and then another seven-hour drive south into the countryside.

That's a lot of traveling. Is it worth the trip for a visitor? Yeah. It's like if someone visited America and said, "Yeah, I've been to America; I went to New York City." Any of us would say they had to be joking. That's great, but that's the tip of the iceberg. I think that's true of China. China is as enormous and as varied as America. The landscapes of central and western China are just not to be believed. You feel like you've stepped out of the modern world and into Shangri-la. It's just so, so beautiful.

Tell me how you would travel there from Shanghai. If you really wanted to see the landscape of The Painted Veil, you would go from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Guilin, and from Guilin you would drive south to Yangshuo. There you can take tour-boat rides on those rivers through those hills. It's like a river valley that cuts through these impossibly steep, sort of sharp limestone hills that are covered in trees and pines and things. There is not a way to describe it. You really feel like you have gone into one of those Chinese paintings of a tiny bamboo raft being pulled down a river, with people in their straw hats. It is authentically that landscape, and we really didn't have to dress it up much for the film. The most that we had to do (because we were coming into it a little later than their actual rice harvest) was make an agreement in the spring with that whole little district to guarantee them their rice crop if they would plant it a month late so that it would be nice and high and green when we were filming. We traveled down there in the midst of our shoot, and we were coming through all these fields that were being harvested, and we were all having heart attacks. We came up over the ridge and looked down into our valley, our remote little valley, and it was just full of fields of green rice and yellow rice. Of course, in China, this cost a couple of thousand dollars, but it was really one of those things that makes you smile about making movies. They all looked at us like we were insane.