Amanda Schull partners with Chi Cao.
As rags-to-riches fantasies go, few are as far-flung and seemingly far-fetched as the one actually lived and written about by Li Cunxin: At 11, he was plucked from an obscure, poverty-ridden village in rural China during the saber-rattling dictatorship of Mao Tse-Tung so he could enroll in Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy, where he excelled to such a spectacular extent that he was shipped off to Texas eight years later as an exchange student and achieved more distinction with the Houston Ballet.
By his early 20s, Li Cunxin was living the American Dream—only his Red Chinese handlers cautioned him that this was, in reality, a nightmare. Eventually, he caught on that he was on the sunny side of the street and contrived to stick around beyond his passport deadline, falling in love with—and marrying—a Texas co-ed to that end.
An epic taffy-pull at the embassy resulted, with diplomats from both sides tugging at his loyalty and conscience. The upshot was that staying in the U.S. and pursuing his career here cost him his country. He would never be allowed to go home again.
Not the most satisfactory of endings, so the filmmakers (and Life) tacked on a heart-tugging finale that plays like a house afire, even though it was borrowed wholesale from the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1944, Going My Way. Sentimentality, when it works, knows no age.
Now 48 and retired from active dance (beyond board obligations with companies around the world), Li Cunxin moved to Melbourne and into the area of high finance. His autobiography, titled Mao’s Last Dancer like the film, enjoyed a place on the Australian bestseller list for a year and a half and is now in its 32nd printing. Its popularity Down Under gave Aussie moviemakers the edge in filming it first.
Producer Jane Scott purchased the movie rights when she saw the emotional undercurrent of this journey. She hired Jan Sardi to adapt the sprawling story into a manageable film length. The two previously collaborated on 1996’s Shine, in which they divided the mentally shattered Australian pianist David Helfgott into a role played by three different actors (among them, an Oscar-winning Geoffrey Rush).
They went the same three-play route here with Li Cunxin, miraculously casting Huang Wen Bin as the boy, Chengwu Guo as the teenager, and Chi Cao as the adult.
When Bruce Beresford entered the picture as its director, he had pretty serious doubts that one, let alone three, passable Li Cunxins could be corraled for the film. “But I underestimated Jane’s tenacity,” he admits sheepishly. “Initially, I said, ‘The trouble is we’ll never get anyone to play the leading role. You’ve got to find a Chinese dancer who’s not just good but really, really great, who can act, who speaks English and Mandarin. I don’t know if there is anybody. I don’t think there is.’
“Hong Kong was our first stop, and we found four skilled male dancers, but all had the drawback of rudimentary English. In Los Angeles, we found Amanda Schull, who plays the American ballerina Li wanted to marry. The San Francisco Ballet company had a young Chinese woman as their principal dancer—but no Chinese men.”
Ultimately, it was Li Cunxin who knew where the next Li Cunxin was coming from. He urged Beresford and Scott to hop the next flight to Sunderland and check out Chi Cao, a Chinese-born principal dancer who was performing there with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Cao’s father was the principal, and his mother a musician, at the Beijing Dance Academy; both had been Li Cunxin’s dorm masters there.
“The minute he came on stage, I nudged Jane,” Beresford recalls. “I said, ‘That’s it. We’ve got him. He looks great.’ Lithe and elegant, he struck me as the Chinese Errol Flynn. The next day, he read for us—with confidence and command of English—and we knew we had our man. He’d never acted before—except in some ballet because they have to act out a bit on stage—but it’s really quite different for the camera.”
Having cleared the massive hurdle of casting the film properly, the moviemakers moved on to the next monumental obstacle—securing permission from the Chinese government to film in their country. The major bone of contention was Madame Mao. “They didn’t want her in the film. They said, ‘Look, she’s a disgraced non-person. We’ve erased her out of history. She didn’t happen. She can’t be in the film.’”
