Gong Li in Hannibal Rising
Gong Li on Hannibal Rising
"I saw two of the films," said Gong. "Definitely the Hannibal films are quite popular in Asia and China. The novels, I'm not sure if they've been released in Chinese yet or not. But certainly the films, everybody knows about those. So if you just say Silence of the Lambs, everybody knows exactly what you're talking about."
Lady Murasaki does not intend to give Hannibal the power to kill. She tries merely to teach him martial arts to build his body and mind. What he does with it is the very moral issue of the film.
"I think it's a matter of the fate, or the lives, of these two characters. They're quite similar. When they meet, right away they realize that they share something in common, which is that they've suffered a lot in the war, and specifically, that their families have all died in the war. So they had to face a lot of dark experiences together. They have a lot of this pain and suffering in their hearts. So I think that's what attracts Lady Murasaki to Hannibal. And she has a kind of a desire to kind of help him and protect him, as it were, to get through this. And at the same time, I think it's quite similar for Hannibal as well. What attracts him is this feeling of possibility of protecting and being protected. It's sort of like in the scenes in the war, we see if somebody gets killed and you want to take revenge or something, or you want to protect that person. So it's a kind of a mutual kind of dependency, as it were. They depended on each other to help them get through these difficult times."
Just beginning to work in English, Hannibal Rising threw Gong another curve ball. "In this one, I had to speak with a kind of a British accent. And it was kind of interesting because we had dialogue coaches to work with. And I had just come to this film from Miami, making Miami Vice, where I have a Cuban accent. So when I arrived, of course, a dialogue coach said, 'Oh, that sounds great, but in this one, we don't want you to have all those rolling Rs, etc, with a Cuban accent. We need to have a British accent, with a kind of very high class, aristocratic feel to it.' So with the dialogue coach, I think things worked out okay."
It's not the first time Gong has been asked to play a Japanese character either. Geisha was notorious for its Chinese cast. "For me, the important thing is that women in general have a lot of things in common, regardless of their background. So in this case, I didn't want to just give a kind of superficial performance of a Japanese person. I did indeed go and do a little research to understand better about the historical and cultural background of this particular character. For example, experiences that people had in the war, and the way that affected them many years later. But I didn't really want to just make my character have a Japanese appearance, the way the make-up works or certain ways of walking or talking or nodding, etc. Those things are not really important to me as part of Japanese culture. It was important, rather, to understand some of that background. But as I said, the important thing is really to also think in a more kind of international way, to see that this woman, as a woman who was sort of international, has certain things in common with women, but also, it's not just that she's just Japanese."
And if Hollywood keeps ignoring the differences, she'll keep taking the work. "Things have really changed quite a lot, especially recently, as China has opened up more and more, and people know more about China. You know, they can see the difference, especially with the speed of economic development in China is quite impressive, and so people pay more attention to it now and are really able to see what's special about it, or what's different about it from Japan. But of course, from another perspective, you might think it's kind of like the way we look at the Europeans, and we're not quite sure, 'Where is he really from?' So for some people, it's a process of getting to know more about China as things open up, and gradually, people become more and more clear about the difference."
Hannibal Rising opens to theatres this Friday, February 9th.
For trailer, poster, full synopsis and more movie info, go to the Hannibal Rising Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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