Tom Dey's Shanghai Noon

By Jerry Roberts
Photos by Doug Curran

Director Tom Dey (in blue) with his extras

Commercial director Tom Dey's feature film debut, Shanghai Noon, is a polyglot Western comedy starring action icon Jackie Chan and a beach bum–styled Owen Wilson as unlikely buddies searching in 1881 Nevada for a Chinese princess, played by Ally McBeal regular Lucy Liu. The kick-'em-down/shoot-'em-up features cowboys, Indians, Chinese miners, gunslingers, train gun battles, saloon fights, drunk horses, brothel escapades and sufficient Chan mayhem to dispatch a wide array of rough customers.

The film is Dey's first dealing with comedy. It also was perhaps the first time that a Hollywood director shot inside the historical and moated Forbidden City in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

"There isn't any better education for aspiring feature directors than directing commercials," says the 35-year-old director. "The experience that I got shooting every month on a commercial set was invaluable in terms of how to run a crew, how to make your day, be prepared, be professional, move fast. It really was unbelievable preparation. I was lucky in that I studied narrative filmmaking even before I realized that commercials were actually directed by somebody. At the American Film Institute no one ever mentioned that word, ‘commercials' - it was a dirty word. 

"People will tell you that a commercial is like a sprint and a movie's like a marathon. You have to learn how to pace yourself. When you go from commercials into the feature world, it feels like everyone is moving in slow motion around you, because we are so used to moving so quickly - from start-to-finish in three weeks," says the maker of screen ads for Nike, Mastercard, USAirways, Showtime Networks, L'Oreal and others. "Yet in the feature world, you're not interviewing somebody to work with you for two days; you're interviewing somebody to spend six months with you. Many times in pre-production I was frustrated, feeling, ‘Why didn't you hire these guys yet? What are we waiting for?' 

"The biggest challenge is going from telling a story in 30 seconds to telling a story in 105 minutes," Dey says. "How do you maintain focus on a story that takes so much longer to unfold? How do you make that story organic? How do you build it over such a greater length of time?"

Tom Dey (in blue) checks out a shot

Adapting to the situation is part of directing anything. But in the commercial world, directors are often unofficially classified by such tags as ‘the car guy' for a maker of automobile commercials or ‘the tabletop guy' for a director of food ads.

"It's so easy to get pigeonholed in commercials," Dey says. "No one at an ad agency would hire me to direct comedy, and here, in the feature world, I was chosen to direct a fairly high-budget comedy. I was working regularly and all of a sudden I was ‘the hair guy.' I mean, what do I know about hair? I had done half a dozen hair commercials and here I am suddenly ‘the hair guy.' I did one and it worked and they kept giving me more. It was crazy."

Also crazy - and trying - were Dey's efforts to try to shoot Shanghai Noon's opening in the Forbidden City, where the princess escapes a prearranged marriage. Dey was briefly allowed by the Chinese government to costume 400 People's Republic of China army regulars into 19th-century Qing Dynasty imperial guards.

"I think I may be the first American director to shoot a Hollywood movie there," Dey says. "We barely made it there and really only shot for a number of hours. The whole story of filming there is sort of a cold-war saga unto itself. The first time I read the script, the first page said, ‘Forbidden City, 1881, 500 imperial guards.'

"As soon as I read that, I went, ‘Wow, this is amazing. This is a chance to go on an adventure, to create a world on a very large canvas.' Of course I had seen [Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's] The Last Emperor and knew of the Forbidden City and it would be great if we could shoot there.

"So, when I got hired to do the movie, I flew to Hong Kong to meet with Jackie and Roger Birnbaum, one of the producers. When we were getting ready to come back to Los Angeles, I said, ‘I'm going to go to Beijing to look at the Forbidden City.' And he just looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Well, you know we're never going to get to shoot there. You can look at it if you want.' From that moment on, because he told me ‘no,' I kind of had it in my mind - especially after I went there and saw how amazing it is and the scale of it, I knew we had to shoot there.

"I started to plan the opening shots based on the photographs I took there. We went back and scouted it with a team, still without any idea that we were going to get permission to shoot there. Then all kinds of things conspired against us. The government was noncommittal until we bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and they said, ‘Forget it.' There were anti–U.S. demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which is right in front of the Forbidden City.

Dey with actor Jackie Chan

"Disney said, ‘No way. Even if the Chinese say ‘yes,' we won't let you go over there for insurance reasons.' Then the Chinese pulled The Phantom Menace and every other U.S. film from their theaters. I was watching this thing go up in smoke. We continued to location scout throughout the States and Canada and there was just no alternative. 

"One of the imperial guards that we cast in Beijing came to Canada and gave me this little jade pendant and said, ‘This is for good luck.' I remember putting it on and vowing not to take it off until I walk back through the gates of the Forbidden City. Every day I wore this thing. About two weeks before the end of shooting in Canada, Disney said, ‘If you sign these releases that say we're not responsible if you are kidnapped or killed or whatever, that's the only way we'll let you go over there.'

