choice to represent the gypsy sub-culture of international journalism.
Blades also contributes a moving musical interlude, singing the Ry Cooder lament, "Across the Borderline." The song, composed originally to be performed by Tex-Mex legend Freddie Fender on the soundtrack of the Jack Nicholson film The Border (1982), about an INS agent tempted into corruption, has a chilling resonance with the subject matter of Chinese Box — particularly with the fate of Vivian, an "illegal immigrant" from Mainland China.
With the storyline and the cast in place, Wang, with producers Piel and Pilcher and production designer Chris Wong, began the delicate work of deciding how the city and the characters could be represented physically, in a way that would reflect the feelings for the place of the director and his characters. One device to achieve this, according to Wong, was a conscious symbolic use of color:
"This is a film which tells about the last six months before the handover of Hong Kong to China. So I decided to use the colors of the two Hong Kong flags, the old flag and the new flag. We start with the British color of royal purple and gradually change to a Chinese red as the story progresses. Of course, the color red not only represents China but also a kind of danger, so I hope the level of tension in the film increases over time, just as result of our manipulation of color."
One location that was chosen specifically as a projection of character was John's Kowloon apartment. Wang chose a tiny, old-fashioned flat overlooking one of the areas busiest streets. An apartment that would seem horrendously down-market to an upwardly mobileHong Kong native at John's professional level, the place seems a perfect for an émigré who loves the city and wants to drink in as much authentic atmosphere as he can. The style of the apartment is hard-core 1950s Hong Kong, with simple wooden partitions to divide the rooms and an enclosed balcony.
"I wanted to show John's foreigness," Wang says, "but also that he loves Hong Kong. He lives in an old place rather than a glitzy new building or a condo. But within that old-fashioned space he has all the latest high-tech equipment that is necessary to his work, so you'd never mistake this for the apartment of a bohemian."
Shooting on location was a special challenge in a city like Hong Kong, a favorite international tourist destination and a frequent film locale. The first consideration was to break through the audience's assumption that they already knew what Hong Kong was like, to make them see it in a fresh way.
"I was very conscious of not showing anything stereotypical or touristy," Wang says. "We used a number of well-known Hong Kong locations — the floating Jumbo Restaurant in Aberdeen Harbor, Temple Street market in Kowloon, the Star Ferry that goes from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon across the harbor; you've seen that in a dozen movies. But we always tried to shoot them in ways that either disguised them or showed them in a new light. The film had a lot of input from people who live there and are very familiar with the city, so in that sense I'm confident that it is very grounded and very real."
Wang's goal was to reflect that level of reality in the way the locations and the sets were photographed, as well: "I'd done very elegant, very controlled stuff recently and I wanted Chinese Box to be more gritty and immediate. I really felt that Vilko Filac was that kind of a director of photography, a cinematic guerrilla. We made a major decision to shoot almost everything hand-held. It's not pretty, or pristine, or controlled. Instead it's always moving and very physical and has a rough edge to it — which is very Hong Kong."
Filac is well-known in international cinema circles as the cinematographer who helped director Emir Kusturica make four acclaimed films under difficult comditions in the former Yugoslavia, including When Father Was Away on Business. It was Filac who roamed the streets of Hong Kong collecting evocative documentary images of street life. On one of these forays he came across the pit bull Water Monster, who runs to exhaustion daily on a tread mill and became one the movie's central images.
"Hong Kong," Filac says, "is very photogenic because you have all these contrasts. Just look around at the buildings. Very poor, very rich, very high, very low. All very attractive for photography. The life here is interesting to photograph, too, because it's so concentrated. There's a maximum concentration of everything, or nice and ugly, of good and bad."
For costume designer Shirley Chan, too, the contrasting social levels of characters who mingle freely in Hong Kong was a touchstone for major wardrobe choices.
"With the two major female characters," Chan says, "it was simple. Although both of these people live in the same city, their backgrounds are completely different. Vivian (Gong Li) is quite vain. She has to make herself feel beautiful. In a way it's a disguise she puts on to cover her weaknesses. Jean (Maggie Cheung) starts out both more international and more natural, but her look is influenced by her private problems. She locks herself in her own little world and sometimes the colors and the combinations don't match. When things clash it's a way of illustrating the disjointedness of her inner world."
Similarly, the differences between Vivian's two suitors, John (Jeremy Irons) and Chang (Michael Hui), is reflected in their clothing: "John is a man of taste but he isn't rich, and he has other things on his mind. You can see his sense of style in the quality of the things he wears, but you can also tell that he's been wearing the same items for years and that they're a bit frayed. Chang is more like Vivian. He's on the make in society and always chooses brand new designer clothes in an attempt to look sophisticated."
