The emperor's new film

Chinese film-maker Chen Kaige made his name internationally with Farewell My Concubine and a twee wardrobe. Howard Feinstein watched him on location in Shanghai and noticed a change in style

Chris Doyle downs a capful of Glenfiddich, then refills it for the film-maker Chen Kaige. "It's our only glass!" the Hong Kong-based, Australian-born cinematographer explains. It is 10.30 on a beautiful April morning in Suzhou, three hours drive west of Shanghai, a 2,500-year-old canal-ringed city with a population of 700,000 which guidebooks call "the Venice of China". Its alternative Chinese name translates into "Heaven on Earth", a reference to the magnificent gardens that numbered nearly 300 under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), but have dwindled to a dozen after a century's neglect. The two men, both 42, repeat the ritual drink several times a day, most often before starting a take on the new production, Temptress Moon, Chen's first movie since winning the Golden Palm at Cannes two years ago with Farewell My Concubine, which starred Gong Li and Leslie Cheung.

"An-jing!" commands the beefy, towering director, immediately silencing the techies from Beijing who are scattered through the house-and-garden complex known as Wu Jinang. "Yu-bay!" he bellows: ready to roll. After Chen's dramatic, drawn-out "Kai-shih!", Doyle, a 35mm Arriflex mounted on his bony shoulder, his thin torso hugged by a chubby focus-puller, moves slowly up and out from a photograph of a stunning woman toward the marvellous faces of Gong Li (To Live, Raise the Red Lantern), and Taiwanese newcomer Kevin Lin. Li is clad in a traditional light-green embroidered gown, long stones hanging significantly from her ears and a pigtail down her back while Lin sports a deep blue robe and a monkish coif. "T'ing!" shouts Chen - cut. Gong Li's attendant quickly wraps her in a long red jacket, the team huddles around the instant-replay video monitor, and the master delivers his comments.

The scene goes down as smoothly as the whisky. It is a particularly delicate creationfrom someone who commands such a martial presence. Unshaven and schlumpy during the shooting, Chen is known internationally for his twee wardrobe. "It's absolutely necessary that people treat me like a king on the set," Chen says in excellent English, a remnant of his three years as a visiting scholar at New York University in the late 1980s. "There is only one decision-maker. There is no democracy. People are happy with this authority. Off the set we can talk. I'm a friend, a brother; we can drink together." Predictably he names the crag-faced, Mandarin-speaking Doyle as his most important collaborator on the picture, a lush drama about a triangular love affair, with soupcons of poisoning, abuse, incest, and mob violence. It is a retreat 75 years into the past, far from the political metaphors and subsequent hassles of Chen's earlier films like The Big Parade, Yellow Earth, Life on a String and the temporarily banned Concubine. A politically expedient collaboration with the Shanghai Film Studios (they provide services rather than yuan), the project is costing Hong Kong producer and ex-martial arts movie queen Hsu Feng of Tomson Films more than $6m.

Temptress Moon's fluid style marks a significant break from the symbolic cinema of exteriors, the languorous long-takes deployed up until now by Chen and his so-called Fifth Generation colleagues from the Beijing Film Academy class of 1982. "We want to separate ourselves from the work of the Fifth Generation," Doyle says. "We're the Eighth Generation!" he shouts.

"In the past," explains Chen, "we just wanted to keep the camera standing. We only wanted to let the actors act. I've totally renounced that. We're using Steadicam and hand-held shots. This is a way to describe the interior world of the characters. Explanations are psychological, like the travelling shot we did this morning when Gong Li finds Leslie Cheung. She is not just walking through a beautiful house, she's taking the road to love."

The houses in Suzhou almost demand exploratory camera work and a psychological reading. High-ranking intellectuals once retreated from the tedium of daily life behind their blank stucco facades. "They lived here and forgot about what was happening outside," Chen says.

In the front are the reception areas, adorned with crenellated panels and furnished with huge black-lacquered chairs which provided the points where their public and private worlds intersected. Further back are family rooms and additional open spaces, carefully plotted but far from linear. The layout is a maze of surprise turns, long corridors, varying roof and floor heights, bridges over ponds - as philosophical as it is architectonic. It is a microcosm of the contrasts outside the walls: male and female, Yin and Yang. It could be a diagram of the mind.

He filmed the amazing 1min 40sec travelling shot at another house, Ou Yuan. Through Chen's favoured smoke-filled rooms and corridors, Doyle, seated on the Steadicam, follows Gong Li, wearing a pink blouse and trousers, her hair braided and double-bunned. She carries a chandelier, searching frantically for Leslie Cheung, whom she loves. She stops suddenly and looks around, while Doyle darts in rapidly. Otherwise, he follows behind at her pace.

"Gong Li told us after the third day, 'I feel free,' " Chen explains. " 'I can just move and act, and the camera follows me. I don't feel its presence. I feel I have discovered a new world.' " It is difficult not to find similarities between Gong Li's new-found sense of freedom on screen and recent events in her private life. She recently left long-time collaborator Zhang Yimou during their production of Shanghai Triad - reportedly because he refused to marry her and have children - for a new companion, a Chinese businessman from Singapore who is keeping a low profile in her room.

"Gong Li brings her personal life into the movie," says Chen, who first saw her when he accompanied his buddy and former cameraman Zhang Yimou to the Beijing Academy of Drama eight years ago. Zhang cast her in his directorial debut, Red Sorghum. "It works well. It's a film about a woman's choice, and what kind of person she wants to be with."

"I can tell Gong Li," he continues, " 'This is wrong, this isn't what this character should do. It's overacting. She always says, 'I've got you.' " Gong Li came aboard after a four-month hiatus in production. Chen had fired two actresses, a Chinese woman who worked for two days, then a Taiwanese actress named Wang Ching-ying, aka Wang Ying, who lasted two months and who, everyone involved concurs, didn't cut it.

All agree that Chen is difficult to work with. "He is a very anxious person," Kevin Lin say. "When he's directing on the set and the actors don't understand what he says, he becomes more and more impatient." "It's not easy. You have to fit into his scheme," says He Saifei, who plays Cheung's older sister. "He only says very abstract things; he just gives you the spirit of what he wants."

"I'm the only one in the movie who just does one take," boasts pretty boy Cheung, who played the the gay lead in Concubine and is now one of Asia's leading actors. "Concubine, which had some Steadicam, marked a big change in Chen's style. I give him credit for his earlier films, but I found them quite boring. The moving camera takes a lot of time, but I think the Steadicam and hand-held shots are appropriate - the characters have lots of ups and downs."

"To tell you the truth, he's not easy to work for, but it's worth it," offers Hwang Cha Keuei, the film's art director and designer of the magnificent, nearly full-size 1920s replica of Shanghai's commercial Nanjing Road, located about 40 minutes from Shanghai. "The most horrible thing," Hwang adds, "is that the camera keeps moving, and it creates problems for us. There will only be travelling shots after the initial establishing shots. And crane shots. He's moving everywhere."

"We don't know what Chen Kaige thinks inside," says 45-year-old Hsu Feng, whose billionaire developer husband, David Tong of Tomson Industries, provided the $1 million that launched Tomson Films back in 1983. "After working with him, it would be difficult for me to work with other directors. Chen Kaige would risk his life for a film. Other directors use their intellect; he makes a film with his senses."

"I'd stand by God to make movies in this world," Chen Kaige insists. "I make myself tired. Nothing satisfies me. That makes the film good."

n 'Temptress Moon' will be screened at Cannes next year