The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 81

mmi POOR QUALITY 0 Tilt HOhr IKKilUANT VOtVODUUR EASTUW SECTION Inside: ART 1 .1 LJ lj uptown 1 autnmohilat HA MONTREAL. SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1987 tt 7 -J- ''tit i rs -Jcr ti wife CJ LJ Lw) Cw LJ ft tf! Ciii L.J iJ LJ wwJ C. rais ft It's a whole new movie game as ambitious Canadian project starts shooting in China's capital i 7" Action! Director Phillip Borsos on Beijing set of Bethune: The Making of a Hero. EIJING It's well past midnieht when the steam engine sighs to a halt in a it By LUCINDA CHODAN reporting from Beijing on the set of 'Bethune' i rV yf, Photos by Neal Ulevich, AP .1 ir 'JH yf ft .1. iff i fM te-antttntiMii Bethune stars Helen Shaver (left), Donald Sutherland (right) get help with script.

Villi" HUM nuinnipn IIMWmH.H.I!JIHII.M. 1 '4 r- railway station that's equal parts smoke and eerie yellow light. Then the ghosts from half a century ago begin to stir. Injured Chinese soldiers straggle off a flatbed car. A wizened man in traditional mandarin garb strolls through the station's dingy arches.

And a tall, gaunt man wearing a greatcoat and carrying an oversized medical bag steps gingerly to the platform in. the chilly night air. "Cut!" shouts the director. Ting!" parrots a Chinese translator as tho players in the scene relax. Technically, that tableau was Scene 1, Shot 5, Take 1 of the film Bethune: The Making of a Hero.

In reality, it was the opening footage of the most ambitious Canadian film project ever undertaken. Over the next six months, a cast headed by Donald Sutherland will traipse to locations in China, Spain and Canada for the $16-million production. The end product: a feature film that will be released in English, Chinese and French and a four-hour television mini-series on the CBC and Radio Canada. That $16-million budget would not be extraordinary in Hollywood. Says producer Pieter Kroonenburg: "This film would cost $25 million U.S.

in Hollywood, and it would have needed one of the top two or three stars in the world just to recoup costs." The budget may be moderate by Hollywood standards, but Telefilm Canada, the federal agency that helps finance Canadian films, says it makes Bethune one of the most expensive Canadian movies ever. It isn't just the budget that makes Bethune noteworthy, though. The film is a Canadian-Sino-French co-production that includes the greatest financial commitment the Chinese have made to a western movie. And because of its scale it includes the proverbial cast of thousands, played by the Chinese People's Liberation Army and its exotic Chinese settings, Bethune 's makers are optimistically mentioning the film in the same breath as such epics as Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and Gandhi.

That's not bad company for an irascible Ontario-born sirgeon who cut a wide, noisy swath in Montreal social circles in the early 1930s. But Bethune's inclusion in that group is due to what that flamboyant dandy metamorphosed into: A soldier in the international battle against fascism and ultimately a martyr to the Chinese revolutionary cause. Forty-eight years after his death from blood poisoning during the Sino-Japanese war, Bethune is stiil a national hero in China. Thanks to an article written by paper. "This film will change the way people think about him but that is not a bad thing." Director Phillip Borsos looks dazed.

It's Night Two of shooting, and all the Chinese extras who were on the set for Night One are nowhere to be found victims of a massive linguistic misunderstanding. That means all the footage from the first long, painful night of shooting is useless. "Emily," he says wearily, scanning the set for the Chinese interpreter. "Where's Emily?" That incident is a microcosm of the maze of linguistic and technical complications the multicultural crew of Bethune has faced in Beijing. In a crew that contains 130 Chinese members and 35 assorted anglophone and francophone westerners, language has been the single largest barrier to getting things done.

But if language is a headache for the crew, it's a nightmare for the producers. They've had to budget twice as much time for the Chinese portion of the film as they would for a similar shoot in the West. That's for ordinary translation. Bethune production manager Sean Ryerson says things are seldom that simple. "It takes time to realize that not only is the language different, but the language of film is different," he says.

"For instance, if you've got something, film people have got letters for it so "special effects" becomes When the translators see that, they scramble for their technical dictionaries, and about an hour later, they come to us and say: 'I'm very sorry, but I can't find this "Or when we say: 'Quiet on the we mean dead silence, because we're shooting both the visuals and sound. It doesn't mean the same thing to them, because they don't shoot sound at the same time, so they just keep doing what they're doing which can be disastrous." Then there are the sheer technical differences. China runs on direct current; North America runs on alternating current. Because key western crew members needed specialized western equipment, that Mao Zedong in 1939, every Chinese schoolchild knows the name Bai Chu En (literally "white seek the Chinese pronunciation of Bethune. And to say "Bai Chu En" to the average Chinese is to elicit a spontaneous outpouring ofpraise for the man Bethune biographer Ted Allan with only a soupcon of exaggeration characterizes as "the most important foreigner since Buddha" in China.

The reverence the Chinese have for Bethune presented one of the biggest initial question marks for Bethune's film-makers. The image the average Chinese has of Bethune is sort of a Communist saint working selflessly for the Revolution. That saint isn't the man that Allan, who wrote the screenplay for Bethune, knew in Montreal and Spain and he isn't the man he wanted Donald Sutherland to play in Bethune: The Making of a Hero. "I know there are people who don't want to hear these things about Bethune, but I knew him intimately," said Allan, in Beijing for the filming. "He wasn't a womanizer, but he loved women, and he often became violently angry, and when he got to Spain, he drank too much.