All the elements of the film that came together during production were kept fluid on purpose, which meant that certain tasks normally relegated to a separate, post-production phase — the editing and the addition of music — had to be moved up to keep pace with the constantly changing work being done on location. Film editor Chris Tellefsen and composer Graeme Revell found themselves integrated into the production process to a degree that was unusual and exhilarating.
Tellefsen set up his editing facilities in New York well in advance so that he could begin assembling footage almost from the first day of shooting. From Hong Kong, Wang sent lists of scene orders and detailed notes on timing, which changed on a daily basis. "I would get the footage almsot as the scenes were being shot," Tellefsen says, "while the latest notes were flowing from the fax machine. It became almost a kind of contest, just to see if I could stay one jump ahead."
Tellefsen's task was complicated by the various kinds of footage Wang was sending him: "A strong element to support John's obsession with Hong Kong was the fact that he was shooting video in the streets. This added a new texture, allowing me to find opportunities for new transitions and a way of opening up the film.
"Each character also required specific treatment affecting the pace of the picture. John is a the reflective observer, ponderous and searching. Vivian is extremely classic and calm, always holding up a placid face in public. And finally Jean is frantic, jumpy, a con artist, always on the move, never still. The rhythms of their scenes had to reflect those differences."
Composer Revell found himself adapting his rhythms to a shifting mosaic of incidental music selected by Wang for scenes that were developing organically on location. The source music ranged from contemporary Hong Kong "Cantopop" to classical Chinese opera melodies, and Revell's score adapted elements from each and every idiom.
Wang and Revell shared a desire to stay as far way as possible from the musical clichés often used in Western films to evoke the Orient. They were looking for a central musical motif that was purely Chinese but that would also sound fresh to Western ears. A classical Chinese vocalist, Shanghai's Dadawa, was Revell's choice to carry one of the score's main themes. Her tracks were augmented with Chinese flutes recorded in Hong Kong and symphonic and choral tracks recorded in Los Angeles and Seattle.
"That beautiful female voice became the motif for the character of John," Revell explains. "It is his siren song, calling to this man who is unable to understand either Hong Kong or the woman he loves. As John's journey ends the sound blends literally with the sirens in the harbor, telling us that he is closer to home than perhaps he ever knew.
"On the other hand, Vivian is beautifully and classically Chinese that she demanded a different motif. Music did not need to underline the obvious in her case. Vivian's struggle is to free herself from a sexual history that has become an unjustified cultural stereotype for Asian women. We chose to use a very simple piano and clarinet piece for her.
"By the end of the film John and Vivian are finally able to realize their love for one another and their themes intertwine with their limbs. At least in one compartment of our Chinese box there truly exists love and understanding."
One of the stars of Chinese Box has no specific motif, because no single melodic thread could do her justice. "Hong Kong itself is one of the stars of this film," editor Tellefsen says. "More than any other element, the frantic pace of the city dictated the overall rhythm and sound of the picture."
Wayne Wang agrees. "In making the film," he says, "and witnessing, in person, the last six months of the transition period, I realized that I had stronger emotional ties with the city and the Hong Kong people than I had ever expected. I realize now that I will never leave this place behind altogether. A part of me has never left."
JEREMY IRONS (John)
"John is just a normal English guy," Jeremy Irons asserts, "a journalist, who's lived in Hong Kong for a decade. He is a man, like many men here, who watched his marriage collapse and who continued on without great thought. But then he discovers that he's got limited time left because of his illness, and that hones his appetite to try to make sense, first, of Hong Kong, and through that of his own life."
Jeremy Irons made his feature debut in a small role as the Russian choreographer Fokine in Herbert Ross's bio-pic Nijinsky in 1979. But he first won fame international fame for his textured and soulful performance as Charles Ryder in the British TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel Brideshead Revisited, which was distributed around the world. Irons was nominated for an Emmy and for a British Academy Award for his work in Brideshead, and won the Golden Globe Award as Best Actor.
A year later, Irons won the coveted duel role as a Victorian gentleman obsessed with a fallen woman, and as the actor playing the character in a film, in Karel Reisz' adaptation of the John Fowles novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. Irons won a Variety Club Award as Best Actor and was nominated by the British Academy.
From the beginning, Irons has alternated movie work and theater assignments, following an acclaimed turn in 1982 as a Polish immigrant laborer in Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting with London and Broadway runs in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing in 1983; picking up a Drama League Award and a Tony Award as Best Actor along the way. He appeared with Robert De Niro in Roland Joffe's The Mission in 1985; and then spent the 1986-87 theater season in London as a member of Royal Shakespeare Company.
