Jonathan Rhys Meyers has played his share of villains. Now the Emmy-winning actor is a good guy: George Hogg, who led orphans across war-ravaged China. Clifford Coonangoes on set in Hengdian
A remote part of eastern China, and it's so cold on the set of The Children of Huang Shi that the cameras, the crew and the cast are in constant danger of seizing up. Jonathan Rhys Meyers wears a People's Liberation Army greatcoat when he's not on camera, to keep warm. To work his way into the part of George Hogg, a young English journalist who led 60 orphans on an extraordinary march to safety across war-ravaged China in 1937, the Irish actor keeps telling himself he's from somewhere else. "I'm British. I'm British," he repeats in plummy tones, to the laughter of the large Chinese crew, his voice echoing through the temple in this spectacular part of Zhejiang province. Roger Spottiswoode, the film's Canadian-born director, chuckles.
The real Hogg journeyed across snow-covered mountains to safety in Shandan, a city on the edge of the Gobi Desert, where he became headmaster of a school for orphans set up by a New Zealand philanthropist named Rewi Alley. Hogg died in July 1945, from tetanus after he stubbed his toe playing basketball. We'll have to wait until early next year, when the film is due out, to see what happens to his fictional version. The film, which features epic battles and a sympathetic reading of recent Chinese history, is an adaptation of Hogg's adventures and is more about broader truths than biographical detail.
Rhys Meyers's Hogg meets a nurse named Lee, played by the Australian actor Radha Mitchell, and falls in with a Chinese partisan leader, played by the legendary Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat. (Another Hong Kong stalwart, the Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh, has a cameo as an aristocratic survivor called Madame Wang.)
Nobody in China talks about the second World War. Instead they refer to the Anti-Japanese War, which ran from 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, until 1945, when the war ended with Japanese capitulation. The conflict still has political ramifications in China, and relations between the two Asian powers have never really recovered - the Chinese say the Japanese have never said sorry properly.
We've seen foreigners lead orphans through China, despite haranguing Japanese forces, before; Ingrid Bergman, as Gladys Aylward, did much the same thing as Hogg in the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. But The Children of Huang Shi is very much a Chinese movie, not necessarily Hollywood's reading of the issues.
Spottiswoode - a prolific film-maker whose varied output includes Hiroshima, Tomorrow Never Dies and Under Fire - likes to engage with political issues. He has just returned from Rwanda, where he was filming Shake Hands with the Devil, about the UN-appointed Canadian general who struggled in vain to stop the massacre of 800,000 people in 1994. For Spottiswoode, whose interest is in how politics plays out with the individual, The Children of Huang Shi fulfils a dream of making a Chinese film.
"I never had a story, and then this came along. The film is about people being taken out of their cultures. It's about a young Englishman from a middle-class background trying to break out, who came into this highly different world and found a courage he didn't expect," Spottiswoode says, as we bump along in a bus on an isolated road after a huge row with a truck driver who refused to give way - a true Chinese experience.
Much of the shoot has taken place at Hengdian World Studios, a vast facility near Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, where a big chunk of old China has been re-created for shooting historical epics and costume dramas. The production has also used locations in some of the remotest regions of China, including an aluminium factory in Gansu province, between Mongolia and Tibet. There are cultural differences between the Asian and Western ways of doing things, but Spottiswoode is generally positive about the dedication of the crew, who dug production buses and trucks out of many a quagmire during filming.
The Children of Huang Shi has a strong Chinese element partly for financial reasons, as it allowed the film-makers to do things they wouldn't normally be able to on a €15 million budget. Even though the film is set in China, it could have been made elsewhere. But labour and locations are still relatively cheap here, and there is also plenty of local talent: many of the children in the film were recruited from Peking-opera schools.
"This was tough at the start, but it's getting easier," says one of the boys playing the orphans, who have had a punishing schedule, as well as lessons from a travelling tutor. "You know, my favourite English words are 'Go home to rest'. I don't like the English words 'One more time'," he says.
Radha Mitchell, who was briefly in the Australian soap opera Neighbours and, more recently, in Finding Neverland, Phone Booth and Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, is still reeling from the gap between her expectations of a communist country and the reality, particularly after the contemporary decadence of Shanghai.
