DIP

Posted in Writing on 04/14/2010 08:38 am by Simon

I visited the set where my channel 4 film, DIP, was being shot. I felt a rush of pride – here were thirty people all trying to make my words come to life. Far more people than I expected, in fact, and I never quite worked out what all of them did. There was a script supervisor who checked continuity, and a makeup lady who kept rushing up to the lead and gelling down a loose forelock; two producers; a man who periodically told everyone to be quiet; two assistant directors; a clutch of extras. And all these people were crammed onto a bus, the story’s setting. The bus trundled along in the bus lane, stopping whenever the scene required it – which meant a fair few irate drivers behind wondering what was going on. It was a Friday night, so there were lots of people out, with even, at one point, a couple of drunk girls trying to get on board. It was the last day of a four day shoot and all the scheduled scenes were to be shot on the top deck. So actors, director, camera and sound people were upstairs, and everyone else was downstairs, with boxes of crisps and dried fruit and a tea caddy. The monitor was set up where the prams normally go. If you wore headphones – cans – you could hear what the actors were saying. I found it excruciating listening, I just couldn’t stand to hear my words being spoken, so I turned the volume down – but it was great to watch them.

After seeing a scene being shot, I felt a burst of euphoria and thought, this is where I am meant to be, this is exciting, what happens next? But what happens next is that they do exactly the same scene again, and this time shoot it from a different angle. Then they do it again to get some reaction shots from the secondary charcters, then again because that last shot went wrong – the bus went past a billboard and there was a logo in the frame, the stray forelock sprung loose once more. And then they do it again and again and by the time they move on you’ve thoroughly lost interest. I discovered that film sets are really boring places; everyone is waiting around pretty much all the time. They were very nice to me, scrupulous in trying to accord me status, but they all had jobs to do and I hadn’t, I was really just in the way, and I felt like a visiting dignitary, saying ‘and what do you do?’ and shaking hands.

Later I saw a rough cut – an assembly – in a Soho edit suite. Watching it, I felt like asking for all the dialogue to be cut. When you’re writing a script the temptation is to obsess over dialogue – and, after all, when writing a novel, dialogue is the most powerful and vivid thing you can write. But when you see the film, the realise that the dialogue is meh; it’s the pictures that count. And the most powerful images are things that looked like nothing in the script – ‘Asad looks out of the window’, ‘the girl is eating a kebab’; or just weren’t there at all – there’s a big difference between what is written and what is actually shot. Then out of this vast, amorphous lump of filmed material called ‘coverage’ a tiny fragment is sliced up and put together to make the film.

Now the edit is done. They have taken the hum of the engine out and added other sound effects – squeaky brakes, the smack of a punch – and all that remains is to layer the score over the whole thing. I am very much looking forward to seeing it on the big screen, at a screening in the Curzon Cinema in a couple of weeks. Though I will squirm, I am sure.

 

Deep forest

Posted in Travel article, Yunnan on 02/01/2010 07:10 pm by Simon

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest, where you can have an unforgettable experience of great natural beauty.
Get off the beaten track and hire a guide to take you through the pristine, old growth rainforest of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, Simon Lewis, says

Darkness was falling, we were alone in the forest and the fallen tree that served as a bridge over the swollen river had been swept away. We couldn’t go back – we’d already walked 20 km through dense jungle – and going forward appeared to be a dubious proposition.

But Mr Rush, my indomitable guide, didn’t give it a second thought.

“Just take off your shoes and jump,” he said and dived in. The water foamed around his thighs as he waded ahead. I followed tentatively with shoes held above my head, shivering at the cold water and feeling the mud squelch between my toes. I tried not to think about the leeches and snakes we’d seen earlier.

“This is nothing,” Rush said. “One time I came with two Dutch girls. The stream was so high we had to wait for some villagers to come along, and they pulled us all across with ropes.”

