Happy Birthday: Li Gong

Li Gong

Born: December 31, 1965 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China

The important things are the script and the director. I have been waiting around to get the right script and the right director. For example, in the past if a Hollywood director came to me with a script and wanted me to play a character and she was a stereotypical Asian woman who gets into a fight and gets killed off quickly, that didn’t seem to have much interest for me.

[on Rob Marshall]: The most extraordinary thing about Rob Marshall is the way he works. For one thing: he is always encouraging, always supportive. Whatever we do, he says “Perfect”, “Elegant”, “Very Good”, etc. Even if you’re not the best actress in the world, he will keep supporting and encouraging, so that you will feel like “oh my Gosh, I’m such a great actress, I can be a great actress!’ And this really helped us a lot, because it really inspired us to give him our all. Every time we tried a scene, we would give him more and more. The other thing about Rob Marshall is his way of rehearsing. We rehearsed the whole film all the way through, from beginning to end, before we started shooting each scene. We had to memorize all the lines. They set up a simple set for us to practice and we ran our lines, adjusting some, so we knew what we were doing when we actually started filming it. We rehearsed the whole thing even before we split up the screenplay into shots, so we knew the whole script all the way through. This is something we just don’t do in China. And it’s very refreshing and different for me. And now I’m convinced this is a very good way to work.

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