31 - 10 - 09 : The Blood Bond Saga (part 26)

If you go down to the woods tonight...

Halloween, and we schedule our first night shoot, and our first scenes with the mighty Kong Sifu, who plays Ding the gunrunner in 'Blood Bond'. The setting is a wooded area down by a reservoir. For the first time, we invest in a couple of cherry pickers from which to beam the lights. These are on hire from the local government, and so arrive late, much to the consternation of gaffer Eric Boland.

The local landlord insists on setting off firecrackers before we shoot, in order to scare of ghosts.If there are supernatural beings at hand, they make their presence felt very quickly. The first thing MB does when he turns up is fall down a hole! He twists and ankle and bruises his hip. Fortunately, besides being a kung fu master, Latin dance exponent and and an actor, Kong is also a bone setter, and applies some immediate 'hands on' first aid that seems to do the trick.

The first scene is a lengthy dialogue exchange between Tremayne (Michael Biehn) and Ding (Kong Kwok-keung Sifu). Kong is more than an actor; he's a force of nature and a scene-stealer of epic proportions.

He's performing in his second language, though, and I'm impressed with how patiently Michael directs him to get his full character, as well as intelligible dialogue.

If you want to see Kong in his glory days, check out the Shaw Bros classic 'Monkey Kung Fu', and the Bolo Yeung vehicles '10 Magnificent Killers' and 'Writing Kung Fu'. He also played the belligerent chef in the Bruce Lee bio pic 'Dragon'.

By the end of the scene, Kong had really got to grips with his larger than life character, and had us all in stitches with his performance.

As mentioned, the setting of our film is a made up Asian country, Purma, and we had a lot of fun inserting invented place names into a map of the place. See if you can spot them in the finished film.

We then started setting up a scene where Michael's character teaches Deva (Phoenix Chou) to shoot. Unfortunately, we were beset with generator problems. Night shoots can be real work. It takes forever to light and, if you have any electrical trouble, you're buggered.

Working in fits and starts, we managed to get the scene, which, I have to admit, is reminiscent of one in 'Aliens' where Michael teaches Sigourney Weaver how to fire some space age artillery.

The other thing that happens is that, when you make the shift to shooting nights, everyone is slightly out of sync. You start off normal, then get really tired, then get really silly. By 3am, we were laughing at things you wouldn't even crack a smile for in daylight.

One genuinely funny moment occurred when we played back a close-up of Michael from the scene. Besides him and Phoe, a third, ghostly voice was heard chanting in the background. What could it be? Turned out it was Kong, off camera but still miked up,  rehearsing the one line he delivers at the end of the scene.

The lighting problems continued, so Phoenix held court on 'Ding's' bed.

In the end, the only shot to escape us was one where we actually see the results of her firing an AK-47 at a tree. The lights kept 'pulsing', and we finally gave in and decided to shoot it the following weekend (when we come back to this location) or else as a pick-up shot at the studio.

As soon as we wrapped, Michael, Phoenix, Seth Scher, Ross Clarkson and I all piled into a van for Hong Kong, where we would spend the day (on a visa run for several of them) before returning to Nanhai for the next day's shoot.

(Next: Hong Kong Sojourn, plus more funny photos...)