Wet and Wild Pandas : Making a movie in China’s hinterlands presents unique challenges--like paying to film on sacred moss. On location with ‘The Little Panda.’

Arguments against making a movie in China’s Jiuzhaigou National Park in remote Sichuan Province in the summer:

* It takes at least 15 hours to get here from the nearest major city, provincial capital Chengdu, traveling on dangerous, cliff-hugging roads rife with armed brigands and small-time hijackers.

* Tibetan priests have to be consulted about shooting locations to make sure film crews are not violating Buddhist holy sites. Burly special-effects riggers and grips have to be trained to avoid tromping on “sacred moss” or “sacred rocks.”

* Some native people here are fond of setting up large charges of dynamite near hotels and other populated areas.

* It is the rainy season.

* Mudslides.

* Vipers.

Arguments for making a movie here:

* There are waterfalls that drop like veils over rocky ledges, turquoise blue lakes and wildflower-carpeted mountain meadows unequaled anywhere in Asia.

* It is stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful--comparable to Yosemite or Yellowstone National Parks in the United States.

* It is one of the few remaining natural habitats for the giant panda and therefore a good location if you happen to be making a movie featuring pandas.

* Pandas.

“It is the most remote location I’ve worked, unless you count Cleveland,” says Stephen Lang, the actor who plays the adult male lead in the Warner Bros. family adventure film “The Little Panda,” being filmed on location here.

“It looks like Yellowstone,” says director Chris Cain, who is from South Dakota. “But they would never let us make a film like this in Yellowstone. Here, they let us build bridges across canyons.”

In fact, the “Little Panda” production crew has also dammed up waterfalls, built roads, remodeled villages and, after some heavy negotiating with a Tibetan lama, built an artificial ledge on a cliff face. Similar activities in Yellowstone would result in a long jail term.

For two months, Hollywood took over a 278-square-mile national park, while the local residents looked on with mouths agape and, more often than director Cain liked, hands outstretched.

“Everybody wants money,” Cain grumbled during a lunch break interview. “Moss is ‘sacred,’ but then it has its price. Rocks are ‘sacred,’ but they have their price.”

Take the Tibetan village episode, for example.

Set decorator Douglas Carnegie says that when the crew started the project, an $18.5-million co-production with the Beijing Film Studio and the Toronto-based Little P Productions, they thought the village scene would be one of the cheapest sets in the movie.

The plot is an adventure story in which an American boy (played by Ryan Slater) and a young Chinese girl (Yi Ding) have a series of harrowing adventures as they attempt to protect a baby panda (played by two real pandas from the nearby Wolong Captive Breeding Station) from a pair of oafish but persistent Chinese poachers. Eventually, the children and the panda are rescued by the boy’s father, a wildlife field researcher played by Lang.

Scouting the location, Canadian production designer John Willett (“Mississippi Burning,” “The Firm”) found an abandoned Tibetan village in a mountain glade where the boy and the panda are supposed to hide in a hayloft.

Although the village looked abandoned, as soon as filming started, its residents stepped forward to make their claims. They turned out to be tough negotiators.

“They threatened to throw us off the set if we didn’t pay this much for a yak and that much for each goat we used,” says Carnegie, who sparked a minor cultural incident by accidentally stepping on a Tibetan prayer flag.

In the end, the village cost the company five times what it originally estimated, plus Willett’s favorite wristwatch.

“They said they didn’t steal it,” Willett recalls. “They said they liked it so they took it.”

But Willett and most of the other crew members are willing to forgive the local people most of the daily ransoms. The producers paid a large sum of money to the local government and park management. Apparently the money never reached the common people.

Besides, they reasoned, the villagers deserve some compensation for having their homeland turned into a movie set. The film’s 200-strong crew, cast and support staff filled the park’s only two modern hotels during the height of tourist season. The production’s 75 vehicles, including a fleet of four-wheel-drive trucks, crowded the roads.

Mountain climbers were hired to install satellite phone transmitters and a video room was set up in the hotel karaoke bar enabling several film camp followers to do their morning aerobics.

