Hardly a Forbidden City for Filming

The American film “Restless” was shot in Beijing in the fall of 1997. It’s scheduled to be released in Los Angeles in October. The following is a firsthand account of shooting a film in China by Paul Francis Duke, who was involved in the production.

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There’s no country that sparks images in the public imagination more complex and contradictory than China. Chinese films have become staples of the art-house repertoire, so colorful tales of emperors and opera singers and martial arts wizards interweave with news photos of protesting religious believers, or--in the most powerful images to emerge from China in recent years--students courageously standing up to tanks and bullets. On a more prosaic level, every day brings new headlines about Western businesses eager to sell soap and toilet paper and cell phones to more than 1 billion consumers.

The real China is more subtle, and in many ways more intriguing, than any of these images can suggest. The real China is found in the daily struggle of China’s energetic and resourceful people to join the modern world while wrestling with the legacy of 50 years of communism and 5,000 years of tradition. The China that hasn’t been seen by most of the world is what my American colleagues and I were trying to capture a slice of when we set out to Beijing to shoot an independent film, “Restless.”

The backgrounds of the people involved said much about what we wanted to bring to the project. Writer-director Jule Gilfillan was a red-haired woman from Oregon who had studied Chinese in Taiwan before attending USC film school. While at USC, she made a detour as a visiting student at the Beijing Film Academy (school of such greats as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige), where she made a prizewinning short film in Chinese.

Jule had linked up with the Taiwan-born producer Peter Shiao, who had a background working in California politics and had, by way of getting into the entertainment industry, organized a summit meeting of Chinese and Hollywood filmmakers--the first of its kind--in Shanghai.

For my part (I was co-producer and second-unit director of “Restless”), I had fallen in love with mainland filmmaking in film school, finding in such pictures as “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Ermo” echoes of the intense personal drama and sharp social observation I loved in 1970s American cinema. Chinese cinema was blissfully free of the snobby irony that so afflicts American “art” movies now. Intrigued, I was spurred to learn Mandarin, hoping that one day I would work with Chinese filmmakers.

Instead of seeing the Chinese as Cold War-style enemies--as they’ve been portrayed in recent big studio films such as “Red Corner” and “Kundun”--Jule’s script was a romantic comedy in which the Chinese characters often looked mature in comparison with the shallow Americans. As well, the usual cliche of the Western man falling in love with the shy, exotic Chinese flower was upended, with the confused American girl living in China intrigued by the hunky Chinese chess master.

Unlike the makers of “Red Corner,” we hoped that the film could be welcomed in China. As a result, “Restless” was made as a co-production with the government-run Beijing Youth Film Studio. Peter did the hard work of raising most of the financing (about $3 million) from Chinese sources.

Which is not to say the Chinese weren’t plenty suspicious of us. In general, the Chinese view Americans with envy, awe and a certain amount of fear that we’re out to bamboozle them. We had survived an arduous, yearlong process to get approval to shoot in the People’s Republic, marked by demands for small script changes that we had no choice but to make. Final approval came on the very day we started shooting in Beijing. Once finished, we endured another feisty negotiation over taking the negative out of the country for post-production back in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the government didn’t operate with an iron fist. I was impressed by the subtle sensitivity of the Chinese censors. They didn’t make outrageous ideological demands of our script (“the American girl must be seen reading the ‘Little Red Book’ ” or some such), but instead accurately noted moments that might seem quaintly funny to Americans. At one point, a Chinese character cancels an appointment because he has a “political study group”--still a common weekly event for some government workers in China. They asked that the line be excised.

In another scene, an American visiting China is told he must change his travel plans because a bridge has been washed out and won’t be repaired “for weeks.” At the request of the Chinese, the reference to the repair schedule was changed to “Check back in a few days.”

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Our biggest battle, though, came over our desire to use the Taiwanese actress Shiang-Chyi Chen (film buffs might know her from director Tsai Ming-Liang’s “The River”) in the role of a young woman from Beijing. Chen has a skill that we searched for assiduously, without much success, among Beijing’s actresses--she speaks fluent English.

