My TV big break

So this weekend I made my break into Chinese television, starring in Shaanxi TV's production 'Jie Hun Yang Nu Shu' (I still don't know what this means). It was at times pretty frustrating but mostly extremely interesting and a very well spent weekend.



The other actors were as follows: 'my fiancee', the director's daughter; 'her brother', a cool guy who was actually a really good actor; 'her mother', an extremely Chinese looking middle-old aged woman - short, dignified, poised; 'my teacher', played by the director; and my favourite one, 'her dad'. This guy had smoked so many cigarettes in his life that he had one of those splendid smokers' coughs that make you wonder how they are still alive. The inside of his face must have be lined with an inch of tar, because he was just incapable of changing his expression, which is something of a setback when you are trying to act. For the whole two days, the director was shouting at him to express at least some emotion. This guy is a cop in real life, and suitably corrupt, so he got us some donkey meat (illegal in China) to eat on Sunday. It's actually really good, but apparently if you eat too much it makes your nose bleed.



Both days got off to cracking starts. I'm told the director will call me at 7am both days to say when to meet up. Both days he calls around 8, and says we'll meet at around 9.30. So that 6.30 weekend wake-up was really worth it. And on Sunday morning, we were driving in one of those Rascal mini-vans looking for a cake shop to film a scene with me happily walking out of it with 'my fiancee'. It took for ever to find it, and sitting in the front of a car with an increasingly irate Chinese driver is not a pleasant experience, I just do not know how he did not kill at least several pedestrians.



On Saturday morning we drove out to a smaller town about an hour away to film a scene at a bus station. After eventually finding one in the early afternoon, I dusted off my actor's hat. It turns out I didn't dust it off very well, because when I saw a recording of the scene on the camera, I was reminded why I sat out a Lower Sixth Form History production of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Do I really look like that? Do I really sound like that? My voice is very un-microphone friendly anyway, and with a Chinese local language coming out of it, it's even more offensive to the ear. I saw myself on the camera for a few seconds, and no more for the rest of the weekend.



Then we went back to Xi'an to a show flat to film most of the scenes. It was meant to be mine and 'my fiancee's', but the garish purple and orange furniture made me feel very uncomfortable. As for the acting, it was getting increasingly difficult. Due to the fannying around that seems so much a part of life here, it was already late afternoon when we started, and it was clear time was short with so much to film. It was very difficult for me even to remember my lines, because it was in a language I don't understand. A lot of my stuff was filmed one line at a time. One scene I was reading a newspaper and had the cunning idea of holding the script inside the newspaper, but apparently it was poking out the top.



It's also quite difficult because the director and the camera guys refused to inform me about anything. So they'd be talking to each other, then stop, there's a silence, and it turns out that I'm meant to speak. The thought of them letting me in on this rather uesful information forever escaped them, so I had to increasingly impolitely ask them to let me know what was happening. They also never said 'action' or anything like that, we were somehow meant to guess when to start.



The last scene was horrible, I just could not understand anything of what I was saying, could hardly say it, and the some of the people were obviously looking at their watches, so I switched to using a language that I know and they (hopefully) don't and told them where a good place to put that watch might be.



As for my acting, I'm reminded of someone's comment about John Nettles, the main guy in Midsummer Murders - 'he looks like he's auditioning for the part of a comatose patient'. The director kept asking me to look more happy. I felt like Mr Burns, I was smiling my arse off and he's still asking for me to crank up the happiness. My face was sore afterwards. Tom Martyn does not do happy, he does brooding and wronged. I ended Day One in a mini-actors' huff.





Day Two



After the aforementioned cake incident, we went to the directors' hometown, a tiny village in the middle of the countryside. The countryside is the poor, unwanted half of China that is completely forgotten about by those in the cities and outside of China. I loved it. Lots of corn fields with tall green stalks, trees all around, fresh air, less noise, laid back. When I wasn't filming I just wandered round, watching an old man feeding his goat along a path, talking to old people sitting outside their front doors doing nothing in particular. The kids there had never seen a 'waiguoren' (foreigner) before, so they were genuinely excited to see me, there were loads of them crowding round and watching when we were filming.



We filmed a scene of me walking merrily along the side of a field with 'my fiancee' when some kids come along and give me flowers and I play with them and point to my funny big nose and we sing songs together and jump and dance and, oh my, everything is so gosh darn happy! Of course I felt like a complete idiot and was mighty relieved when that was over. After, we went for lunch in the director's mother's home. Being invited into these guys' houses with people who live there was a high quality experience.



We filmed a scene in the courtyard of a traditional Chinese countryside house. During this scene, the 'dad' was even worse than normal thanks to his sporting consumption of 'baijiu' (Chinese vodka-like drink) over lunch. All the people crowding round were laughing at him and by Chinese accent.



Eventually we had to leave the countryside, but we still had to film a scene inside a flat. So we went back to film to some random flat. On entering this flat, I very nearly vomited up my donkey meat. There were several huge photos of the young couple who lived there in those 'his-and-hers' type photos, with them gazing into the middle distance against a blue background, holding teddy bears and wearing white and pink. There was a HUGE one above their bed, it really was the most foul thing ever conceived. I didn't know I would be filming this scene, and accordingly didn't appropriate clothing. So me and 'my fiancee' and I are lying on the bed, having a chat before lights out, and I'm wearing a pair of very short shorts borrowed from some guy and the same white shirt I had been wearing all day. It's going to look dreadful on TV, me having the same shirt on, on supposedly different days of the week.



After a further slightly fraught piece of filming on Monday night, we had finally finished. It was a really cool experience, incredibly interesting, good Chinese practice, but mainly it had given me a great opportunity to go to the countryside with people who knew it. All I have to do now is wait for those Hollywood offers to roll in...