South China Morning Post
INTERNET EDITION

Sunday August 4 2002

High on adventure

by Jade Lee

A SPIRITUAL relic from Tibet. A family of Chinese acrobats. An evil villain from the West. Mix these factors together in a movie and you get The Touch, an exhilarating adventure that traverses the Chinese provinces from east to west.

The Touch is the only big Hong Kong blockbuster in cinemas this summer and stars action queen Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng, Birthday Girl leading man Ben Chaplin, Moulin Rouge actor Richard Roxburgh and newcomer Brandon Chang. The film is directed by Peter Pau Tak-hei who won an Oscar for his stunning cinematography in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Yeoh and Chang play the last in a line of acrobats who are entrusted with the skills to enable them to retrieve a holy relic when the time comes. And the time comes when the villainous Karl keeps popping up in pursuit of the treasure.

For the actors concerned, making the film was every bit as exciting as the script itself.

Director Pau was constantly concerned about the safety of his crew during the two weeks they spent filming in Tibet. At more than 3,000 metres above sea level, there was a very real danger of altitude sickness.

'It was a huge weight on my shoulders. My biggest worry was that when the sun came up, I would have lost a few men in my crew; that they would have just gone to sleep and not been able to get up again,' he said.

Filming locations turned into makeshift hospitals as the crew - and Yeoh - succumbed to nausea and splitting headaches, symptoms of altitude sickness.

Fortunately, Chaplin was one of the few not affected.

'I was quite good at that altitude, but flexibility is not one of my strengths. I can only kick about chest high, which isn't very impressive when you see it on film. But I was up to the flying and stuff like that,' he said.

Even for Yeoh, the stunts designed by Philip Kwok Chun-fung proved to be a challenge. In one of the scenes, Chaplin and Yeoh are on a runaway horse which is racing towards a 33-metre gorge. The horse was supposed to slow down and stop some distance before the cliff, with the rest of the scene to be completed by computer graphics.

'The horse didn't slow down!' recalled Yeoh, who also produced the film. 'Our hearts were in our mouths as we saw the cliff looming in front of us. The horse trainers finally had to run on to our path to stop the horses. Ben and I couldn't wait to get off.' Fortunately, however, filming concluded without any major mishap, and both cast and crew are proud of the results of their hard work.

'It was a true adventure - from high altitudes to very spiritual locations - with very demanding action and just a lot of fun characters,' said Yeoh.