Off the Beaten Path
To film
The Painted Veil, Edward Norton
went to the end of the earth and back again in
China. Here, he
retraces his steps.
. Photograph by Glen
Wilson.
"I think you'll like
Shanghai. It's quite exciting. Lots of
dancing," says bacteriologist Dr. Walter Fane (played by Edward
Norton) to his new but soon-to-become-adulterous wife, Kitty Fane
(Naomi Watts), in this month's hauntingly beautiful film
The Painted Veil. Based on the 1925 novel
by Somerset Maugham, the film involves a journey from
London to
Shanghai, where, in an act of vengeance over his wife's infidelity,
Dr. Fane accepts a job in a remote Chinese village ravaged by a
deadly cholera epidemic - and forces his wife to accompany him.
Surrounded by both natural splendor and death, the couple travel
from emotional isolation to forgiveness and, finally, to love.
The journey that two-time Oscar nominee Norton took to get the film
made was equally long and arduous. After falling for screenwriter
Ron Nyswaner's adaptation of the novel in 1999, he came aboard as
producer and also took on the lead role. But it wasn't until 2004
that Norton was joined by Watts as costar and coproducer, and the
two - along with a crew of 40 westerners and 260 Chinese, a dozen
translators, and 70 work trucks - were off to China. Not merely to
Shanghai and
Beijing, but to the awe-inspiring terrain and timeless
villages deep inside the mainland. Searching for the perfect
settings for the film, location scouts traveled more than 5,000
miles before finally settling on Guilin, a city in the province of
Guangxi, and the more primitive village of Huang Yao. One of the
world's most picturesque places, Guilin sits along the Li River,
surrounded by majestic, verdant hills; it's the perfect spot, since
The Painted Veil is the first Western film
about China that has been allowed to shoot on location in a very
long time.
This was not Norton's first trip to China. He studied Chinese
history as an undergraduate at
Yale University and had visited his
father, Edward M. Norton, who lived for a time in Kunming as the
founding director of the country's nature conservancy program,
which worked toward developing the first large regional
conservation-management plan. His brother, Jim Norton, runs
river trips down Chinese waterways each winter, which you'll read
more about later. But what could compare to barnstorming through
the country as a character out of a Maugham novel? Here's the
journey Norton took from Shanghai farther into the mainland.
How much time did you spend in China? I was
there about five months, from July through November of last year.
We spent about six or seven weeks in Beijing and about three or
four weeks in Shanghai, then the rest of the time out in northern
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in that beautiful landscape you
see in the film - the river valleys and limestone hills. I had been
[to China] many times, but had never been to any of the big eastern
cities and had not been to Guangxi. So, for the film, everywhere I
went was new to me.
What was your route? Well, we went from
Beijing to Shanghai to Guangxi - understand this is like flying
from New York to
Atlanta and then out to the
Grand Canyon. I mean,
these things are a long way from each other, but much as America
is, they are very easily accessible.
Let's talk about Shanghai first. Tell me where you
went, where you stayed, and what you saw. Try to imagine
standing in the
Hollywood Hills, looking out over the entire L.A.
Basin and
Orange County and having that whole spread have the
vertical density of Midtown Manhattan. That's what Shanghai looks
like. It is really staggering in size. It's somewhere north of 18
million people, and it is overwhelming in its scope. At the same
time, it is very vibrant. It is strikingly modern in some ways,
especially architecturally, and it's very cosmopolitan, in the
sense that it has developed as the city of trade and commerce, and
it has that
energy. Some people say it's a Westernized energy, but
I don't actually agree with that. I think it is a very Chinese
energy, but it is very modern. In a lot of ways, I think calling
things Western just because they are tall and glass is not right.
Shanghai has very dynamic architecture, much more dynamic in some
ways than what you are seeing in American cities. It is more
cosmopolitan than Beijing, in the sense that you feel more of an
international presence in the people. It has kind of quiet,
tree-lined streets in the French Concession area, and the
incredible markets that you associate with China, and big, modern
downtown congestion. It kind of has it all. It has terrific food
and probably the best museum in China, I think - the Shanghai
Museum.