The Chinese Film Bureau stonewalled on this point, arguing that a Taiwanese couldn’t capture the spirit and accent of a Beijing girl; it was clearly a matter of some honor to them. I wrote a letter to the film bureau with a lot of malarkey arguing that allowing us to use a Taiwanese would make a symbolic statement about the unity of Chinese around the world. Beijing-based co-producer Mike McDermott’s diplomatic skills got quite a workout in many meetings on the matter. To our amazement, the government relented and Chen went with us to Beijing.

Once you’ve passed through the government gantlet, China is simply a spectacularly fun place to make a movie. We filmed for a day in the Forbidden City. Our day of shooting included capturing what was certainly the first time anyone had skateboarded in the 600-year-old home of China’s emperors and consorts. Total location fee: $1,200. No rules requiring teams of cops polishing their motorcycles. Try getting the U.S. capitol for that.

Many Americans I talk to about the film have the notion that a production shooting there must be beset by secret police ready to toss you in prison at the slightest mention of Tiananmen. In fact, once you have the approval from the government in hand, it is far easier to shoot in Beijing than in Los Angeles. As second-unit director, I found this freedom was an amazing boon, reminding me of the carefree days of making super-8 films in film school with a few friends. We never needed specific permits for anything, just our general permit to shoot in Beijing.

Many times, my crew--often just myself, a cinematographer and a camera assistant--simply tootled around Beijing in a van. If I saw something I liked and wanted to capture, we pulled over, dropped our tripod and started shooting. Local police might question us, but they were always curious and never hostile--with one exception. Tiananmen Square is indeed still a very sensitive area.

Fan Jiebin, the second unit’s director of photography, didn’t want me, a white American, to go along when we filmed the usual Sunday kite-flying on the square. He feared the police would think we were a Western documentary crew and hassle us, possibly even confiscate the camera. On another night, though, our main director of photography, Yang Shu, with the camera cleverly hidden in the back of a van, got some magnificent shots of our main characters bicycling by Tiananmen at night, with the square brilliantly lighted for China’s National Day, Oct. 1.

Of course, even big Chinese films don’t have the rolling luxury of an American production, with air-conditioned trailers. For all of our costumes and costume changes, we made do with a single small truck loaned to us by Motorola China. (Last year, on another film I worked on in China, Universal’s “Pavilion of Women,” star Willem Dafoe often had to change his pants behind the nearest car). Meals are simple box lunches and everybody eats together, sitting on the curb.

Our lead actress in “Restless,” Catherine Kellner, quickly got into the spirit of it, deciding after only a few days to move from the five-star Hilton to the roach-infested and elevator-free Monkey King Hotel, where the crew (including Jule and I) were staying.

Beijing is, in fact, not a photogenic city. Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and the “costumes and concubines” school of Chinese films that tend to get released in America have created the false impression that Beijing is a city of ancient and grand palaces. There are a few of these left, and the Forbidden City is hugely impressive. But the Cultural Revolution and the Communist drive to build public housing have left most of Beijing a charmless, dirty mess of aging gray apartment blocks.

Deng Xiaoping’s loosening of the economy added another bizarre architectural stratum--scores of neon-purple karaoke palaces and gleaming new shopping malls. With the air pollution creating a near-constant ceiling of smog and the masses of people swarming everywhere, the whole thing is oddly reminiscent of “Blade Runner.” Beijing is a city with a distinct past and a distinct future, but amid so much change, the present feels terribly fleeting, and that’s very difficult to capture on film.

It took me a week of looking through the viewfinder in total frustration to realize that the spirit of Beijing is not in its look, but in its energy: the seemingly 24-hour-a-day construction of new skyscrapers; the wild street mix of bikes and cars and pedestrians; the entrepreneurial zeal of Beijingers, who seem to have converted every possible storefront into a restaurant, a beauty salon, or a one-hour photo-developing shop.

Beijing’s warmer character asserts itself in its wonderful haunts, the relaxed bars where friends meet after work, the arts cafe that shows Truffaut and Godard films on video. I hope that “Restless” has captured some of that feeling.