(Untitled)

[flemmings]

Good heavens. Uncle Ming sings. It's the Japanese influence, I swear. You can't *just* be an actor, you must sing as well.

Oh, and here, utterly incomprehensible to the unChinesed, is bits from the making of, to be cherished for glimpses of Gou Jian wandering about with a cigarette in his mouth.

Comments

[rasetsunyo]

*grin* I was going to translate this eventually but in the meantime...

About 3 minutes plus into the clip:

Uncle Ming: [to camera crew] Did you get that? Did you get that? Hu Jun is a pig! [presumably Hu Jun did something stupid/made a funny face] Ahh why didn't you get that??

Hu Jun: [laughing] I may be a pig, but Teacher Chen is a boar trampling across the plains for battle! (yeah that doesn't make much sense in Chinese either)

[everyone laughs]

Also Uncle Ming injured his back filming the dragged by horses scene.

[flemmings]

I saw the masseur working at him. Jeez guy, at your age you use a body double. In fact, since they so clearly used a rag doll for boy!Xi Shi picked up by Fan Li, they could have done the same for Uncle Ming.

[mvrdrk]

Body double's aren't all that common in Chinese visual media, or at least that's my impression. Lots of them do their own stunts.

[flemmings]

A harrrrdy and incredibly fit race. Bones still go brittle in one's 50s, she worries. (Am pretty sure he had a body double for some of the mid-air cartwheels in Hero, though it's hard to tell.)

[feliciter]

he had a rather good voice for his age limited range, I thought. no worse than some other younger, more heavily-promoted "singer-actors" flooding the market.

Chen Daoming = consummate professional. His main response to them possibly not being able to use much of the scene where he was hanging over the cliff (due to too little of his face being in the shot) was "Should we do it again?"

[flemmings]

I didn't realize it was an age-limited voice. Thought 'Who's this young pop guy singing this pop song to Infernal Affairs 3?'

One has heard that said about Chen Daoming. I hadn't realized to what lengths (in this case one might say 'depths' but I won't) his professionalism goes. By western standards he's approaching sainthood and a shoo-in for canonization.

[paleaswater]

Oh, in the press conference he was all "this series is not just about the verisimilitude, but about texture and weight and the tactile sense." Meaning that yeah, except for catching typhus, he did everything himself. One gets the sense that he was a bit of a masochist when it came to the series.

[flemmings]

Yes well, Gou Jian *doesn't* catch typhus, so nyah. Hey, I'm all for the texture and weight and sense of touch cause look what came of it.

(Consider it his turning-50 midlife crisis. Did all that good stuff sensible actors do when they're 30 years younger and now he has it out of his system. Or who knows? Maybe turning mid-air cartwheels as the first emperor put ideas into his head and he wanted to do something physically challenging again while he was still able. Or maybe he just wants to be Gou Jian.)