A one-woman cultural revolution

Gong Li was always destined to be a star. At 21, she was plucked from her class at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing by the director Zhang Yimou to star in his debut film, Red Sorghum; within a couple of years, she was the best-known actress in China. Her extraordinary performances in early 1990s movies such as Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine meant that to most western filmgoers, she was Chinese cinema. At least, that was the case until the beginning of this decade, when she took a two-year break from acting. “There were just no roles that were worth my time,” Gong explains. “I felt they were average and anyone could do them — it didn’t need to be me. I look for roles that not everyone can play, where I can say, ‘I have to play this part. You can get another actress to play it, and that’s fine, but I’ll be the best at it.’ ”

Sitting in a hotel overlooking Hong Kong harbour, Gong makes it clear she doesn’t do false modesty. On the contrary, she has a highly developed sense of her own worth, a result perhaps of her iconic status at home. “A lot of my movies were banned in China,” she says. “But even when the government weren’t happy with the roles I played, they wouldn’t do anything to me. I’ve always been very popular.” She says it with a smile that’s the equivalent of a wink. On screen, Gong can freeze people with a mere look. But in the flesh, she’s a disarmingly honest woman, with a big laugh that she uses often. Tall and striking rather than classically beautiful, she’s casually dressed in a purple velvet hoodie, jeans and a low-cut white top that reveals an ample chest. She looks far younger than her age, which is 40.  She is now at the stage when most actresses are on the downward slide to playing supporting roles as mums and fierce career women. Gong, though, seems to be having a second wind that’s more of a hurricane than a gentle gust. She didn’t so much announce her return as shout about it earlier this year with a scene-stealing, gloriously over-the-top performance as a vindictive older geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha. Now, with a slew of high-profile projects coming up, she is set to conquer Hollywood.

First up is Michael Mann’s long-planned big-screen version of Miami Vice, in which she plays the female lead. That will be followed by roles in Wong Kar Wai’s segment of the Eros trilogy, and Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask, the latest instalment in the saga of Hannibal Lecter. Then, in November, Gong will start shooting Tim Burton’s new film, The Yellow M, starring opposite Jim Carrey. Her arrival in Hollywood is all the more remarkable after the false start she made to her career in English-language movies nine years ago, when she and Jeremy Irons both looked out of place in the little-seen Chinese Box. “I’d forgotten about that film until you mentioned it — I always do,” Gong says with disdain. Her underdeveloped part served only to put her off working in the West. “A lot of the roles around then seemed to be decoration, where you didn’t really need to act, so I didn’t look in that direction then. Now, it’s very different.”

The desire to play characters nobody else can is satisfied by her role in Miami Vice, as Isabella, the Chinese-Cuban banker for a drugs-and-arms-trafficking cartel. There aren’t any Chinese-Cuban actresses of note, maybe none at all, but Gong not only has the curves to suggest she could be part-Hispanic, but is a mean salsa dancer, too. Further piquing her interest was the fact that Michael Mann had been chasing her for more than 10 years. “He contacted me when he was making Heat, but I couldn’t do it — I didn’t have the time,” she says. “But I like his films, and I really liked the character. Other people might think she’s evil, but I like the fact that she goes after what she wants.”

For those of a certain age, Miami Vice will bring back memories of the 1980s TV series. Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas played Crockett and Tubbs, two undercover cops whose work gave them access to the glitzy lifestyle — all sports cars, speedboats and designer labels — that their targets, the Cuban and Colombian drugs gangs, took for granted. Flash and shallow, but grounded in the reality of Miami’s emergence in the 1980s as the unofficial capital of Latin America, the show fitted its time perfectly.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t shown in China. “I’d never seen it, but Michael Mann gave me lots of tapes of it before we started shooting. I think maybe back then it was entertaining and cool, but it’s a bit dated now,” says Gong, who still lives in Beijing. “Our version is more dangerous; it’s a lot more edgy, I think, and they’ve added the element of romance that wasn’t in the TV series.” Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx have taken over the roles of Crockett and Tubbs. While posing as a cocaine smuggler to infiltrate the syndicate run by Isabella and her husband, Crockett falls for Isabella, and things start to get predictably messy. While the movie cannot match Heat for drama, it delivers the spectacular and elaborate action sequences in which he specialises.