His virtuoso turn in a duel role in the bizarre Dead Ringers (1988), David Cronenberg's fact-based tale of identical-twin gynecologists descending into madness, earned him a New York Film Critics Circle nod and a Canadian Genie, and firmly reestablished Jeremy Irons as one of the world's greatest film actors. A year later, when he was accepting the Best Actor Oscar® for his performance as Klaus Von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune, Irons made a point of thanking Cronenberg for the career boost.
Very few contemporary actors have excelled in such a wide a variety of roles. Just in the last few years Irons has portrayed the beleaguered Polish novelist in Steven Soderburgh's Kafka (1991), a British diplomat in China in love with a cross-dressing Chinese opera star in David Cronenberg's adaptation of the Broadway hit M Butterfly (1993), the voice of Scar the Usurper in Disney's animated record-breaker The Lion King (1994), a mad bomber in the Bruce Willis headbanger Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995), and a terminally ill painter in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996).
In 1996, the actor won the plum role of Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne's film version of Lolita, a hit in Europe although still without a distributor in the US. Fortunately, Irons' unabridged reading of the Nabokov novel on audio cassette is available, and it has been rapturously reviewed.
Also in 1996 Irons directed and co-starred with his actress wife Sinead Cusak in a TV film for England's Channel 4, Mirad: A Boy from Bosnia. He will be seen next playing in the title role in a new film of the Alexandre Dumas swashbuckler The Man in the Iron Mask, for Braveheart screenwriter turned director Randall Wallace.
GONG LI (Vivian)
"Vivian," Gong Li explains, "is a mainland Chinese woman who lives in Hong Kong and runs a karaoke bar. Her relationship with Chang [Michael Hui] and her former background as a bar hostess have shaped the way she is now: seemingly a hard woman from the outside but soft within."
It is an indication of how much the zeitgeist has shifted in world cinema that the reigning art movie goddess of the 1990s hails not from France or Italy, but from the city of Xinjiang, province of Liaoning, People's Republic of China.
Born in 1966, the daughter of two economics professors at a local university, Gong Li enrolled against her parents wishes in the Beijing Drama Academy and studied there for four years. In her second term she was already working professionally on a TV drama serial and almost missed a chance to audition for the famous cinematographer, Zhang Yimou, who had dropped in to cast a young woman for a leading his first film as a director.
She got the part, of course, in Zhang's Red Sorghum (1987), and was soon linked with the director off-screen as well. Additional roles for Zhang in Jou Dou (1989), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), the first two Chinese films ever nominated for Academy Awards®, and later The Story of Qiu Ju (1991), To Live (1994) and Shanghai Triad (1995). She also worked for Zhang's mentor-turned-rival, Chen Kaige, in Farewell My Concubine (1992), for which she was named Best Actress by the New York Film Critic's Circle, and Temptress Moon (1995).
Almost from the beginning Gong Li has also worked steadily in commercial Hong Kong films. Her second major film (in which she co-starred with Zhang) was Ching Sui-tung's rousing fantasy picture, The Terracotta Warrior (1987) She has also appeared in Wong Jing's God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai (1991) and Sylvia Chang's Mary From Beijing (1992). In the latter she played a mainland immigrant adrift in modern Hong Kong, a character that prefigures her role as Vivian.
Chinese Box is a Trimark Entertainment release of an NDF International & Pony Canyon, Inc. and Le Studio Canal + presentation, a Wayne Wang Film starring Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Michael Hui, Maggie Cheung and Ruben Blades, produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Jean-Louis Piel with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Larry Gross from a story by Jean-Claude Carrière, Paul Theroux and Wayne Wang, directed by Wayne Wang.
MAGGIE CHEUNG, (Jean)
According to Maggie Cheung, her Chinese Box character "is a very hip, Hong Kong woman from a middle-class family who's had and education at an international school. She's had a privileged upbringing, and is consequently very worldly, but had abandoned her roots to live an almost nomadic life on the streets of Hong Kong surviving on her wits."
A major box office draw in Hong Kong films for over ten years, Cheung progressed rapidly in her youth from model to beauty queen to TV soap opera star to movie idol. She has appeared in more than 70 films in every imaginable genre, from B-horror flicks to romantic comedies. In recent years she has become a favorite actresses of several leading "art" directors, in Hong Kong and Europe.
Born in Hong Kong in 1964, Cheung emigrated to England with her diplomat-parents at the age of eight, returning for the first time in 1982 after finishing her secondary education. (She speaks perfect English with a delicious Anglo-Asian lilt.) Her intention was to make only a short visit before returning home —to London. But she was "discovered" on a Kowloon streetcorner by a director of TV commercials and spent a year working as a model.