In the two-month filming period, more Westerners have entered this remote region than in all the previous centuries combined. Except for occasional big-game hunters and wildlife researchers, the Min Mountain range valley, with its series of spectacular lakes and waterfalls, had seldom seen a foreign face.

It remains one of the most interesting ethnic minority areas in China, part of the Arba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, in an area 150 miles north of Chengdu near the border with Gansu Province. In addition to the dominant Tibetan and Qiang populations, the area also has pockets of Hui, Man and Miao minorities.

The result of the ethnic mix, splashed together in the valleys of the roaring Min River and its tributaries, is a particularly colorful display of various cuisines, coutures and architectures under a crisp, blue sky.

“Nowhere else in interior China can an Occidental fare better,” famed botanist Ernest (Chinese) Wilson wrote of the Min River city of Songpan in the early 1900s. “With good riding and shooting, an interesting people to study, to say nothing of the flora, this town possesses attractions in advance of all other towns of western China.”

After “The Little Panda” had been shooting for a month, it was clear that Jiuzhaigou, which means “nine village valley” in Chinese, would never be the same again. The villagers abandoned regional greetings, instead shouting “Huloo!” or “Hi!” to passing Westerners.

They also discovered that Corbin Fox, a tall, blond 30-year-old set rigger from Vancouver, had a 60-amp, 380-volt welding machine that could do magic things. By mid-July, Fox said he had repaired eight stoves, a washing machine, three machetes and dozens of knives all belonging to the villagers.

Since China began opening its doors to Western movie-makers in the late 1980s, it has proven to be a rewarding though sometimes very difficult place to make films.

Beijing and the incomparable Forbidden City provided an unforgettable backdrop to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor.”

However, a 1987 effort by director Philip Borsos to film the life of revolutionary doctor Norman Bethune, starring Donald Sutherland in the lead role, was a nightmare. In cooperation with the Chinese army’s August 1 Film Studio, Borsos attempted to film “Bethune: The Making of a Hero” in several widely scattered locations.

But like an army that outruns its supply train, Borsos moved so quickly that his crew ran out of food and water. Eventually, the crew staged an unprecedented three-day strike. Neil Trifunovich, who was Borsos’ special effects coordinator on “Bethune” and is back in China on the panda film, joined the strikers and ordered T-shirts made up with the slogan, designed to mock the director: “You Can’t Save Face and Your Ass at the Same Time.”

Trifunovich said there is no comparison between the Bethune disaster and “The Little Panda.”

For one thing, executive producer Gabriella Martinelli made sure cast and crew were well fed. She hired Italian chef Attilio Pettirossi, who cooked for Bertolucci in “Last Emperor,” to prepare the menus. Pettirossi imported half a ton of pasta over the mountain passes into Jiuzhaigou.

Martinelli, who also produced “M. Butterfly” starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone for Warner Bros., has a proven touch with the Chinese bureaucracy. In “M. Butterfly,” she had a story about a transvestite Chinese spy that she had to somehow sneak by censors.

“I remember with ‘M. Butterfly’ in an early meeting,” Martinelli recalls laughingly during an interview in the Jiuzhaigou hotel dining room. “They (the Chinese censors) came in and said, ‘We read the script and we wondered if perhaps instead of having the woman become a man you could leave her as a woman.’

“I looked at them and said, ‘Oh, that is a good idea, but it would be very difficult.’ ”

Because she was afraid that Chinese censors might pull the plug at any time, she had to “counter prep” a backup location in the tiny Portuguese colony of Macau, on China’s southeast coast.

With “Little Panda,” however, and its family plot and Chinese panda stars, she faced few of the same challenges.

To ensure political support, Martinelli re-established contacts she had made with “M. Butterfly” in Beijing.

She traveled to the Wolong Panda Reserve to negotiate the use of two young pandas, male Simo, born in September, 1993, and Yue, born in November, 1993. The pandas are each insured for $1 million. In potentially dangerous or difficult scenes, they are replaced by an actor, Verne Troyer, wearing a remote-controlled panda head created by Glendale-based Rick Baker Cinovation.

