Few Australian films harbour the ambition of Mao’s Last Dancer. Brendan Swift tracks the big screen adaption of Li Cunxin’s inspirational life story across three continents.
Hiding in a toilet for several hours during a police raid is not a typical part of film production. But then most features are not shot in modern day China.
Just three weeks into filming the government had rejected a crucial permit allowing the foreign production of Mao’s Last Dancer to shoot in the Communist country.
And then, days later, the film’s production office was overrun by police, intent on interrogating the entire production crew, including a terrified accountant who had locked herself in the bathroom.
“It was an extraordinary situation and we were falling into the vortex more and more as time went on,” producer Jane Scott says. “There were scary moments and I did think I was being foolhardy in a way, because I was dealing with investors’ money and if it had gone wrong it would have been a devastating mistake.”
The atmosphere was already politically charged after legendary director Steven Spielberg had criticised China’s human rights record, prompting the government to kick out several US productions filming in the country.
While the Australian production narrowly avoided that fate, police would still make their presence known, forcing crew to grease the wheels of production with tea, cigarettes, and alcohol – as well as the traditional small stipend to look the other way.
“You can’t turn it into a soft nothing – a bit of blancmange, you would lose the whole passion of the film,” Scott says. “But we managed one way or another to complete the film there and nobody got thrown out.”
The specific events which spurred the official backlash – the depiction of Madam Mao’s trial and the end of the revolution – form a relatively minor part of the $25 million film, adapted from ballet dancer Li Cunxin’s inspirational book.
He was born into extreme poverty in China before party apparatchiks plucked him from obscurity at the age of 11 and sent him to Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy for years of harsh training.
A cultural scholarship with the Houston Ballet ultimately spurred his defection to the West amid a dramatic media and political storm.
Director Bruce Beresford describes the shoot – which captures China, the US and Australia over a two decade timespan and footage of some of the world’s best dancers – as one of the most difficult he has completed in his 25-year plus career.
“We had three different people playing Li Cunxin … it’s all quite ambitious and with all those flashbacks to China, it was quite a complicated film to make.”
The journey to the big screen began when Scott and screenwriter Jan Sardi, who memorably penned pianist David Helfgott’s life story in Shine, read the book and were struck by its power.
Cunxin had immigrated to Australia in 1995 and Sardi was able to track him down at his Melbourne-based corporate offices, where he works as a stockbroker. Fortunately, Shine was one of his favourite movies and Sardi was able to allay fears that the book would be given the ‘Hollywood’ treatment.
“When you’re telling the story of someone’s life the first thing you have to do is to win their trust,” Sardi says. The two would meet every couple of weeks over sushi to discuss the adaption, as Sardi struggled to pare back the book’s near-400 pages
into a filmable story arc that would move and inspire audiences.
“It was really difficult because of how much happens in Li’s life and that is part of the magic of the story, in that he has lived life to the full,” Sardi says. “Here’s a story about a little boy that gets taken out of one place and put in another – it’s about him trying to find his place in the world … it’s all the great universal questions in story telling.”
As the script neared completion, the difficult search for a highly versatile, multi-lingual actor, and world-class ballet dancer, began – a goal Beresford did not think was possible.
“I read the book when it first came out but I didn’t think it was filmable because I thought, in the first place, we’d never get permission to film in China, and I also thought we’d never find anyone to play the main role,” Beresford says.
“What it meant having to find was one of the world’s best ballet dancers and he had to be Chinese and he had to speak perfect Mandarin and he had to speak perfect English. Filling in all those criteria was very tricky.”
After several unsuccessful trials, it was Li himself who suggested Chi Cao, the talented principal ballet dancer at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The novice film actor formed a bond with the real life Li, who spent plenty of time on set to give an insight into his life, including the pivotal scene where he is held against his will by the Chinese consulate.
“I knew him from a very young age because he’s very famous in ballet circles in China because of the way he left China and also because he was already a very good dancer before he left China,” Cao tells INSIDEFILM from China, where he has been taking a four-week holiday. “So we all knew who he was and in a way there was a special connection because we came from the same school.”
Despite the rigours of making his first dramatic screen performance, the 31-year old Cao kept up a high-intensity training routine, which involved daily two-hour training sessions at 4am before filming.
“In terms of performing, it is very different, because a film performance you have to do as little as possible in a way. You have to be as natural as you can,” he says.
“With dancing, we have to make everything more dramatic on stage, more theatrical, so when I first start to act, I overact a lot, and then Bruce was always [saying] ‘Oh Chi just turn it down, just think about what you do’.
“The emotion side wasn’t really hard because as a dancer you still have to have the pure emotion to make the audience believe you. But it’s just through a different channel and to find that channel took quite a while.”
Cao had to perform while also learning several routines choreographed specifically for the film by former artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, Graeme Murphy. Beresford captures the scenes in a clear-cut and direct fashion.
“I had a look at a lot of dance sequences from other films and what I thought I would do is not cut this to much and film them mostly head to toe,” Beresford says.
“Because when you cut closer and you’re doing lots of shots of say, reactions of heads or the upper part of the body, you’re not seeing the legs, and I thought for ballet you really had to.”
The action was captured by Beresford’s long time cinematographer, Peter James, who went to Efilm Australia to develop two specific looks: the ‘China look’ representing Li’s early childhood and the later US look.
“Rather than using the whole negative I just went into 50 per cent of the negative so when blown up it makes it grainy, giving the film a period look,” James says. “For the Houston footage, we went back to a full format and it is much more what we’re used to seeing in modern day photography.”
The $25 million film – one of the last to be made under the 10BA financing structure – was funded by the former Film Finance Corporation ($4 million), private investors, its international sales agent Celluloid Dreams International, and, together for the first time, Australian co-distributors Roadshow and Hopscotch.
“We’ve got very different [local] distributors both representing very different audiences in a way – the art house and the commercial,” Scott says.
Second place (behind the Oprah Winfrey-backed drama Precious) in the people’s choice awards at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival last month proved an early sign of its success.
The film has since grossed more than $6.3 million in its first week at local cinemas, catapulting it into Australia’s biggest 50 films of all time. Sales of the book, originally released in 2003 and in its 32nd printing, remain strong.
However, Beresford – who is currently set to shoot the David Williamson-penned South African tale Zebras – was more circumspect just before the film’s October 1 release.
“When I did Driving Miss Daisy the original plan was to release it in one art house in San Francisco. And everyone who looked at it said ‘That’s what we’ll do, we’ll just put it in this San Francisco art house where a lot of gay guys will come and see it’. No one thought it was going to be a popular success.”
That film, released in 1989, won four Oscars from its 11 nominations and grossed more than $US145 million worldwide at the box office.
“Whatever I try and do I say to myself ‘Do I really want to do this, is it a story I really want to tell?’ Because to sit down and say will this be madly popular is very, very difficult.”
This updated article originally featured as the cover story in INSIDEFILM‘s September #124 issue. Subscribe to INSIDEFILM and receive up to 3 FREE DVD’s from Madman’s Directors Suite.
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