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