Character mapped across places and times

I am 68 years old. I have been acting for more than 40 years and have appeared in more than 160 films. People sometimes ask what I have gained from such a long career. The answer is in the places.

I have gone from south to north, east to west, moving between cities, countries and, quite often, centuries. My career has been a journey through the changing geography of Chinese cinema.

The journey began in Beijing.

In 1982, when I was 24, director Li Hanxiang brought me from Hong Kong to Beijing. I had little experience and few expectations of where acting might take me. I had my head shaved, put on a dragon robe and became the Xianfeng Emperor in The Burning of the Imperial Palace and Reign Behind a Curtain.

The films were among the earliest co-productions made in the first years of China's reform and opening-up.

Hong Kong was already making historical films. But nothing in a studio had prepared me for the Forbidden City.

The grandeur I felt there was not the grandeur of a set. It was the grandeur of history. Standing inside those walls, I began to understand that a film could carry more than a story. It could carry the memory of a people.

Then I walked out of the studio and into Beijing.

The city was very different from Hong Kong. Both were modern cities, but they had different rhythms, streets and ways of living.

That was when I began to understand something that has stayed with me ever since: place matters.

A character does not exist in a vacuum. He comes from somewhere. His language, food, weather, family and history all leave their mark on him. Before I learned how to play a character, I learned that I had to find the place that had made him.

A decade later, The Lover took me much farther from home. I had to speak English and French and tell a love story set in Vietnam, with filming in Vietnam and France.

For a Hong Kong actor, it was an unusual journey. Yet the film traveled farther than any of us could have predicted. Young people have told me that it was one of the films that introduced them to cinema.

Cinema does not erase geography. It allows us to see it through other people's lives.

A viewer does not have to be from Hong Kong, Vietnam or France to understand loneliness, desire or regret. A film crosses a border not because it erases differences, but because it gives those differences a human face.

I returned to the mainland many times in the 1990s, making films such as New Dragon Gate Inn and Ashes of Time. Later, as exchanges between Hong Kong and the mainland became closer and more Hong Kong filmmakers came north to work, people began to describe this as "going north".

I never quite saw it that way. For me, it felt more like returning to a landscape I had already begun to know.

I remember the sands of Dunhuang in Gansu. It was a film location, but it became part of my memory.

More importantly, it became part of the film itself. Put a martial-arts story against those mountains and deserts, and the landscape becomes part of the action.

Hong Kong brought its own urban energy and cinematic language. The mainland brought vast landscapes and an enormous range of local cultures. As filmmakers moved between them, the boundaries became less fixed. New stories became possible.

I sometimes joke that, with the Blades of the Guardians, I have completed my "desert trilogy". I would be happy to make a fourth or fifth part. Some of the deserts I remember have already become greener. I would still like to spend the rest of my career seeing more of China's mountains and rivers through a camera.

When I look at the roles I have played over the past two decades, I see more than a collection of characters. I see a changing film industry.

My career happened to move with that change.

People call me a "thousand-faced actor". I don't think I have a thousand faces. I have one method.

I put the character back on his land.

When I played Zhou Chaoxian in Island of Greed, I wrote nearly 100,000 Chinese characters of biography for him. Where did he come from? Why was he there? What had happened to him before the story began?

Those questions were a way of finding the man.

After more than 160 films, I have come to believe that every character is shaped by a particular piece of land. And every good film, in its own way, preserves something of that land — its language, its habits, its memories, even its contradictions.

That is why I have never thought of cinema simply as entertainment. It is also a record of where we have been.

At international film festivals, I have seen this happen in a different way. Films from countries that may have little else in common are placed side by side. Different languages fill the same theater. For a few days, people sit together, watching strangers laugh, suffer and fall in love.

The borders remain outside the cinema.

This year's Hundred Flowers Awards make me think about the journey again. When we talk about culture, we sometimes reach too quickly for large words.

But culture is made from smaller things: a city seen through a camera, a landscape remembered by an actor, a character speaking in a particular voice, an audience laughing at something it thought belonged only to another place.

For more than 40 years, I have been moving through those places.

The map has changed.

Hong Kong has changed. The mainland has changed. Chinese cinema has changed. And so have I.

Perhaps that is what I have really learned from acting: A film does not merely tell us who we are. Sometimes, it shows us where we have been — and gives us a reason to keep going somewhere else.

I still have places I want to see.

I hope Chinese cinema does, too.

The author is a Chinese actor, the youngest Best Actor winner in the history of the Hong Kong Film Awards. The article is based on his remarks at a forum held during the Hundred Flowers Film Festival.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.