This, I believed, was a cunning tactic. Whenever it looked like I might complain, he’d bring up some other tourist who had it worse. And I had no right to grumble, I had got what I had asked for – a real warts and all trip into China’s biggest rainforest.

Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan province, has plenty of virgin, old growth forest; but you have to get out of the sleepy capital, Jinghong, and away from the touristy “forest parks” before you can really see it. And for that you’ll need a guide.

Mr Rush really loves the forest. In his previous job as a beekeeper he had traveled with his hives to every province in China, and he had finally settled in Xishuangbanna because it had “the most magic”.

Though he said he was given his English name because of his eagerness to learn the language in class, it seemed particularly appropriate as he sped down the narrow, overgrown forest trails, swinging a machete to clear the path.

Being inside the forest was a sublime experience. Every moment I was overwhelmed by a glut of visual detail, millions of leaves and tree trunks, all in the narrowest of palettes, green and brown.

Dazzling touches of color were provided by the iridescent wings of butterflies, which seemed to taunt and flirt, by staying just out of reach. The buzz of insects sounded like incessant ring tones. Exotic birds flashed by as the trees above cast shadows and pressed in from each side, as if to repair the red earth scar of our trail.

For hours, the only other sign of human activity was the occasional hole hacked into the bamboo, made by locals looking for tasty grubs to eat. It was only after fording the stream that we began to see signs of civilization.

We passed through a rubber plantation – narrow trees planted in rows – and there were bowls or broken bottles that collected the white sap.

Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at 3 am. The locals don’t like to do it and employ Sichuanese laborers. They peered out at us from simple bamboo huts. Here there were no birds, or butterflies and the only animals were long, bright red centipedes. Rubber trees take up so much water that nothing else grows around them.

Here Mr Rush seemed to walk even faster, it was obvious that he didn’t like this monoculture. With the price of rubber rising, in recent years a lot of forest has been cleared for plantations. Fortunately, much of what remains is now protected.

“There is something very precious here and it needs to be protected. But the people also need to make a living. The challenge for China is to develop without destruction,” Mr Rush said.

Finally, we arrived, in darkness, at a village. With no light pollution the stars shone brightly, seemingly close enough to touch. The locals walked around with torches strapped to their heads, resembling giant fireflies. They were chopping vegetables, cooking, putting children to sleep.

I had a cold shower then settled down to a simple meal around a hearth. I was so hungry that even a bowl of the aforementioned grubs was welcome. Actually, they were pretty tasty, a good meat substitute when fried in chili oil.

Lubricated with home-made baijiu, our host opened up. He said that in his younger days he would go hunting for wild pigs in the forest with a home-made gun. He told a story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot its calf. The angry elephant, so the story goes, charged the man’s house and killed his wife.

Today there are few wild elephants left in the forest, in a nearby forest park.

My hosts were Jino, one of China’s smallest ethnic groups, with only 20,000 members. You can distinguish them by the white headdresses of the women and the rising sun painted, for protection, on the eaves of their houses. Not far away were the jungle villages of Blang people, famous for their elaborate black headdresses; and Wa, whose women were easy to distinguish by their long hair.

“The cultures here are worth every effort to preserve,” Mr Rush said.

As I lay down to sleep on a mat on the floor I thought about this unique face of China that Mr Rush had shown me. I promised myself I would return, though next time I’d bring some wellies.

Simon Lewis is the author of Rough Guide to China
China Daily Updated: 2010-01-07 10:22

 

The best Noir crime books-12

Posted in Writing on 11/30/2009 12:02 am by Simon

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1952

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

Ian Fleming is a good writer, and the James Bond books are good books. That needs to be said, because everyone seems to assume that they are pulpy shlock.

Not at all. They’re gritty, low key British noir. Bond might be a secret agent sent to foreign locales to thwart larger than life villains, but he is a complex and sometimes uncomfortable character, aware of the dehumanising aspects of his job, revulsed by murder, grieved by the deaths of his friends.

