In search of a silver lining
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E-mail China Daily, December 26, 2019
Since a number of Huang's lines were written in English, he recruited a native speaker to act as a voice coach to "force" him to only speak English for the entire duration of the shoot.
On the other hand, Yang studied in the United States and has a good command of English, so she devised a way to make herself sound like a novice speaker.
"I wrote the Chinese characters under the English lines on the script to make me pronounce each phrase a bit awkwardly. So my lines in the film came across as sounding quite 'Chinglish'," Yang smiles.
Both stars also received culinary training to help them perform their scenes in the kitchen at the restaurant owned by the protagonist couple in Clyde.
"I'm still a bachelor and I have yet to reach the same age as the character's age (who is depicted in the movie as being in his mid-40s). So I had to draw on my most mature and complex emotions to imagine the psychological state of this middle-aged man who had suffered the pain of his wife passing away," Huang says of his approach to the role that spans 17 years in the movie.
Despite facing the challenges of acting and language, Huang had some happy and unforgettable moments with a special "actor" named Blue-a stray dog the couple adopted in the film.
"I was surprised to see that a dog could be so smart to follow all the acting commands from the director … such as pretending to be weak and suffering from breathing difficulties," recalls Huang.
Yang adds: "The dog is a famous star in New Zealand and has appeared in several films and TV series. I was told that I should establish an intimate relationship with him (the dog is depicted as a key member of the family in the movie), so I always had some delicious sausages in my pocket."
By Tuesday the film had grossed around 110 million yuan ($15.7 million), outperforming Disney's epic Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker but still overshadowed by the box-office takings from Donnie Yen's final action film, Ip Man 4.
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