Her agent urged Cheung to compete in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant in 1984; she came in second, and just one week later was cast by director Wong Jing in her first feature film, The Frog Prince (1984). Her movie career was put on hold at the outset to fulfill a contract signed by all Miss HK contestants with the organizers of the pageant, the powerful TVB television network. Cheung spent two years working in assembly-line soap operas and swordplay serials.
Cheung's first major film vehicle was superstar Jackie Chan's action hit Police Story (1985). She has continued to work frequently with Chan, appearing in Project A Part II (1987), Police Story Part II (1988), Supercop (1992), and Twin Dragons (1992). She has a string of local hits that are also popular with fans of Hong Kong cinema in the US and Europe, including The Seventh Curse (1986), The Heroic Trio (1992), New Dragon Inn (1992), Tsui Hark's Green Snake (1993), and Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996).
In 1988 she appeared in Wong Kar Wei's debut film, As Tears Go By , and then in two subsequent Wong films, Days of Being Wild (1990) and Ashes of Time (1994). Her work in Stanley Kwan's Actress aka Centre Stage (1992) snagged the Best Actress prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1992. She won praise for her work in Clara Law's Farewell China (1990), Yim Ho's Red Dust (1990), Ann Hui's Song of the Exile (1991). In French director Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep she was a Chinese actress who travels to Paris to play the lead in a loopy re-make of the silent classic Les Vampires.
She will be seen next year in Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting's The Soong Sisters , co-starring with Michelle Yeoh.
Chinese Box is a Trimark Entertainment release of an NDF International & Pony Canyon, Inc. and Le Studio Canal + presentation, a Wayne Wang Film starring Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Michael Hui, Maggie Cheung and Ruben Blades, produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Jean-Louis Piel with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Larry Gross from a story by Jean-Claude Carrière, Paul Theroux and Wayne Wang, directed by Wayne Wang.
MICHAEL HUI (Chang)
Often credited with re-establishing the Cantonese-language cinema in Hong Kong with his topical hit comedies of the early '70s, Michael Hui was the top box office draw in Hong Kong movies in the years following the death of Bruce Lee in 1973. He has been a major force in Chinese popular culture for almost 30 years.
Born in Guangdong, China, in 1942, Hui graduated from Union College (of the Chinese University of Hong Kong), and seemed destined for a normal professional life, first as a high school teacher and then as the manager of an advertising agency. Plucked from obscurity to host an established TV variety show, Enjoy Yourself Tonight, he went on created a sketch-comedy series of his own, The Hui Brothers Show, with his two siblings, Sam Hui, an early star of the "Cantopop" music genre, and Ricky Hui, a gifted sad-sack comic actor.
Hui's attracted the attention of director Li Han-xiang, who offered him the lead in the Shaw Brothers production The Warlord in 1972. After playing smaller roles in three more films for Li, Hui signed a contract to act, write and direct pictures of his own for Golden Harvest in 1975. Another young Golden Harvest director, John Woo, was assigned to work with Hui as an "associate," helping him to get his sea legs on his first three films.
Hui's films were among the first in decades released in the local Chinese dialect of Cantonese, rather than in the imported Mandarin dialect, introduced by refugee filmmakers from the mainland after the revolution. Hui pictures like Games Gamblers Play (1975), The Private Eyes (1975), and Security Unlimited (1976) had a distinct local Hong Kong flavor that is still rare.
Hui played a Japanese race driver in Golden Harvest's 1981 Burt Reynold's Cannonball Run, teamed with action star Jackie Chan . His films continued to be successful, if not quite on the same scale. Teppenyaki (1984), The Chocolate Inspector (1986), Mr Coconut (1989), Front Page (1990) and Magic Touch (1992), all contain classic comic sequences. Hui has been praised by critics throughout his career as a world class comic performer, "the Jack Benny of Asia."
Michael Hui was named Best Actor at the Hong Film Awards in 1981 for Security Unlimited, and was Hong Kong's Actor of the Year for The Front Page in 1990. His 1988 hit Chicken and Duck Talk was invited to film festivals around the world and earned Hui a Best Actor prize at the American Film Institute's Cinetex Comedy Festival in 1989.
Chinese Box is a Trimark Entertainment release of an NDF International & Pony Canyon, Inc. and Le Studio Canal + presentation, a Wayne Wang Film starring Jeremy Irons, Gong Li, Michael Hui, Maggie Cheung and Ruben Blades, produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Jean-Louis Piel with a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Larry Gross from a story by Jean-Claude Carrière, Paul Theroux and Wayne Wang, directed by Wayne Wang.