“He’s very eccentric — a crazy director,” Gong says. “He has to get whatever he wants, whether it’s speedboats or private jets. A lot of directors are like that, but in China they don’t have that sort of money.” Mann’s demands did not just extend to fancy props; he made Gong work harder than she was used to, and she had the added stress of delivering her lines in Cuban-accented English. “Michael is very strict. Everything had to be perfect. If I did the scene really well but got the accent wrong, he would make me do it again. He is hard on his actors, but I think that’s a good thing. He’s like a teacher you really hate but afterwards you realise he was great. I feel now I can work with any director, no problem.”

Farrell seems to have been more congenial company. “I really liked him. I don’t think anything that’s written about him is true. Everyone on the set loved him. He didn’t have to be nice to everyone, but he was.” They share a few love scenes, but it’s Farrell who reveals more than Gong. Was she worried that her fans in China might be upset if she appeared nude in a western film? “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I make my decisions for me and no one else. Other people don’t affect my decisions.” What about her husband: does he? “No, he doesn’t,” Gong says flatly.

She married Ooi Wei Ming, a tobacco company executive from Singapore, in February 1996, a little more than a year after the end of her eight-year relationship with Zhang Yimou. Her time with the director resulted in seven films, including Raise the Red Lantern and To Live (1994), Zhang’s crowning achievement, an epic account of the effects of the first 40 years of communism on one family. Their relationship, though, was also something of a scandal in China, as Zhang was married for most of it.

Those seven films not only reinvented Chinese cinema after the wilderness years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, but gained it unprecedented exposure in the West. Raise the Red Lantern was the first Chinese film nominated for an Oscar, and Gong spent much of the 1990s being honoured at film festivals around the world. Her seemingly effortless grasp of her craft was astonishing for someone in her twenties. Whether she was playing a fallen aristocrat, a concubine or a peasant woman struggling with a dopey or brutal husband and petty officialdom, it was impossible to take your eyes off her. That quality was something Zhang spotted when she auditioned for him as a student. “I didn’t particularly like movies then; I was more into plays,” she recalls. “Maybe that’s why I stood out. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I have to get this.’”

Entwined with Zhang professionally and personally, Gong is cautious in speaking about that intense period in her life. “I haven’t thought much about that time,” she claims, unconvincingly. “I do miss the fact that it was a real collaboration and a true creative process, where we didn’t have to worry about box office. It’s impossible to go back to now, because you can’t just make movies for movies’ sake. There’s no way we could make The Story of Qiu Ju now.”

Eleven years after they last worked together, Zhang and Gong reunited in March to shoot The City of Golden Armour, a historical drama in which Gong stars opposite Chow Yun Fat in what will be the biggest-budget Chinese movie yet. They’d stayed in touch, and Gong, with her usual candour, had already let Zhang know how unimpressed she was with Hero and House of Flying Daggers, his two most successful films in the West. “I called him up and said, ‘How come you’ve gone back to being a cinematographer again? Where have the stories gone?’ A lot of people wouldn’t tell him that, or would be afraid to, but that’s how we communicate. It’s not because I’m mean; it’s because I’m honest,” Gong says. “I think it’s a shame that people think martial arts are all there is to Chinese film.”

The youngest of five children of two university lecturers, Gong developed her single-minded approach to life early on. “I’m very direct, very focused. I always have been when it comes to things I like. But if I have no interest in something, then I can’t be bothered at all. My teachers at school didn’t like me very much.”

Now that Zhang Ziyi, who took over as Zhang Yimou’s muse and lover a few years after the split with Gong, is working in Hollywood too, is there any rivalry? “No. Why would there be? She’s a hard worker, a good actress. I hope more Chinese actresses come through in the future. I think they will.” Gong can afford to be magnanimous. She was the original, and, 20 years on, she’s still the best.