A Tumultuous Affair With China

Okay, John Curran, so they let you make a movie in Shanghai, and all you had to do was take a little advice from the Chinese government? That doesn't sound so bad.

Then again, most of the advice involved "how we would portray certain historical aspects of the story, and those I found to be -- I'll try to be diplomatic here -- it was a pain," Curran says with a laugh. "It's revisionist to a certain degree, and it's repressive and, to the Western way of thinking, nonsensical." He adds: "I didn't want to imply that there was a better film that I didn't get to make. We had a lot of battles, and I feel like we won a lot of them."

He's referring to "The Painted Veil," based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, in which Edward Norton and Naomi Watts play an expatriate husband and wife. (See review on Page 32.) Curran says Norton had been angling for years to make a movie of the adaptation by Ron Nyswaner, who also penned 1993's "Philadelphia."

Watts, who previously starred in Curran's "We Don't Live Here Anymore," signed on, too, and the director jumped right in. "Once I got the script, I read it, and a few months later I was in China."

Curran shot some of the film in Shanghai, where Norton's character, an epidemiologist named Walter Fane, is stationed with the British colonial government. When his wife, Kitty (Watts), has an affair, he accepts a job in a remote village where a cholera epidemic is raging. As retaliation for her betrayal, Walter forces his wife to join him.

Much of "The Painted Veil" was filmed in the dramatic rural landscape of the southeast Chinese province of Guangxi, where lush valleys and rice paddies are framed by tall, skinny mountains known as karsks. "Once we saw this range of mountains that I'd seen in photographs, I kind of focused" on them, Curran says of his trip to scout locations.

It was the last place they shot, Curran says, and it wound up being "the funnest part of the shoot for a lot of us, because by then the crew was really functioning well, we all knew each other, the film was going well, we'd really gotten in a groove, and we were out in these exotic places."

But it wasn't all hugs and nature walks in rural China. At first, Curran says, the locals "really embraced us, and we used a lot of them as extras. But by the end of it, they were sick of us. They were like, 'Okay, you can go now.' Literally, if we had to shoot there another few days, it would have been bad."

He explains: "You're basically taking over . . . a beautiful little town, [where] essentially people are living the same way they've lived for hundreds of years. There are very modest, narrow streets and small houses. We were getting people's houses to use for locations, so you're kind of kicking people out of their homes."

Worse, Curran says, "you're in one person's home, and the person who lives next door, well, they didn't get their home picked, [so] there's a sort of resentment. . . . Anywhere you shoot, that happens. You get a house on the street, and the guy down the street gets [ticked] off that you didn't pick his house, so he starts up with the lawn mower, so you gotta pay him to turn off his lawn mower. It's crazy. They get really incensed."

Censorship, snubbed homeowners and a shoot half a world away -- all to tell a love story. "I like the way that the film starts out with two interesting people who can't stand each other, and, little by little, through this experience, this crazy journey, they start to really look at each other anew. I guess it was really the spark and crackle of that friction that interested me more than anything," he says.

"The Painted Veil's" other love story, maybe, is Curran's ode to a rapidly industrializing China. "I think there's an element of China that wants to preserve its past, but . . . things move quickly. I wanted to go photograph a film in a part of China that might no longer be there." Ultimately, he says, "I got to go shoot it through a romantic prism, and that was great."