Joan Chen: Chen Reaction

"My favorite scene of yours was in The Last Emperor when you walk through the mansion spitting at Japanese people."

"Oh yes, I had to drink a glass of water before that one," Joan recalls.

"Why do you think Americans are so into Hong Kong films right now?"

"Good question, I don't know!" Joan answers. "I think a lot of Hong Kong movies are mindless, good entertainment. Audiences are deteriorating over there."

It's certainly no secret that most Hong Kong filmmakers are more interested in winning at the box office than they are in winning at the Academy Awards; full-length features have been known to be slapped together-- from inception to final edit--in two months flat. Hot actors like Tony Leung, of last year's steamy The Lover, or Maggie Cheung whose film, The Actress, is due for U.S. release, will work on two or three films simultaneously.

"I did a Hong Kong movie," Joan mutters sheepishly. "It's horrible. Don't go see it. Actually, don't say I said that."

"What's the movie?"

Chen starts squirming. "Uh-uh. I'm not telling you. But it was a grand endeavor without the money to do it. You know, somehow a few people had to do everything."

"You mean the director had to drive the catering truck and do the makeup and take out the trash?"

"Exactly. With one person's salary, we made a whole epic. We got no sleep at all. I think Hong Kong actors and actresses are really quite amazing. They're very versatile. They drive their own vans to change in. They do a good job."

When I ask Chen to give me her impression of some of the Hong Kong actresses, she giggles mischievously. "What about Anita Mui?" I ask, referring to the actress who's as known for her bad-girl antics and her bad pop singing as she is for acting in Stanley Kwan's Rouge.

"I don't know her very well," Chen says. "I ate crab with her once in Hong Kong, but then she wanted to play mah-jongg and I didn't know how to play, so I left."

How about Maggie Cheung, the stunning young actress who took home the 1993 Best Actress statue at the Hong Kong Film Awards? "She is very good in The Actress," Chen concedes, and adds, "but all of a sudden, she got boobs! What happened?

"They are very sassy, those Hong Kong girls," Chen continues. "I'm actually timid when I go there. I feel threatened by all of them. Nightclubs every night. I tell them, I have to go home and sleep. I feel like a big country bumpkin."

When I ask her about the Hong Kong actors, Chen softens and her eyes take on a shine.

"Would you like to work with Tony Leung?" I ask her.

"We've actually spoken to each other several times. We were thinking of doing something together. You know, after he appeared in The Lover, I heard all kinds of women saying, 'Oh, Chinese men!'"

"What about Chow Yun-Fat?" I ask, referring to action director John Woo's screen alter-ego.

"Did you ever see God of Gamblers," Chen asks, "in which he plays a gambler of mystic powers who's addicted to chocolate bars? I think Chow Yun-Fat's a great actor. He has to be to present himself as well as he does in a lot of those ridiculous movies. You know, people say that he's getting old and fat. But I don't care. I really love him."

Chen's position as a Chinese actress with standing in Hollywood gives her the opportunity to do projects the best actors in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan can only dream of. She'll soon appear in Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, the third offering in what Stone's been calling his Vietnam Trilogy. It's based on Le Ly Hayslip's two autobiographical books, covering nearly four decades of war and turmoil in Vietnam, as well as what is perhaps an even more trying existence, that of a San Diego housewife. In the late '80s, Chen came across the manuscript to Hayslip's first book, and five months before publication, she tried to option the film rights to it. "I felt an affinity with the destiny of this woman. She just touched me. So I called her agent. I called everybody. Then I met her." Chen knew that if she could adapt the book to the screen, Hayslip's character could be the role of a lifetime for her. The next thing Chen knew, the rights had been sold to Stone.

"Oliver called me and said, 'Well, Joan, no hard feelings,'" Chen shrugs. "Four years passed, and then Oliver called me up again to say that the project was alive, and would I like to come in to read?" But Stone had already held nationwide casting calls for the part of Hayslip and the role had gone to a first-time actress named Hiep Thi Le. The part Stone wanted Chen for was that of the haggard and beleaguered "Mama."

"At first, I said, 'Well, I'll think about it,'" says Chen. "But in my heart, I'd already said yes because I loved the project. Even if he had asked me to play the father I would have said yes."

"You've always had these glamorous roles. How does a Shanghai girl like yourself prepare to play a peasant?" Actually, I've heard the stories of how Stone made Chen toil, along with the neophyte actors, in the rice paddies of Thailand, where the film was shot, as a kind of method acting run amok.

"I was thrown on a farm," Chen says. She's not real good at masking her indignation. "Every day, for two weeks, we got up at 5:30, we went to the farm, we worked for the whole day, and we ate with the local peasants. It was hard work. It was really hard work. It was not as hard for Hiep because she came from that part of the world. She came to America on one of those refugee boats. Anyway, I was mentally whipped by Oliver Stone every day. He was ..." Chen searches for the exact words--perhaps the English translation for the Communist Chinese concept of Evil Landowner Pig--"a slave driver!" she says finally.

"What were his other directorial techniques?" I ask.

Chen pulls up one of her pant legs. "Look at this!"

I look. There's a burn mark the size of Mongolia coursing up Chen's otherwise ivory calf.

"I was walking past a water pump on the dike and I got this very deep burn. But I was supposed to jump into the muddy water and go back to work. I said, 'Oliver ... I burned myself.' I was in tears. I knew he was going to hate me. You should have seen that face." Chen makes her eyes go wild. "He was like, 'What! You cut yourself? How did you do that?' There was none of this, 'Oh gee, Joan, I'm sorry.' We called a doctor and he said, 'Joan really shouldn't be in the fields,' but Oliver made me put a huge condom over my leg every day and go back into the water. He said, 'If you don't go into the field, you don't eat. You die.'

"It was a permanent scar," Joan continues, leading me to wonder if she's talking about her burn mark or her experience working with Stone. "But I'm very grateful Oliver gave me this chance," she adds.

Though Chen is aware that Heaven and Earth stands to make the bigger splash, she is more personally enthusiastic about Golden Gate, "a beautiful, poetic and thought-provoking film" written by David Henry Hwang. "I'd film anything David wrote," Chen asserts.

It's difficult to say how the future of Chinese-themed films, or Chinese filmmakers, will unfold, but Chen herself is secure in an American career--she's the actress most likely to be considered for any appropriate good role in a Hollywood film. Chen also wants to go back to China to work occasionally; she's talking to Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine about possible projects. As she explains, "I need to go back to China more now than I did before."

_______________________

Alison Dakota Gee wrote about the Hong Kong Film Awards for the October Movieline.

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Comments

  • I think westerners need to keep an open mind about any form of ancient/chinese medicine. They (we) seem to forget that we didn't know what antibiotics was 200 years ago. There are more types of energy to be discovered who knows maybe in another 200 years we'll discover something equally as exciting!

  • Her book was on New York Times bestseller list for more than a month. Who has done that? Grisham? She wants people to think she's dumb. The more they think that, the more she earns.