Incredible behind the scenes photos shot in Beijing on set of 1986 film The Last Emperor
- After meeting and befriending director Bernardo Bertolucci, Basil Pao was offered a part in The Last Emperor
- He took on other jobs during filming, including stills photographer, and a selection of his photos are on show in Hong Kong
For two months over the summer of 1986, photographer Basil Pao watched sunrise at the Meridian Gate, the largest gate at the Forbidden City in Beijing. As part of the team working on The Last Emperor, the early starts were par for the course, but he didn’t mind the lack of sleep. Working for Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci was a dream come true.
As an 18-year-old art student in Los Angeles, Pao had sneaked into a cinema with a friend to watch Bertolucci’s 1970 expressionist masterpiece The Conformist – they were broke and didn’t have the money for tickets – and the experience changed his life.
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“It was the first perfect film I’d ever seen and hugely influenced my whole way of looking at things,” says Pao from his home on Cheung Chau, an island 10km (6 miles) from Hong Kong Island.
The chance to work with the Italian director came 15 years later when his fiancée Pat showed a friend pictures of their engagement party. That friend was Joanna Merlin, Bertolucci’s casting director in New York. She arranged a meeting between Bertolucci and Pao, in part because he looked a little like Pu Yi, the last ruler of the Qing dynasty.
When they met at the Mandarin Hotel, Pao shared how he’d sneaked into the theatre and, without skipping a beat, Bertolucci said, “You owe me US$3.50.” They laughed and it was the start of a lasting friendship. Then 33 years old, Pao was cast as Pu Yi’s father, Prince Chun, which meant spending a lot of time either on horseback or on his knees kowtowing.
When he wasn’t wearing the heavy dragon robes, he served as one of a handful of assistant directors – “Bernardo’s eunuchs” – and helped with the film extras. Initially this involved tasks such as finding the horses for the Imperial Guards and, as the film went on, he ended up helping assemble some of the 19,000 extras that appeared in the crowd scenes.
Once they started shooting, producer Jeremy Thomas realised one stills photographer wouldn’t be enough and asked Pao to also do “special stills”. Many of those images are now on show at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in an exhibition called “The Last Emperor Revisited”.
“It was an extraordinary time. We pretty much had total freedom in the Forbidden City. They closed the various palaces for our filming,” says Pao.
Initially, the film crew was barred from shooting in the Hall of Supreme Harmony because an earlier Chinese production team had damaged the imperial throne room. Eventually they were permitted on condition that nothing metallic touched the floor.
“We weren’t allowed lights or tripods in there, which meant that we had a huge bank of lights right outside, so it looked like natural light coming into the throne room,” says Pao.
The night shoots had their own set of challenges. Pao recalls one especially surreal evening filming the wedding party scene. When the team lost one of the generators, the set was plunged into darkness. Dressed in full costume, Pao tried to gather up the extras who were there to play the wedding party guests.
“Bernardo was yelling for me, ‘Where is he? What are we doing?’ It was very chaotic,” says Pao.
The behind-the-scenes photographs Pao took during the filming of The Last Emperor were eventually published all over the world and established him as a photographer.
“It was amazing working with these incredibly talented people, they were fantastic. I remember eating lot of spaghetti because the Italian crew couldn’t move without pasta,” says Pao.
The Last Emperor Revisited – the exhibition runs through to March 31 at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Non-members are welcome from 10am-noon and 3pm-5.30pm daily. Please register at the concierge before visiting the exhibition in the Main Bar.