He was, whether we like it or not, a thoroughly human being." Would the Chinese be willing to accept a fallible Bethune? Absolutely, said Kroonenburg. "We had no problems at all having the script accepted" by the Chinese body responsible for co-productions, the Chinese Film Co-production Corporation, Kroonenburg said. The Chinese even suggested modifications to the role of Mao Zedong that would make the great helmsman more human. The reason for the Chinese acquiescence is simple, said Li Zhimin, head of the Chinese Film Co-production Corporation. "We have a Chinese saying: there is no goat which is completely a goat.

There is no man who has no faults." Other Chinese feel their countrymen are ready to accept a more realistic portrayal of Bai Chu En. "The Chinese people remember Bai Chu En as a great person," said Wu Caibin, a feature writer with the English-language China Daily news A I iV i 1 1 1 St A m. i mmm Actors playing wounded Chinese soldiers break for a chat during station scene. meant more than 30 tonnes of equip- precipitous plunge into 20th-century Ryerson said. "In Canada, that's a ment had to be shipped in from technology.

There is still no compre- phone call. If it screws up, it's two around the world, including about hensive telephone book for Beijing, phone calls 'Nothing I've ever done prepared 150 lights, five cameras and two There were no photocopiers for hire, generators. There were sometimes no vehicles Even the office equipment was available to transport equipment, imported. Because the Chinese writ- What there was was Chinese bu- ten form is calligraphy, typewriters reaucracy. were not readily available.

"I spent four weeks negotiating Problems also arose from China's the transportation for the shoot," me for this and I can't imagine ever facing problems this big again." Bethune was a ladies' man and bon vivant. Page G-3. iiming Bethune a 45-year saga for Ted ASian Bethune name still opens doors in China At the time of Norman Bethune's death, his name had become a talisman for Mao Zedong's beleaguered 8th Route Army. Troops launched themselves into battle shouting: "Attack! Bethune is with us!" The name has assumed almost the same function for the people producing Beth-. une: The Making of a Hero.

The man who rented a photocopier to the film-makers knocked the price down because it was for a movie about Bethune. The Beijing hotel that js home for the crew lowered its prices. And production manager Sean Ryerson says doors throughout China were opened because of Bethune's name. "I don't know where we'd be without it." Lucinda Chodan The Grey Fox, One Magic Christmas). beat out long-time front-runner Kotcheff as director.

And in January of this year 45 years after Allan wrote his initial screenplay the first Bethune crew members headed for Beijing. "As far as I know, that's twice as long as it's taken to make any other motion picture in history," said Allan. "Richard Attenborough took 22 years to do Gandhi so there's nothing wrong in taking 45 years to do Bethune." Allan, who met Bethune as an idealistic 18-year-old. has always clung to the conviction that his story would be told on screen. "I did lose interest.

I did lose hope I would lose interest every year, I would lose hope every week," said Allan, 70. "But I've known people like Brecht and Hemingway and Einstein, and Bethune was the most exciting man I ever knew. "Even when I was disillusioned with him, I always knew that I was dealing with one of the most extraordinary men, not just of our era, but ijf all time." with players from three countries. Belstar Productions of Paris chipped in $2 million. Canada provided about $10 million ($3.7 million dollars through Telefilm Canada, $1.6 million through the CBC and Radio-Canada and the rest from private sources).

And China's August First Studios, the studio of the People's Liberation Army, committed itself to providing about $6 million in services in China. New Brunswick-born actor Donald Sutherland, long obsessed with the character of Bethune, was signed for the title role. Sutherland has already played Bethune once, in a 1978 CBC-TV docudrama. Says director Phillip Borsos: "Donald looks like Bethune, he feels like him, he understands him completely and totally. He is Bethune.

There was no need to cast about for a different actor." Helen Shaver, fresh off her role in The Color of Money, was cast as a New Zealand missionary. French star Jane Birkin would play Bethune's wife, Frances. Borsos, the hottest young director in Canada By LUCINDA CHODAN of The Gazette BEIJING Since 1952, Norman Bethune has been the subject of at least two biographies, two plays, a National Film Board documentary, a CBC docudrama and a Chinese feature film. But for Montreal writer Ted Allan, trying to bring Bethune to the screen has been a long and frustrating job. It started in 1942.

That's when Allan wrote the first screenplay for a North American feature film about Bethune. That original 180-page screenplay is now being used as the basis of Bethune: The Making of a Hero, which started shooting in Beijing last week. "But I'm not cheering until I see the finished film," said Allan, the author of Lies my Father Told Me and Love Streams. "I've been almost this close four times before." Those four attempts include efforts by three Hollywood studios and such well- known producers and directors as Otto Preminger, Norman Jewison, John Ke-meny and Ted Kotcheff. Those attempts failed, usually for lack of financing, and with them died the hopes of a number of actors interested in playing the quixotic Bethune Sean Connery, Christopher Plummer, Richard Dreyfuss, even Robert Redford.

Then, in 1985, Montreal-based Filmline International and producers Pieter Kroonenburg and Nicolas Clermont stepped in. "The time was right," said Kroonenburg the other day. "We felt it couldn't be done anywhere but China and it could not be done without Chinese participation. "So we approached the Chinese, and in keeping with their new policy of openness toward the West, they said they were interested. That's when we knew we would have a very good chance if we played our cards right." Filmline, a 6-year-old company that produced the films Toby McTeague and Heartaches, fashioned a comicated deal i.