I had to gothrough a very strict diet and training
regimen. I went down to three per cent body fat.”
Liu Yifei was found after Caro and her team
met more than 1000 actresses, over a year. Caro
wanted “real physical prowess”, and got it. The
actress flew from Los Angeles to Beijing for
a two-hour audition and killed it, despite not
having slept on her night-flight and going straightin. “I wanted to thoroughly explore this girl,”
says Caro of the screen test. “Because I needed
a warrior, and I needed a partner. So she did this
gruelling audition and then we sent her straight
to the physical trainer to do an equally gruelling
physical assessment. Weights, push-ups,pull-ups,
everything. She was brilliant in the dramatic
part of the audition, and in the physical part sheLeft:Mulan
dressed in more
traditional
female attire.Above:Mulan
trains with the
warriors she will
lead. Caro
reveals that
when it came to
the action, Liu
set the bar for
the boys.Right:
Bori Khan and
Xianniang in
cahoots. No
good, surely, can
come from this.I’ll Make A Man Out Of Yousequence, as
performed by Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond
will not be singing in this film. Nobody’s singing
here at all.
GOING PRACTICAL
MULANWAS SHOT in 18 locations throughout
China, inthe countryside, in ancient villages and
in the Gobi Desert. “Our goal is to create a really
epic template,” says Reed. For inspiration, Caro
watched Asian masterworks, from Zhang Yimou’s
Heroto Ronny Yu’sSaving General Yang, but also
David Lean’sLawrence Of Arabia. “I’ve always had
a bigger vision than the budgets of my previous
movies allowed,” she says. Her previous film,
2017’sThe Zookeeper’s Wife, “looks like $70 million
but it was a fraction of that. One of the great gifts
ofMulanwas that the budget [rumoured to be up
to $300 million] was equal to the vision.”
It is all, she says, about realism. “That’s my
default setting: real landscapes, real relationships,
real sets that actors can live in the world of,
because it brings an authenticity to the
performances. I’m not a green-screen girl.” The
horses out here in New Zealand are certainly real.
There are 80 being employed for the big battle
sequence, with Mongolian trick riders performing
as Bori Khan’s ‘shadow warriors’. “They can turn
around in the saddle on the move,” enthuses Reed.
“So they’re riding the horses at full gallop and
can then jump off the side, come back up, land
backwards in the saddle, continue to ride the
horse and then shoot arrows off the back of it. If
I wasn’t watching it happen I wouldn’t believe it.”
Caro is just as awed. “All that backwards
riding and jumping, it’s all real,” she says. “That’s
the biggest thing for me about making this in
live-action — it can be real. It’s a real story about
a girl going to war. All of that realism, in camera
— it’s cinema. It really thrills me.”
CGI has mainly been used for some set-
extension, but as much as the story would allow,
she wanted to stayaway.“Marvel,Star Wars, a lot
of the Disney live actions, are somewhat stage-
bound films, with backgrounds created in the
digital world. But for us, it’s very meaningfully real
landscapes. Real light. Real grit on real faces.” Jason
Scott Lee, speaking toEmpirebetween takes,tells
us how much this helped his performance. “Out
here, you feel the vast country and the mountains,”
he says. “You can mount your horse,sit up on it
and sit tall and you look out and think, ‘I’mBori
Khan and this is my land.’ Your acting finds a
purpose because you can see the actual thing.”
TOUGHENING UP
WITH LEE ON board as the big bad, Caro wanted
him to tune into the right mindset. “Bori Khan’s
father gets killed by the Emperor, so I’m in revenge
mode,” says Lee of his character, and to get him
there, Caro sent him to train with a Māori kapa
haka master. “They’re very fierce,” the actor says.
“Niki wanted me to tap into that warrior essence.”
She also wanted him shredded. “Niki wanted Bori
Khan to be thissinewy, savage warrior,
very ripped, like an animal,” he says. “So Alamy, Shutterstock