Off the Beaten PathTo 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/shanghaiGrand Hyatt Shanghai, expensive, 011-86-21-5049-1234,
www.shanghai.grand.hyatt.comHeng Shan Moller Villa Hotel, moderate, 011-86-21-6247-8881,
www.mollervilla.comDining
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.comPeople’s Park
Shanghai Museum, 011-86-21-6327-2829,
www.shanghaimuseum.netTravel
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.