Minus Madame Mao, the script would be in serious shambles—she being the motor for Li Cunxin’s incredible journey—plus, one of the biggest scenes in the film had her arriving at the ballet school, saluted by thousands of students waving red banners.
“What we did,” Beresford the pragmatist is not ashamed to say, “was ignore the government’s edict. We went ahead and cast a lookalike and put her in the scene.”
It was, he concedes, nerve-racking. “I kept thinking, ‘Something’s going to happen. They’re going to throw us out of the country.’ I expected carloads of police to arrive and to find myself a few days later in an outlaying province, weeding a potato farm.”
What happened was—nothing. “I don’t know how we got away with it. We just went in and did it. I thought they’d come and try to stop us, but they never did. We never heard anymore about it. I think they were very busy. They were getting ready for the Olympics, and they were building a new airport and those big sports venues all over the city, and I think everyone was preoccupied. We slipped under the radar.
“Being thrown out of China was the most worrying thing—because, if we had been thrown out, I don’t know what we’d have done. I don’t know where we could have done it all because we needed all those Chinese kids in the ballet school. They were all real ballet students. If we’d gotten chucked out, I don’t know where we could have completed the picture. Probably, the whole thing would have just collapsed.”
Mao’s Last Dancer, which debuts stateside on August 20 from Samuel Goldwyn Films, is as close as Beresford has come to directing his Red Shoes. “It’s my first dance film. I knew virtually nothing about ballet before I started it. I directed operas but not ballet. I’m not a dancer or choreographer, so I had to learn a lot. I went to lots of ballets. I looked up all the ballet films I could find and studied them.”
His opera exposure at least made him somewhat fearless about bolting into the ballet fray. “Opera is not more difficult than film, just different. Directing an opera is really rather like directing a play because you’re directing it for the drama of the performance. But I’m really passionately fond of opera, and I love directing them.”
Texas has always been lucky turf for Beresford. It was here that he coaxed Oscar-winning work out of Robert Duvall and screenwriter Horton Foote for 1983’s Tender Mercies. And he returned ten years ago to the Houston Grand Opera to direct the world premiere of Cold Sassy Tree, an opera composed by Carlisle Floyd and based on the 1984 novel by Olive Ann Burns. (Joan Tewkesbury also made a 1989 TV-movie of it with Faye Dunaway, Richard Widmark and Neil Patrick Harris.)
“I’m planning to do another Carlisle Floyd opera next year in Australia—Of Mice and Men, back at the Sydney Opera House. I staged Andre Previn’s opera of A Streetcar Named Desire there in Sydney and in Melbourne. It was a very big success.”
Two decades ago, Beresford directed Jessica Tandy, Broadway’s original Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, to a long-overdue Oscar. The vehicle accompanying her ride, Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy, also motored into the Oscar-winner’s circle as Best Picture of 1989—apparently under its own steam, without a director, since Beresford didn’t even rate a nomination from the Academy. “It was a little strange,” he allows, “but I don’t think it really worried me. By the time the nominations came out, I’d already finished another film.”
Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart is the other Pulitzer Prize play Beresford brought to the screen, and it was an Australian play, for which he did the Oscar-nominated adaptation, that broke him into the world of international cinema—Breaker Morant.
Auteurists go crazy trying to pigeonhole Beresford, who has defiantly maintained an eclectic career—he has a low threshold for boredom, he would have you believe.
“When I start a film, I find the subject so completely absorbing—and by the time the film is actually finished, I really want the next one to be something very different because what I had just done was so exhilarating. I really couldn’t do the same subject again. After Miss Daisy, I was offered a lot of films in the rural South, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ve done that.’ I never came across another story that was as good.”
Because he “gives at the office” so thoroughly, Beresford never takes a backward glance at his movies. “Other people’s films I can watch over and over, but not mine. Once I’ve finished them, I never look at any of them again. It’s crazy to sit down and watch old films you’ve made. I see them so much while I’m editing them that by the time they’re really finished and in the cinemas or on TV, I really can’t watch them again."