Tell me about that. The Shanghai Museum was
definitely a highlight. I have probably gone there three or four
times during the different visits I have made to the city. I
think the ceramics collection alone at the Shanghai Museum is worth
the visit to Shanghai. I never would have thought I could have that
kind of a reaction to a ceramics collection, but it is staggering
to see an almost 10,000-year history of ceramics spelled out in
front of you in the place where it happened more dynamically than
anywhere else on earth. Then there are the scroll paintings, the
sort of vertically hung paintings with incredible landscapes, and
the bronze. Everything in that museum is just amazing. It's amazing
to look at the sophistication of what they were doing at a time
when people in
Europe were living in sod huts.
Okay, what's something more off the beaten
path? I really like the esoteric, weird little things in
Shanghai, like going to the pet market, where you can see the
incredible obsession with crickets of every shape and size.
Cricket boxes and fighting crickets and huge crowds of people
gathered around these tiny clay boxes where the crickets are
fighting and the people are betting on them.
How do crickets fight? You put two crickets
in a box and then tickle their antennae with little straw sticks to
get them to wrestle each other. People bet on it like they do with
dogs, except nobody really gets hurt. They still do the market in
China in a way that we just don't over here anymore. You know, when
you run into a really great market in
America, like Pike Place
Market in
Seattle, it is pretty rare. Over there, they are all
about the market. It's fun to go into the hustle and bustle of
people bartering and buying things in a less formalized way. We
went to lots of markets in China, in different towns and cities.
There are just markets everywhere. You can go to the silk market,
you can go to the pearl market, the antiques market - they are just
massive, massive conglomerations of items.
So if you had two days in Shanghai, what would you
do? I guess for a day or two in Shanghai, I would say: Don't
miss the Shanghai Museum. It also puts you right in the People's
Park, in central Shanghai, from which you can see a lot of the
dynamic architecture. The Shanghai Museum is right in the middle of
People's Park.
Lunch or dinner - where would you go? There
is a bar called the Face Bar in the French Concession. It's in an
old colonial-era diplomatic house, and there's a terrific Thai
restaurant called
Lan Na Thai upstairs and a terrific Indian
restaurant called Hazara downstairs. It is a charming place to sit.
There was a little restaurant we loved called Café Azul. Naomi and
some friends and I ate there almost every free morning we had. It's
just a little café. It has some little tables you can sit around,
with pillows, and just a fantastic sort of Mediterranean-inflected
brunch, which is not what you would expect in Shanghai, but it was
really good.
How about something more typically Chinese?
There is an ethnic minority from the far western part of China
called the Uighur. You can find little Uighur restaurants, and they
make terrific noodles, especially, but also good little stews and
things like that. I think you could also go for a drink at the top
of the Jin Mao Tower, which is just an enormous modern skyscraper.
I think it is the highest observation deck in China. There is a
bar/restaurant on about the 90th floor. If you have a clear day in
the late afternoon, it is a great spot to go up to and have tea or
a drink and be able to really walk around and grasp the magnitude
of the city. I would say - I'm just thinking ad hoc here - always
carry a book in your bag in Shanghai, because the likelihood of
sitting in traffic is substantial. It can be bad. It's fascinating.
Where did you stay when you were there? I
stayed at the
Four Seasons, and it was nice. At the top of the Jin
Mao Tower is the new Grand Hyatt Shanghai, and that, I have heard,
is nice as well. It must have incredible views. We filmed some of
the colonial clubs of Shanghai in an old hotel, the Heng Shan
Moller Villa Hotel. It's the only hotel that has an old, colonial
feel to it. It's not far from the People's Park or the French
Concession. It's where Kitty goes to see Charlie [Townsend, played
by Liev Schreiber] with all the people in the club. It's fun to
film in something that feels like the real thing.
Tell us about the French Concession.
In the colonial era, the various countries that had been
permitted in the city divided up Shanghai; essentially it had
been a treaty port. China, having long been closed to Western
trade until it was eventually opened up, gave trading
concessions to certain nations. Shanghai was one of the ports
those nations were allowed to trade in. Literally, the map of
the city was carved up by these different national
concessions. There was the British Settlement and the French
Concession, and many of those old neighborhoods have
essentially been redeveloped. But the area that they call the
French Concession still has tree-lined streets and old
houses, and it has been preserved a little more.