"What I really like about this script is that it doesn't have a paternalistic attitude; it feels like a marriage of the two cultures. You can see that in the crew and in the way it's shot. You're not going to the cinema to see a White Man's point of view on China," she says.
Against a stunning backdrop of a reservoir surrounded by cliffs, I chat with Rhys Meyers as scores of young extras, scabby donkeys and cantankerous goats move around behind us. Sheets of icy rain fall on our open tent as he grips his precious cigarettes. On screen the Dublin-born, Cork-raised actor is a study in insolence. As a vicious civil-war mercenary in Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil he was terrifying beyond his years, and as the Ripleyesque Chris Wilton in Allen's Match Point last year he gave a studied performance as a villain.
This makes his friendliness all the more surprising. He strides across the muddy set, gripping my arm and saying "I'm Johnny" as if we had just met in central Dublin instead of in remotest China. Then he takes time to introduce me to everyone. He's a forceful figure, but not an arrogant one. The children love him. "Are you a troublemaker?" he asks; they respond gleefully. He explains where Ireland is, saying: "Here's England, then here's Ireland, and then there's America." It seems a genuine warmth, a million miles from the sullen gender-bender Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine or the petulant George Osborne in Mira Nair's version of Vanity Fair.
Rhys Meyers is a warm presence on the set, regularly making jokes to keep his colleagues' spirits up. He likes being thought of as a bad boy, and he has played his share of villains - he says he's still waiting to be cast as a James Bond baddy - but being cast as Hogg allows him to show his versatility as an actor.
"Arrogance is definitely a big part of the roles that I've gotten. Many of my characters have had an air of it about them," he says. "But Hogg is not an arrogant character in any way, and I hope he doesn't come off as arrogant . . . it's the one thing I try not to play at all. He's a man struggling in a society that he will truly never understand but yet feels an obligation to these children that he can't help himself but feel. I hope people will be able to see that in the movie."
Rhys Meyers is Irish, certainly, and has played explicitly Irish parts, such as that of the football coach in Bend It Like Beckham, but it's not a big issue. He reckons Cillian Murphy has played more "Irish" roles, although he is surprised that he's not thought of more strongly as an Irish actor. Maybe it's the surname, he says.
"In Match Point Woody Allen asked me if I wanted Chris Wilton to be Irish, and I said yes, because I wanted an Irish figure in the lead role, but I didn't think it through, and maybe I would have kept him as a character from Luton, as he was originally, if I'd thought about it more, in terms of working out how this person would have been accepted," he says.
Shooting The Children of Huang Shi has been a challenge - both he and Mitchell fell ill during the colder parts of the shoot - but Rhys Meyers seems to enjoy a bit of adversity. "Filming in China is an adventure. In a sense you're not going to be comfortable, but this film is not meant to be a comfortable film; it's a hard, hungry film."
Wrapped in his Chinese army coat, he listens between takes to Maria Doyle Kennedy on his iPod Nano. Rhys Meyers is becoming a bit of a bad-weather expert, having recently finished a series of dead-of-winter night shoots in New York for August Rush, Kirsten Sheridan's new movie, with Robin Williams and Keri Russell. "There are nicer places China in the winter and Ireland in the summer - I've got to get on one of these big sunny Hollywood productions that take place in the Caribbean or something, give myself a break," he says.
Rhys Meyers visited Tibet as a teenager. What was it like to arrive in China to shoot? "It was all a shock. I've travelled in every continent in the world, but there's something different about China. You know, of all the places I've been to, it's really different. You're very far from home and far from everything you've ever known. I was in Tibet when I was 19, but you can't really put Tibet and China in the same bracket. They are two very, very different parts of Asian culture."
He knew nothing about George Hogg, so he had to choose between doing lots of research and flying blind. In the end he decided to come to China as a novice, just as Hogg did, in order to emulate the kind of cultural shock that Hogg felt.
You sense that making The Children of Huang Shi has involved a steep learning curve for these young actors - sleeping in a power station in Gansu is not an experience afforded every visitor to the country - but this expeditionary feeling informs much of the film's energy.
It is still early days, but, having seen some of the rushes, you sense that Rhys Meyers's film will have a much more authentic feel than a lot of films about China.