河國榮, An Aussie in Hong Kong

In January, having just left TVB, I found myself working with Mr Chow Yun Fat 發哥 as his personal dialect coach, flying business class to a small city called Durango located in Mexico where we lived and worked for just over two months working on the Fox production Dragonball. It was quite an experience but not much fun (acceptable, taken that this was a working trip rather than a pleasure trip).

Most people, at least here in Hong Kong, have the impression that working for a Hollywood film production company is fun, or at least much more pleasurable than working for a Hong Kong film production company. The perception is that the work is not hectic or rushed, the working hours are shorter (and that hotel standard food will be provided). The perception is wrong.

With Dragonball being my first Hollywood production, I was not entirely prepared for the calibre of the crew. They were quite extraordinary.

The director

James Wong was the director. I watched him carefully. I wanted to see how Hollywood directors interacted with their cast. At TVB, our directors had (past tense because I'm no longer there ;-) very little time to discuss our scenes in detail with us. There was virtually no sharing or exchange of ideas. We simply arrived on set whereupon the director would glance at the set, decide where and how we would move during the scene (what we refer to as "blocking") and then run us through the scene. At TVB, most scenes were 'rehearsed' in mere minutes.