Okay, on to the countryside, which was so
amazingly filmed in The Painted Veil. Guangxi is really one
of those special, special places. The big city is Guilin, and the
well-known sort of tourist area is called Yangshuo, but we were
pretty far off that beaten track. We were in a very tiny town, an
ancient town called Huang Yao. It was so far from anywhere. It was
built over 500 years ago and is still completely intact as a Ming
dynasty-era town. All the things that you see in the parts of the
film showing us walking in town - the exterior of the convent, you
know, the alleys where we were chased, and the river where we
floated and got off and on the boats - almost all of that was in
Huang Yao. It is really an amazing experience to be in a place
where you can point the camera in any direction and be looking at
something that has not changed, in many ways, since the 1500s. All
the extras were people in the town. It was a strange and unusual
experience for them. We were like this
army that rolled into town,
but hopefully we were a friendly one.
How did you discover it? I credit our
director, John Curran. He kept getting taken to a lot of places
that had been filmed in Chinese films and that were known. He kept
saying, "This isn't the end of the earth to me." He kept pushing
them farther and farther out, and he finally went really far enough
out that he saw it and said, "This is it."
How far from Shanghai are we talking? It's
a three-and-a-half-hour flight to the east
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.
I understand you stayed at backpacker
hostels? There were a couple of very charming little
hotels. They put out Ping-Pong tables for us in the
courtyard, and we were there for over a month. That was Huang
Yao. Then the other place after that … in the film, when you
see those shots of the big river snaking through those hills
and the compound where we live? That was in another town,
called Yizhou. It was a bigger town that had a lovely hotel
right on that river. It was called the
Holiday Inn. They call
a lot of hotels the Holiday Inn, even though they have
nothing to do with the Holiday Inn [chain].
Where did your father live when he was
there? He lived in Kunming, in Yunnan, in southwestern
China. Yunnan is, without any question in my mind, the most
beautiful part of China that I have been to. It's the
Rockies and
the Grand Canyon, all rolled into one. It encompasses everything
from Burma's rain forest all the way to the top of the Himalayan
peaks. It is just the landscape of your Shangri-la dreams:
incredible mountains, deep river valleys, gorges, beautifully
terraced fields cutting up the hillsides, beautiful ancient towns
like Lijiang, and people of incredible ethnic diversity. I would
wander around in northwest Yunnan for six months. From Beijing or
Shanghai, you would probably fly to Kunming, which is a wonderful
city. From Kunming, you could jump to any of the smaller towns like
Lijiang or Zhongdian. Also, I would say that my brother, Jim, is
one of the only people in the world running commercial river trips
on the rivers of northwest Yunnan. My brother was really the first
person to really start running regular commercial
rafting trips on
some of these incredibly adventurous rivers that cut through these
gorges in Yunnan. People book his trips through a big travel
company called Mountain Travel Sobek. My brother, Jim, runs the
Yunnan Great Rivers trip, on the great bend of the
Yangtze and
upper Mekong. They do it every February and April, and it is the
trip of a lifetime. Truly. I have done the Grand Canyon, and never
in my life have I seen river gorges like these. It is the river
trip of all time.
What else is worth traveling across China to
see? When transitioning from Beijing to Shanghai, a
couple of us took a flight to a town called Xian, which is
the city where the famous discovery of the underground
terra-cotta warriors happened. You look on the map and you
go, "Holy cow, am I going to go all the way out there?" Then
it's like going to Chicago; it was easy. The ancient city
wall [of Xian] is still intact. You can go up on bicycles and
ride the whole perimeter of the top of the ancient city wall.
There is something about it that is really cool, because you
are riding the perimeter of the ancient city, yet the modern
city is all around you. And, of course, the tombs of the
terra-cotta warriors - they've been turned into a major
museum. You step in, and it just blows your mind. You just
cannot believe the scale of it and just the audacity of it.