RUBEN BLADES (Jim)
"Jim is an action-oriented photo journalist," Blades says, of the character he portrays in Chinese Box, "who finds himself in Hong Kong covering the handover and back in touch with his old friend John [Jeremy Irons]. They gravitate towards each other, partly because they share the same kind of cynicism and dry wit, but largely because they're both loners and respectful of each other's space — which is particularly important because of John's condition."
An overachiever on a grand scale, Ruben Blades is a respected actor with more than 15 feature film and TV credits under his belt. He is also a world-class musical pioneer whose 1978 release Siembre is still the best-selling salsa album of all time. At the peak of his musical fame, Blades took time out to earn the second of two law degrees, this time from Harvard. And in 1994 he returned to his native Panama to form a new political party, Papa Egoro (Mother Earth), and to stand as its candidate for President.
Born in 1948, Blades was strongly influenced by his mother. the bolero singer Anoland Bellido. He attended university and earned his first law degree (and passed the bar) in Panama. He began playing in bands as a student, mixing rock 'n' roll and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and became a favorite at local clubs. He earned money in his student days singing commercial jingles for local radio and television.
In 1974 Blades re-located to New York City, which had become the world salsa capitol. Working sessions at the studios of Fania Records, he attracted the attention of the label's star attraction, Ray Barreto, who took him on as a song-writer and arranger. Blades solo career was launched when another salsa great, Willie Colon, produced and "presented" his first album, Meteindo Mano!, in 1977. His second record with Colon, Siembre, produced top-ten hits throughout Latin America, on the salsa charts in the US, and even in Europe. Going beyond the genre's dance-music traditions, Blades became a culture hero with lyrics that carried a strong social message, angry tales of barrio street life.
In 1982 he made his film debut in the Spanish-language musical La Ultima Pelea (The Last Fight).
Three more albums produced by Colon, and a series of solo efforts with his band Seis del Solar (later Son del Solar) led to a breakthrough "crossover" effort on Elektra, Buscando America, in 1985. As a reflection on the turn his career was taking, Blades appeared the same year in Leon Ichaso's film Crossover Dreams, which explored the hazards confronting ethnic artists who court a "mainstream" audience. Also in 1985, Blades was the subject of a documentary by Robert Mugge, The Return of Ruben Blades.
In the years following his graduation from Harvard, Blades acting career took off. His films credits include The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), The Two Jakes (1990), Spike Lee's Mo Better Blues (1990), The Super (1991), Color of Night (1994) and most recently The Devil's Own (1997). In 1993, Blades appeared in a memorable X-Files episode about the chupacabras legend, "El Mundo Gira."
In 1998, Blades makes his Broadway debut playing the title role in the fact-based Capeman, a barrio musical written by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and directed by choreographer Mark Morris, with songs by Paul Simon.
WAYNE WANG (Director, Co-Story)
Wayne Wang, a key figure in the development of American independent filmmaking, was born in Hong Kong in 1949. His family, like millions of others, fled China to Hong Kong after the communist take-over in 1947. The director's English moniker was chosen by his father, an engineer and-businessman who was a fan of the gweilo movie star John Wayne.
After graduating from Yah Yan Jesuit High School, Wang came to the US at 18 to study film at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. The Bay Area has been his home base ever since. Wang's first feature film was the graduate student project A Man, A Woman, A Killer (1975), co-directed with Rick Schmidt.
Returning to Hong Kong with a Masters degree and feature film under his belt, Wang went to work at the public broadcasting outlet R.T.H.K. (Radio and Television Hong Kong), which had become a launching pad for a whole group of young film-school trained directors — including Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, Shu Kei and Alan Fong — who were creating what came to be known as the "Hong Kong New Wave." Wang directed several highly regarded episodes of the landmark realistic drama series Below the Lion Rock, about the daily lives of ordinary Hong Kong citizens.
Although apparently poised for a career in the blossoming Hong Kong film industry of the 1980s, Wang was frustrated by the cramped creative atmosphere and suffocating bureaucracy of the Crown Colony. He made the bold decision to return to the US to do social work. "I was still some kind of crazy radical," he now admits. He moved into San Francisco's Chinatown and took a job working with new immigrants from Asia, helping them to get their sea legs in the new world.
His experiences in Chinatown directly inspired Wang's second feature film, Chan Is Missing (1982), which used an enigmatic thriller plot as a vehicle to explore social conflicts and political divisions in the neighborhood. Made in 16mm black & white, for just $27,000.00, produced, directed written and even edited by Wang, Chan is Missing was at least a decade ahead of its time, pre-figuring the recent wave of so-called "micro-budget" successes like El Mariachi and Clerks.
In Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1984), Wang explored the personal and domestic ramifications of immigrant realities, closely observing an aging mother who clings stubbornly to her identity as Chinese, and her highly-Americanized US-born daughter, and their struggle to bridge the culture gap. Strongly influenced by the contemplative style and tone of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Dim Sum had its world premiere in the Director's Fortnight program of the Cannes Film Festival. It went on to win the Best Foreign Film prize at the British Academy Awards™.
Seeking a dramatic change of pace in both tone and subject matter, Wang undertook the all-Anglo thriller Slamdance in 1987, a neo-noir melodrama starring Tom Hulce, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Virginia Madsen. Set against the LA underground music scene, Slamdance played in the Images du Cinema section at Cannes.
New York's Chinatown was the both setting and the subject of Wang's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), a period drama set in the 1940s and based upon Louis Chu's respected 1961 novel, a pioneering work of Asian-American fiction. Starring Wang's wife, actress Cora Miao, and Russell Wong, the film explored the consequences of a clause of US immigration law that turned Chinatown virtually into a community of bachelors. Ironically, Wang ended up shooting much of Eat a Bowl of Tea in Hong Kong, which at that point looked more like the Chinatown of the 1940s than Chinatown did itself. Responding powerfully to the city of his youth during the shooting of Tea, Wang felt a powerful need to explore his responses to the city on film. The result was Life is Cheap ... But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1990), an activist gangster comedy that marked a return to the rough-and-tumble shooting style of Chan is Missing. The film embodied some of his strongest feelings about the city, and Wang returned to many similar themes in Chinese Box.
Wang next undertook his first film for a major Hollywood studio, The Joy Luck Club (1993), adapted from Amy Tan's admired bestseller. A return for Wang to many of the issues of Dim Sum, but placing them in a larger context, Joy Luck's complex narrative interweaves the stories of four American-born Asian women with flashback accounts of their mothers' very different experiences in "the old country."
Wang next directed novelist Paul Auster's original script Smoke in 1995, set in a tobacco shop in Brooklyn, with a huge cast of neighborhood eccentrics led by Harvey Keitel, William Hurt and Forest Whitaker. Almost immediately Wang and Auster cooked up and co-directed a second story employing many of the same characters and settings, Blue in the Face, (1995), filmed quickly and with extensive improvisation.
Noticing that many of the best commercial filmmakers of the Hong Kong industry (John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Stanley Tong, Kirk Wong) were leaving to pursue opportunities in Hollywood, Wang and his Bay Area colleague Francis Ford Coppola formed the company Chrome Dragon, dedicated to helping adventurous commercial features get off the ground in Asia. Their first production, Sherman Hu's debut feature Lanai-Loa, will be released in 1998.
JEAN-LOUIS PIEL (Producer)
A respected French producer currently based in Hong Kong, Jean-Louis Piel initially planned a career as a physicist, earning an advanced degree in the subject at the Ecole Polytechnigue in Paris. He became an editor at the journal of philosophy 1/2 Dialectiques and edited several philosophy texts.
Piel's transition to a film career began in 1982, when he took a job with French film giant Gaumont, working as a line producer and then as a production executive on ten films. Distinguished productions supervised by Piel at Gaumont included Volker Schlondorff's TV production Georgina's Grunde (1974), Reiner Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), Carlos Saura's Antonietta (1982), Nelson Pereira dos Santos' Memorias do Carcere ("Memories of Prison") (1984).
From 1985 to 1989, Piel and a partner, Phillipe Carcassone, created and ran the production company Cinea, owned by P. Bremond, where Piel oversaw the production of twelve films, including Corinne Serreau's Romuald et Juliette ("Mama, There's a Man in Your Bed") (1989) and Patrice Laconte's Monsieur Hire (1989), with Michel Blanc, a critical success around the world.
In the early 1990's, Piel ran the Paris production company Camera One, owned by Michel Seydoux. Films personally supervised by Piel at Camera One included Jean-Paul Rappeneu's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu and written by Chinese Box screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) and Nikita Mikhalkov's Urga ("Close to Eden") (1991), an epic shot in Mongolia that one the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.
In 1992, Piel formed a company of his own, Alpha Films, which has quickly acquired a reputation as one of the driving forces behind the new global movement in cinema, in which national boundaries dissolve. Alpha has so far produced films by English, Russian and Chinese filmmakers, with notable success. Nikita Mikhalkov's Utomlyonnye Solntsem ("Burnt by The Sun") (1994) won the Oscar™ as best Foreign Film in 1995 and the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Peter Greenaway's Pillow Book (1995) was a world wide critical success. And Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad (1995) was named best Foreign Film by The National Board of Review and snagged a Golden Globe nomination.