"I said, ‘Whatever you want. Let's just go over there.' And it turned out that that was the cheapest thing to shoot, which is the only reason they let us go, because it always comes down to money. Even when we went back over there, we still didn't have permission to shoot. The government was saying, ‘It's a possibility...' Every night we had these dinners with the Chinese Film Commission. Finally, they said, ‘You can shoot before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m.' Well, the sun never comes out in Beijing, because the smog and the humidity is so thick that you can hardly see before 9:00 and after 5:00. 

"The first day we did the wide shots of the sedan chair in the Forbidden City. We had been training 400 soldiers to be exercising like imperial guards. That night, the government came to me eight hours before the guards were to move into the big courtyard and said, ‘No, you can't shoot here.' It's 8 p.m. and the guards were supposed to move in at 2 a.m. to start setting up.

"Fortunately, we had a fallback location nearby which we used, but it didn't have that actual grandeur. It was just one nightmare after another. I finished shooting in China thinking that we did not get the shots we needed. I felt that I had failed. I felt that the beginning of the film wouldn't hold up and would be nowhere near what it could have been. I was pretty devastated. Then when we came back and screened it, I looked at the faces of the people watching the footage, and they really were, like, ‘Wow.' What I learned was that things are in a matter of degrees. That doors twice as large don't matter. That's the story of the Forbidden City."

For the majority of the shoot, Dey was subject to the unpredictability of the weather at his Canada locations. On July 14, 1999, it even snowed.

"It was the worst weather in 80 years in Alberta. It rained or snowed or sleeted or hailed - something fell out of the sky almost every day," Dey remembers. "In commercials, if it rains, no problem, you have another day. In movies, you just have to lose the scene, at least I did with my producer. I found myself giving more and more to the second unit and crossing out scenes that we just didn't have the time to shoot. I had to make a choice between directing an action movie and directing a relationship movie.

"I knew that without a relationship, we had no movie. So I made a choice. My assistant director, DGA member Bruce Moriarty, said, ‘Look, you have to choose which scenes you're going to give over to second unit.' And it became so clear to me at that moment that, ‘Yes, I'm going to concentrate on the relationship and the chemistry between these two guys.'

"At the end of the day, it's a film about friendship and why friendship is so important, why people become friends, what threatens friendship. And I think that we were very fortunate to have cast two actors who really have this incredible chemistry."

And, in Jackie Chan's case, incredible experience. Not only has Chan been writing, producing, choreographing and performing stunts, and acting out broad shenanigans throughout a generation of huggermugger flicks, he's also an esteemed director in the Far East.

"Everybody keeps asking me, ‘Wasn't it intimidating working with a guy who has done so many films and directed some of them himself?'" Dey says. "It should have been. But the fact is, when I was in Hong Kong, I went to see the latest film that he had directed, and it allowed me to see that he works from a broader sensibility. I knew that I could see his direction working in a theater in Hong Kong. But I could see how it was not going to work in America. And I think that helped give me the confidence to tell him when I thought he was wrong, or to push him in the direction where I felt he needed to go.

"At the same time, I approached the working relationship wanting to benefit from all of his experience, and really wanting him to share all of his expertise and make me look good. Who am I to question Jackie Chan about what he's so good at? So I really embraced his ideas and contributions. He was so willing to share and try things out that he never had done before. He never said ‘No' in 72 days of shooting, which shows a lot of class for an actor of his stature and renown.

"I had seen a lot of his movies before I met him and I knew he was a great physical comedian and a great action star, but didn't realize what a good actor he is," Dey avers. "That's something Owen responded to. He was very surprised. There were some scenes in the movie that we hold on Jackie when Owen was speaking simply because Jackie is so good at listening. You can see Jackie's emotions in his reactions as they wash over his face, because he has this incredibly open face."

Dey (right) prepares Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan for a scene in Shanghai Noon

Dey was also helped by the advice of longtime DGA member George Roy Hill via the educational tool of the documentary film. "I watched a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," Dey recalls. "In it, George Roy Hill tells an anecdote about an actor coming up to him on the first week of shooting and saying, ‘You know, I don't know how to play this. Are we making a comedy or a drama or what are we doing here?' And Hill said to him, ‘Just play it real, and if it's supposed to be funny, it'll be funny, and if it's supposed to be dramatic, it'll be dramatic.' That really struck a chord in me."

To Dey, getting Shanghai Noon to work meant having it work not only in the moment and for the audience, but for succeeding media lives on tape and DVD and tomorrow's audiences.

"Commercials belong to a disposable culture and movies are going to be around for as long as people want to see them," Dey says. "That has a big effect on a commercial director such as myself who will also work on a feature film. I was having to answer questions all day long that I would have to live with for the rest of my life. I knew that if I answered those questions wrong, that they were going to come back to haunt me. There's a lot more pressure on a feature film to get it right, because you are going to have to live with it. People wonder why I was so adamant about timing the picture or being around for all the little details - that's why. For every time that thing comes on television or I watch the DVD, that's why."

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