There are four or five really stand-out novels, but I choose this just because it’s the first and here we see Bond grow into his persona. The plot is very simple, the first outing of the formula – a villain with a plan, a girl, a glamorous locale. In this case, Le Chiffre the communist banker needs to win big at cards at a casino on the French riviera; Bond is sent to stop him. This simple plot is able to carry the book because of Fleming’s fantastic technique. He gets you to believe everything that happens by describing it exhaustively and precisely, in an uninflected style; the writer here is a camera, an expert recorder, and a master of technical jargons – it all assures you that he knows of what he speaks. And nowhere more so than when describing sprts cars, fine dining, foreign travel – it must have been absolutely intoxicating when it came out, in the post-rationing 50s.

There are some fantastically tense gamblng scenes; a couple of murders; a brutal torture scene; an intense love affair with its emotional parabola poignantly evoked – only this one ends with betrayal and death. And at the centre is this fascinating, cool, cruel fish, Bond, who must annihilate his finer feelings to be better at his work. He succeeds, at the end of this, setting up the rest of the series.

And I heard they’ve made a film of it.

 

The best Noir crime books-11

Posted in Writing on 11/25/2009 12:48 am by Simon

Strangers on a train, Patricia Highsmith, 1950

The train tore along with an angry, irregular rythmn

Guy is good egg; a talented young architect on the up – the only flaw in his life is his vicious estranged wife. On a train journey he meets decadent mother’s boy Bruno, who impulsively plans the perfect double murder – he’ll knock off Guy’s wife, if Guy takes out his father. Without apprarent motive, they’re bound to get away with it…

This was the first and maybe the best of a long list of psychological thrillers. Instead of the traditional antagonist/protagonist Highsmith gives us two men locked in a destructive bond. The strange relationship that develops between Guy and Bruno is like an illicit gay affair; they are said to be joined ‘closer than brotherhood’. Bruno says he loves Guy but after he kills Guy’s wife insists that Guy honour his half of a bargain that was never made – then blackmails the man until he cracks. Guy can never quite break away from Bruno’s grip; in one sequence he even saves Bruno from drowning. Cornered, forced into murder and about to be caught, Guy can still describes Bruno as ‘his own cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.’

As in many of Highsmith’s books, the interest is in the perverse psychology of the characters. Her novels are always astute, well written and twisted. Graham Greene called her a ‘poet of apprehension’.

Hitchcock filmed this one, of course, and though it’s a decent film he neutered its perversity by having Guy refuse to kill anyone. Shame.

 

Jungle trek

Posted in Yunnan on 10/30/2009 10:07 am by Simon

jungle

The last time I was in Jinghong it had a thriving backpacker culture – banana pancake cafes and cheap guesthouses. The backpackers had been drawn by culture and nature; now there was less of both, and the backpackers had largely gone, to be replaced by high rolling Chinese tourists, who generally are happy to be given a packaged experience – an ethnic dancing show, a visit to a nature reserve, maybe some illicit gambling.

Where once there were twenty guides to take roughing it types into the jungle, today there are only three.

My guide was called Mister Rush. His nickname might was from his eagerness to ask questions in English class, but it seemed an appropraite moniker when I was following him through the rainforest, as he set a hell of a pace. He was a compact, slim man from Hubei, precise in his gestures and clipped in his diction, and like all the guides and trekkers I’ve known, had an independent minded and philosophical bent. He had five years spent working as a beekeeper, travelling with his bees up and down the country.

He bemoaned the contemporary Chinese obsession with money but still, spent a lot of time talking about it – what is the average salary in your country, why does a nurse get less than a banker, what difference a welfare system makes, and so on.

We walked to a Hani village. The Hani until recently had lived in the mountains until the government asked them to come down.

The village was the usual scruffy collection of buuildings – chickens pecking, dogs barking, the smell of shit, plastic scattered everywhere. The wooden huts where they dried the crops were much more appealing, to my eyes, than the crudely built houses. One dwelling at the top of the village was markedly better than the others, with shining blue roof tiles and a neat yard. This guy had made it rich as a middle man and rather than move away he had stayed with his neighbours to lord it over them.

