MULAN
Why the live-action remake is a ballad without songs.
When news first broke that Disney had greenlit a live-action remake of the 1998 animation Mulan, which featured captivating songs and a wise-cracking dragon sidekick voiced by Eddie Murphy, many may have expected a slavishly faithful recreation of the beloved original. After all, neither Guy Ritchie’s live-action Aladdin nor Jon Favreau’s The Lion King did much to deviate, and both went on to earn more than $1 billion at the global box office. However, a musical was never on the cards for Mulan.
“Honestly, that was never a discussion I had with Disney,” director Niki Caro confirms to Teasers. Instead, Caro turned to the source. “Both myself and the studio were really committed to honour the DNA of the 1998 animation and the centuries-old Ballad Of Mulan
– on which the story is based – but we always knew we wanted to make something completely new. This was never going to be a frame-by-frame retelling of the story.”
For the uninitiated, Mulan is the story of a fearless maiden who masquerades as a man in order to take her elderly father’s place in the Imperial Army when an invasion threatens the empire. It’s an epic journey of discovery where the disguised hero goes on to become one of China’s greatest warriors. “For me, it was such a privilege to tell a story that’s been relevant for hundreds and hundreds of years,” explains Caro, who rose to fame as director of the Academy Award-nominated Whale Rider and has since directed Charlize Theron in North Country and Jessica Chastain in The Zookeeper’s Wife. “This is the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man,
commits to her own authentic power and fights as a woman.”
As such, Caro saw in Mulan a story that mirrored her own experiences as a blockbuster filmmaker in 2020. “To be honest, it feels even more relevant to be a female director that tells this story today, because, like Mulan, I connected to my own power as a woman to tell it. I don’t disguise myself as a man to direct movies. There’s a line in the film that really stands out to me,” Caro continues. “One of the characters says to Mulan: ‘It’s impossible for a woman to lead a man’s army.’ That line speaks to me because that’s my job; I lead a man’s army. But in this ‘filmmaker’ army, all my generals were women, so the storytelling is very female-led and I’m so happy and satisfied about that.”
Reportedly costing somewhere in the region of $200 million to make, what Mulan lacks in music and Mushu, it more than makes up for with expansive battles and thrilling fight sequences that share just as much DNA with martial arts classics like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as the Disney original.
“The film was shot by a brilliant Australian cinematographer called Mandy Walker,” explains Caro, who heralds from New Zealand and shot Mulan in both her home country and China. “As an action movie, we wanted Mulan to be really real, visceral, explosive, adrenalised and muscular, but we also wanted it to be beautiful. As part of our research, we went back to historical Chinese paintings and we looked at great Chinese movies. We studied colour, structure, framing and focus… we studied everything to express the most beautiful version of this story.”
Caro also puts Mulan at the centre of the frame, “both literally and figuratively” - a technique George Miller deployed to great effect in Mad Max: Fury Road. “The framing is very composed. It’s very Chinese. Mandy used lenses that pull your eye that way,” Caro says. “I’m going to be slightly nerdy now, but we had one special lens that we mainly used with Mulan. It was made from ground glass, the same lenses David Lean used on Lawrence Of Arabia, so all the beauty in this film is very, very, very conscious.”
Primed to launch in cinemas on 27 March of this year, Mulan was delayed until 24 July when it became clear that Covid-19 would lead to the imminent shutdown of the entire film industry. However, this wasn’t the first time the movie’s release was postponed. The big-budget spectacle was originally given a November 2018 release date, but this was pushed back after it proved harder than expected to find the perfect actress to play the eponymous role.
“We saw in excess of a thousand people during the casting,” admits the director. “We almost went from village to village in China, because I had this romantic idea that we might find her that way. I thought we’d find that needle in a haystack there, because that’s the way I searched for Keisha CastleHughes when I made Whale Rider. We searched the world for a year, but we couldn’t find Mulan.”
Eventually, the casting team struck gold with Chinese star Liu Yifei, who starred alongside Jackie Chan and Jet Li in 2008’s The Forbidden Kingdom. But what makes Yifei perfect for the role? “Let me tell you what we put her through,” chuckles Caro. “We brought Yifei to Los Angeles. She took a 14-hour flight from Beijing to LA, which gives you the worst jet lag in the world. And she did a two-hour audition in English, which isn’t her first language. Then we sent her into the gym with a personal trainer to do a punishing 90-minute workout that was designed to test her physical limits and to see whether she was the warrior I needed [for the role]. She went through this whole process, but never ever did she ask to stop. She always did exactly what was asked of her and more. We knew we had our Mulan.” AT.
ETA | 24 JULY / MULAN IS SCHEDULED TO OPEN IN CINEMAS NEXT MONTH.
‘WE STUDIED EVERYTHING TO EXPRESS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VERSION OF THIS STORY’
NIKI CARO