I went back to China and did a movie in Mandarin, and I don't speak Mandarin, so I learned it phonetically. Now, when I'm on set and somebody gives me English lines, I'm like, "Are you kidding? What's happening? This is amazing!"
The most difficult thing is that I don't speak Mandarin and I had this experience - of working in a language that I don't understand - before and it's really horrible. Eighteen years ago, I played a mute in one film because I couldn't speak Mandarin. There was another film where I had to speak Vietnamese. It's horrible!
I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.
You have hundreds of artists you're dealing with across the world and the scale of this movie [Kung Fu Panda] was insane - we had a parallel pipeline going on where you had two versions recording Mandarin voice actors, getting it to be funny for Mandarin audiences going beyond a straight translation, and then animating it and lighting it, it's a lot of work.
I can speak passable Mandarin. I will not be translating at the U.N. anytime soon.
Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.
I was born and raised in China, Mandarin is my first language, and I definitely know America. I think that will be my strength, to try and bring the two worlds together.
Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.
I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.
I've just had a wonderful time doing Chinese music, and it's been so rewarding for me. I feel like there's so much potential in mandarin music, and there's so much, you know, ground left to be broken.
My Mandarin is slowly getting worse.
It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.
Helen Tse tells a gripping tale of struggle, laughter, love and food that marks Sweet Mandarin as a must read book. It is not only an immigrant account of life but also a universal touching story of survival that will move your soul as well.
Mandarin is gonna be the language in 15 to 20 years.
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
When you're done shooting, the movie that you're going to release when you're done shooting is as bad as it will ever be. And then through editing, and finishing the effects and adding music, you get to make the movie better again. So I'm really hard on myself and on the movie.