Zhang Yimou's latest, the beleaguered Keep Cool (1997) will be the next Jean-Louis Piel production released in the US.
LYDIA DEAN PILCHER (Producer)
An MFA graduate of NYU Film School, Lydia Dean Pilcher began her career in the production departments of such successful films as F/X, After Hours, 'Round Midnight, The House on Carroll Street, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. She was associate producer and Unit Production Manager on Forrest Whitaker's Strapped and the HBO telefilm Criminal Justice. Her other film credits include Quiz Show, Mississippi Burning, and Jonathan Demme's Domestic Dilemma segment of the HBO mini-series Women and Men II.
Pilcher also co-produced Stacy Cochran's My New Gun, Norman Rene's Longtime Companion and Red, Hot + Dance, an AIDS benefit performance documentary for MTV and Sony Video.Pilcher has to date produced three films directed by Mira Nair,The Perez Family, Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra. She produced Maggie Greenwald's The Kill-Off and Michael Moore's Pets or Meat: Return to Flint, the sequel to his controversial documentary Roger and Me. Pilcher made her directorial debut this year with Reno Finds Her Man, a film for HBO executive produced by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner.
JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE (Screenwriter, Co-Story)
One of the premiere screenwriters not just of French but of European cinema as a whole, three-time Oscar™ nominee Jean-Claude Carrière has led an even more varied and peripatetic life than most writers. You could say that his work has run the gamut from fetid corridors of Castle Frankenstein to the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet.
Carrière's first source of income as a struggling writer in Paris (he was born in Colombieres-sur-Orbes in the South of France in 1931) was as a purveyor of pulp fiction. From 1957 to 1959, under the pseudonym Benoit Becker, he wrote six paperback original novels about the Frankenstein monster, reborn in modern France. On the other hand, his most recent book, published in 1994, Violence and Compassion, was a transcription of a wide-ranging series of conversations with the exiled Dalai Lama of Tibet. Violence and Compassion has been translated into a dozen languages, including English. The Frankenstein novels are still available only in French.
Carrière began his film career working with comic Pierre Etaix on Le Soupirant ("The Suitor") (1962). Later that year, a short film that Carrière produced for Etaix and appeared in Heureuex anniversaire ("Happy Anniversary") won the Academy Award™ that same year for Best Live Action Short Subject. Carrière also made a couple of early pictures with "the Ed Wood of Europe," Jess (Jesus) Franco: the phatasmogorically awful Miss Muerte ("The Diabolical Dr Z") (1996) and Cartas boca arriba ("Attack of the Robots") (1966), with Eddie Constantine.
Carrière met Luis Bunuel in 1963, and wrote (and acted in) Le Journal d'une femme de chambre ("Diary of a Chambermaid") (1964). Thus began an almost 20-year association with Bunuel that eventually produced Belle de Jour (1967) (Gold Lion at Venice International Film Festival), La Voie lactee ("The Milky Way") (1970), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie ("The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie") (1972), Le Fantôme de la liberté ("The Phantom of Liberty") (1974) and Cet obscur object du desir ("That Obscure Object of Desire") (1977). The scripts for Le Charme discret and Cet obscur object earned Oscar™ nominations.
Carrière's professional career has been defined by steady working relationships with several gifted filmmakers: with Louis Malle, on Viva Maria! (1965) and Milou en Mai ("May Fools") (1989); with Philippe de Broca on Le voleur ("The Thief of Paris") (1967) and Julie - Pot de Colle (1977); with Jacques Deray on Borsalino (1970), Funerale a Los Angeles ("The Outside Man") (1973) and Le Gang (1977); with Milos Forman on Taking Off (1971) and Valmont (1989); and with Volker Schlondorff on Die Blechtrommel ("The Tin Drum") (1979), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Oscar ™ for Best Foreign Film, Die Fälschung ("Circle of Deceit) (1981), Un amour de Swann ("Swann in Love") (1984), and Der Unhold ("The Ogre") (1996), starring John Malkovich. With Peter Brook, for whom he wrote many stage and screen works, including The Conference of the Birds, and an acclaimed nine-hour theatrical adaptation of "the Indian Iliad," the Mahabarata, filmed in a shortened three-hour version in 1989
Carrière also contributed the scripts for Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut ("Every Man for Himself") (1979), Daniel Vigne's The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), Andrezej Wajda's Danton (1982), Nagisa Oshima's Max, mon amour (1986), Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), his third Oscar™-nominated script, Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), starring Gerard Depardieu, and Vigne's Le Hussard sur le toit ("Horseman on the Roof") (1995). Forman has adapted Carrière's play The Little Black Book, with Liv Tyler and Nathalie Portman, and India's Mani Kaul has filmed the writer's latest original screenplay, The Dicing. Both films will be released in 1998. Carrière is the director of the trade organization F.E.M.I.S., Fondation europeenne des metiers de l'image et du son.