Perhaps surprisingly, there has been little outcry from naturalists about the use of live pandas in a movie.

In an interview in Beijing, from where he was on his way to study wild camels in Mongolia, American field biologist George B. Schaller, who wrote a book based on several years of research on pandas in China, said he thought the movie might even help the pandas “as long as they are not made to look silly.” “Acting in a movie is probably a good experience for the pandas,” Schaller said. “They are out of their cages. It could even be of mental and physical benefit.”

Although they are accompanied by their individual handlers from the Wolong Reserve, the creatures were groomed for their film roles by movie animal trainer Mark Wiener, a native of Los Angeles who lives in Canada. Wiener says the immature pandas are not as intelligent as the North American bears he has worked with in the past.

Because they are a highly endangered animal, he is not permitted to train them using treats.

“Mark has basically figured out what the pandas do naturally, and he gets them to do that for us. They are going to be the real stars of the show,” said director Cain, whose previous credits include “Young Guns” and “Where the River Runs Black,” filmed in the jungles of Brazil.

“This film is a little more difficult,” Cain said, comparing the panda movie to the Brazilian one. “In Brazil, it was hot. You were always exhausted. There were poisonous snakes. Practically everything in the forest was poisonous. But at the end of the day you went to a four-star hotel with a choice of good restaurants.”

Because the young pandas were growing quickly, adding 10 pounds a month to their weight, executive producer Martinelli had to move quickly. She rejected the more easily accessible Wolong Reserve as a location because, dark and gloomy in narrow wet valleys, it had none of the dramatic vistas needed for an outdoor adventure film.

To secure Jiuzhaigou, which was designated by the Chinese government as a national park in 1992, she courted the favor of local Communist Party official, park director and mayor Zhe Renzhu.

Zhe, a native Tibetan who was born in the park, once visited Yosemite and has a dream that Jiuzhaigou will someday be as famous.

“Yosemite and Jiuzhaigou are sister parks,” he said in an interview, after dining with Martinelli in the movie company mess, “only we have more water.”

When the hotel containing the production offices developed electricity shortages, Martinelli visited the local power plant. There she planted herself on the plant manager’s desk and slowly stacked a set of round wooden checkers on his desk into a large tower.

“Do you see this?” she told the manager. “This is my movie.” Hitting the stack with her hand, she scattered the checkers across the room. “Without electricity I have no movie.” Power was restored the next day.

The low point so far, Martinelli says, was learning that the Chinese government would not grant permission for a helicopter that she had counted on using to transport film, supplies and key personnel back and forth from Chengdu.

This meant that every jar of peanut butter, every canister of film, every ounce of pasta demanded by the Italian chef had to be transported over the mountains by road.

Making this film, said one weary urbanite on location for the past two months, is comparable “to Hannibal crossing the Alps.”

The route to Chengdu was quickly dubbed “the road to hell” by cast and crew. Practically everyone has a horror story.

On her trip up the rugged Min River valley on her way to Jiuzhaigou, scenic artist Victoria Ogimski saw “one tour bus hanging over the edge of the road; one bus upside down; a lumber truck over the edge and another one practically over.”

Set decorator Carnegie is a veteran of three round trips on the road from hell. On one trip, the road was blocked by local gangsters demanding a toll. On another, the way was locked by a fallen boulder “the size of a refrigerator.” It took a whole village to clear it away. “While we were waiting I walked down to the river and spent the night in a gold diggers’ camp.”

But production designer Willett, as usual, had the topper. Driving in his 4x4 vehicle in one notorious stretch of road, Willett watched with horror as a white horse fell off the cliff above him into the river. Willett and his crew later nicknamed the incident: “Vertical horse bowling.”

“I’ve never before in my life kept a diary,” he said during an interview on his way to inspect a rope suspension bridge built for the movie. “But I’ve started doing it since I came here. It seems like something incredible happens every day.”*