It's so incredible to imagine some guy drilling a well on his
property and punching through to a cavern and lowering a
lantern down and seeing this. It's staggering. They estimate
that it could be on the order of 30,000 of these life-size
figures and military units with horses and wagons built in
terra-cotta, and they have restored nearly 10,000 of them.
They stand there like this army, and it's so from a different
time. I'm not personally one to traipse out just to see the
thing that everyone wants to see. But this was definitely
worth the trip.
He Said …
Where
Edward Norton discovered the ancient past and modern present
in Shanghai
Lodging
Four Seasons Hotel,
very expensive, 011-86-21-6256-8888,
www.fourseasons.com/shanghai
Grand Hyatt Shanghai, expensive,
011-86-21-5049-1234,
www.shanghai.grand.hyatt.com
Heng Shan Moller Villa Hotel, moderate,
011-86-21-6247-8881,
www.mollervilla.com
Dining
Café Azul, world cuisine and
tapas bar, moderate, 011-86-21-6433-1172
Face Bar, Thai and Indian, moderate,
011-86-21-6466-4328
Hazara, Indian, moderate,
011-86-21-6466-4328
Lan Na Thai, Thai, moderate,
011-86-21-6466-4328
Sites
Emperor Qin's Terra-cotta Warriors and
Horses Museum, 011-86-29-8139-9313
Jin Mao Tower, 011-86-21-5047-5101,
www.shanghai.grand.hyatt.com
People's Park
Shanghai Museum, 011-86-21-6327-2829,
www.shanghaimuseum.net
Travel
Yunnan Great Rivers trip (Mountain
Travel Sobek), 888-687-6235,
www.mtsobek.com
We Said … Where we discovered the ancient
past and modern present in Shanghai
Lodging
Donghu Hotel, moderate,
011-86-21-6415-8158,
www.donghuhotel.com.
Some people, even the most jaded New Yorkers, may find themselves
overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. Luckily for them,
there's the Donghu, a cluster of accommodations that are situated
along a peaceful stretch of road in the historic yet trendy French
Concession district.
Super 8 Feng Ye, inexpensive,
011-86-21-6535-6633,
www.super8.com. After
upping its presence in China in preparation for the 2008 Olympics
in Beijing, Super 8 is now the country's largest foreign operator
of economy hotels. This, a new outpost in Shanghai, is fresh,
clean, and comfortable; is within walking distance of the popular
Bund district; and includes several two-story guest rooms that will
remind you of the small studio apartment you lived in right out of
college.
Dining
Lu Bo Lang, moderate, 011-86-21-6328-0602,
www.lubolang.com. Annie: “We’ll have dim sum in Chinatown.” Walter: “Is there wheat in it?” So goes a scene from 1993’s memorable Sleepless in Seattle. But where she really should have taken him for good dim sum is to this three-story, state-owned eatery in Shanghai’s Old Chinese City. Fans of its dumplings (everything from sea cucumber with shrimp roe to shredded-turnip shortcake) reportedly include
Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton.
New Heights, moderate to expensive, 011-86-21-6321-0909,
www.threeonthebund.com. While its name refers not to its food but to its panoramic perch atop the Three on the Bund building (gloriously redesigned by Michael Graves), New Heights will tempt your taste buds with a menu packed with Eastern and Western bistro-style dishes such as bamboo-and-pork spicy noodle soup and the rib eye with home fries sprinkled with rosemary rock salt.
Attractions
Huxin Ting Teahouse, 011-86-21-6373-6950. Huxin Ting’s entire neighborhood is a throwback to the traditions of ancient China, none of them perhaps more sacred than a good cup of tea. Make sure you get here early in order to grab a seat by the window, where you can sit and let the flavor of the tea leaves, the wafting scent of jasmine, the view of the surrounding gardens, and the soothing sounds of classical Chinese rhythms take you back in time.
M50. If, like Ed Norton, you’re a fan of great art, make a point to seek out this burgeoning arts district. (M50 can be a little tricky to find; tell your cab driver you want to go to 50 Moganshan Road.) Here, the contemporary musings on canvas of Xue Song, oversize abstracts of Ding Yi, and works of more than 100 other artists are brought to light in refashioned factories and warehouses, often works of art in themselves.