The walls were painted with big character slogans about aids, or building socialism. One read ‘boys and girls are equal’. This hints at a big problem in the Chinese countryside; smaller families and the wish for a male heir means that there is now a big gender imbalance – lots more men than girls. Which has led to the practise of bride buying; really poor families sell their girls to men who can’t find wives. A girl costs about twelve thousand yuan, apparently – just over a grand. And with girls suddenly so lucrative, kidnapping has become a problem too.

From there it was a short hike to a tea factory. Here the tea leaves were dried in the open air, then fermented – left basically – before being pressed between heavy stone blocks into bricks. The point being that these are stable (unlike green tea, which spoils), and easy to transport. This ‘black pu’er cha’ was once sent from here on the tough trek to Tibet.

It was a great location, with beautiful views of the forest; if I had to work in a factory, I would choose this one. The staff were locals but the boss was from Hong Kong. As ever, it was noticeable that even in minority areas, the entrepeneurs and money makers – like my guide – were Han.

Then we hit the forest. The trail was barely discernible, and often Rush had to hack the foliage back with a machete. Inevitably perhaps to a westerner of my generation, it brought memories of Vietnam war films. The butterflies were lovely, but there wasn’t much wildlife to be! seen, as it was all in the bush. Heard lots of birds though, above the buzz of insects which was so incessant it was like tinnitus. The bamboo clumps were huge, sometimes twenty metres, and grew in clumps. Sometimes holes had been hacked into the hollow interior, made by locals picking out grubs to eat. A sense of profligacy, lushness, thick meaty leaves everywhere, tremendous agglomeration of visual detail but all in only one colour, green.

We arrived after dark in a Jinuo village, and ate a meal (including some of the aforementioned grubs, fried in chilli oil) with a local family. The head of the house went hunting at night with a homemade gun – the animals would not run from light at night. He talked about how a decade ago a group of hunters in his village had been shot by the government for killing an elephant. And he told an apocrychal story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot the elephant’s kid. The angry elephant, so ! the story goes, went to the guy’s house and killed his wife.

These mountain people were small, wiry and taciturn. They weren’t particularly welcoming or interested in us, they just got on with their business. They worhsipped the sun, and every house had a painting of a sunrise on the roof eaves.

The next day we hiked through a rubber plantation. It was boring – rubber is non native, and takes up so much water that nothing else grows around it. Bowls or broken bottles collected the white sap. Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at three in the morning. The locals don’t like to do it and employ even poorer people from elsewhere in China. The labourers lived in bamboo huts inside the plantation. The price of rubber has increased in recent years, everyone is busy trying to get rich, and little of the forest is now left. The only animals I saw now were six inch long, bright red poisonous centipedes. The track was busy with guys on motorbikes bearing plastic vats full of raw rubber, which rather resembles tofu.

We came down to the plains and a prosperous, neat Dai village. Some guys were betting on fighting cocks. It’s kind of like acrobatic sumo, with the birds jumping at each other, diving and pivoting as they look for advantage. It was impressive to watch one bird launch itself feet first in a big attack and see the other duck right under the aggressor, turn and attack from behind.

These people were much friendlier – we were given water chestnuts, some ladies invited us to hang out with them on hammocks slung between the stilts that hold their buildings up. Dai men all have tattoos – the older ones have abstract designs of dots but the younger guys sport snakes and dragons. The Dai language has its own script, unlike other minority languages and Dai people are said to look down on their less cultured mountain neighbours. They have certainly adapted to modern China better than most minorities.

And that was my jungle trek. It left me with the desire to see more of the real thing. Apparently it’s possible not far from here to arrange to be slipped over the border into northern Burma – opium factories, tribal militias, head hunters – now that would be an adventure.

 
Older Entries