LARRY GROSS (Screenwriter)
An established Hollywood screenwriter, Larry Gross was initially recruited for Chinese Box to work on the English-language dialog, and ended up writing many of the episodes centering on Maggie Cheung's Jean. But Gross also contributed story ideas — like the revealing scene in which Gong Li's Vivian watches Marlene Dietrich emoting on TV and imitates her mannerisms.
As a screenwriter Gross is most often associated with director Walter Hill, with whom he has collaborated on four films, 48 HRS (1982), for which he received an Edgar Allen Poe Award™ from the Mystery Writers of America, Streets of Fire (1984), Another 48 HRS (1990) and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), the latter in collaboration with John Milius. He wrote and directed episodes of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gideon Oliver and Midnight Caller, and the feature film 3:15 (1986), a teengang drama sometimes described as "High Noon in High School. " He wrote and produced This World, Then the Fireworks (1996), with Billy Zane and Gina Gershon, directed by Michael Oblowitz from the novel by Jim Thompson.
A journalist and film critic in addition to his work in film, Gross is Associate Editor of Millimeter, the magazine of the American Society of Cinematographers. He has contributed articles and reviews to Bomb, Movieline, Sight & Sound and Film Comment.
GRAEME REVELL (Composer)
Noted recently for his contributions to the urban-gothic atmosphere of hits 1997's Spawn and The Saint, New Zealand-born Graeme Revell may well be the hardest-working music man in show business. He turned out six major film scores in 1995 alone, and five in 1996, and all were apt and effective responses to the material. He is known for the wide range of sampled and computer generated fresh sounds he weaves into his music.
Born in Auckland in 1955, Revell came to Hollywood in 1989, after his work on the nail-biting kiwi suspense film Dead Calm won an Aussie Oscar™. His first American vehicle was the horror sequel Child's Play 2 (1990), and a sizable portion of his work since has been for thrillers of one sort or another, including Traces of Red (1992), Curtis Hanson's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs (1992), John Woo's Hard Target (1993), Alex Proyas' The Crow (1994), Tank Girl (1995), Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), The Craft (1996), and Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk til Dawn (1996).
At the same time, Revell has consistently alternated his high-tension assignments with subtler independent projects, beginning with Wim Wenders' Bis ans Ende der Welt ("Until the End of the World") in 1991. In that vein he contributed the soundtracks to Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena (1993), Jeffrey Levy's S.F.W. (1994), Scott Calvert's The Basketball Diaries (1995) and Chinese Box.
VILKO FILAC (Director of Photography)
Bosnian-born Vilko Filac was the cinematographer on the ground-breaking Yugoslavian films of director Emir Kusterica, Sjecas Li Se Dolly Dell? ("Do You Remember Dolly Bell?") (1981), Otac Na Sluzbenom Putu ("When Father Was Away on Business") (1985), and Dom za Vesanje.("Time of the Gypsies") (1989). Filac came to the US with Kusterica in 1993 to shoot Arizona Dream, which co-starred Johnny Depp, and when Depp made his own writing and directing debut, with The Brave in 1997, he recruited Filac to take the pictures.
Vilko Filac also photographed Karpo Godina's Rdeci Boogie ("Red Boogie") (1982) and Franci Slak's Butnskal ("Bumpstone") (1985) in the former Yugoslavia, and Kusterica's acclaimed French production Underground (1995), which will finally be released in the US in early 1998.
CHRISTOPHER TELLEFSEN (Editor)
Christopher Tellefsen has edited three films directed by Wayne Wang, Smoke (1995), Blue in the Face (1995) and Chinese Box. He has become something of a mainstay on the independent film scene, after launching his career with two films written and directed by Whit Stillman, Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994). Tellefsen then edited Larry Clark's semi-documentary feature Kids (1995) and the directorial debut of that film's screenwriter, Harmony Corine, the controversial Gummo (1997). His most recent efforts include David O'Russell's acclaimed black comedy of family turmoil Flirting With Disaster (1996) and Milos Forman's bio-pic The People vs Larry Flynt (1996).