曹操 我在中国影视剧中扮演外国人(下)
Not long after he arrived, he began dating a Chinese woman named Li Zhiyin, a finance major in college who later became his wife. On one of their early dates, he picked up an English-language listings magazine and saw an ad seeking a foreign actor for a Chinese movie. Kos-Read had never lost his love for performing, and he thought it could be fun to act in China. He auditioned and got the part, which was supposed to pay the equivalent of about $400 for three months of work. In the movie, called “Mei Shi Zhao Shi” (“Looking for Trouble”), Kos-Read plays an American documentary filmmaker following around a group of disillusioned bohemians. He says it took the producers two years to pay him. But two weeks after the movie wrapped, he landed three months of work on a Chinese soap opera.
到中国之后不久，他开始跟一个叫李之茵的中国女人约会，当时她在大学里学金融，后来成了他的妻子。在他们刚开始约会时，有一次他随手拿起一本以英文出版的活动信息类杂志，看到一则某中国电影寻找外国演员的广告。科斯-瑞德从未失去对表演的热爱，他觉得在中国表演应该挺有趣的。他去面试，得到了那个角色，三个月的报酬大约是400美元。那部电影名叫《没事找事》，科斯-瑞德在片中饰演一名美国纪录片导演，跟拍一群幻想破灭的放荡不羁的文化人。他说，制片方两年后才给他报酬。不过，那部电影杀青两周后，他在一部中国的连续剧中得到一份三个月的工作。
There were only a handful of foreign actors working in China at the time, and Kos-Read quickly realized he offered filmmakers there a rare combination of traits. He spoke good Mandarin, was a decent actor and had a look that many Chinese consider typically “American”: six feet tall, square jaw, blue eyes. He was able to make a living in the industry, but his early roles weren’t great. At that stage of his career, most filmmakers still had limited exposure to foreigners and foreign cultures, and his early parts tended to reflect Chinese stereotypes of Westerners. He rarely played bad guys, because there are very few American villains in Chinese movies (those roles tend to go to the woeful cohort of Japanese actors working in China). Instead, Kos-Read was often typecast as a “dumb guy,” he says. Most frequently, he was an arrogant foreign businessman who falls for a local beauty, only to be spurned as she inevitably makes the virtuous choice to stay with her Chinese suitor. Sometimes he played the foreign friend whose presence onscreen is intended to make the main character seem more worldly; Kos-Read dubbed another stock character “the fool,” an arrogant Westerner whose disdain for China is, by the end of the movie, transformed into admiration.
当时，中国只有少量外国演员，科斯-瑞德很快意识到，对片方来说，难得的是他身上结合了好几种品质。他普通话说得很好，演得也不错，长相符合很多中国人心目中典型美国人的样子：六英尺高，方下巴，蓝眼睛。他能以这个行业为生，但早期的角色都不太好。在他事业的那个阶段，大部分中国电影制作人对外国人和外国文化的了解依然很有限，他早期的角色往往反映出中国人对西方人的刻板印象。他很少演坏人，因为在中国电影中美国人很少是坏人（坏人大多是由一群在中国工作的悲催的日本演员来演）。相反，科斯-瑞德经常饰演“傻乎乎的家伙”（他的原话）。他最常演的是爱上中国美女的傲慢的外国商人，但最后都是被甩，因为女方必然会做出正义的选择，与中国的求婚者在一起。有时他饰演主角的外国朋友，他的出现只是为了让主角显得更高大上；科斯-瑞德还饰演另一个老套的角色，他称之为“傻子”，也就是傲慢的西方人，到影片末尾，这个角色对中国的鄙视会转化为敬佩。
When he was studying Mandarin at N.Y.U., Kos-Read adopted a Chinese moniker, as many language students do. He took his, Cao Cao, from a historical general who is also a central character in one of the country’s most revered classical novels, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” Like a Chinese King Arthur or Davy Crockett, the original Cao Cao exists in fact and fiction and in between. Kos-Read chose the name because it was easy to remember and because he liked that Cao Cao was a wise, self-reliant man. Years later, the decision would prove wise indeed. To his Chinese audience, it showed that the American, despite his loutish onscreen personae, took an interest in their history and culture.
科斯-瑞德在纽约大学学中文时给自己起了个中文名字，很多学外语的学生都这样做。曹操这个名字来自中国历史上的一位军事家，他也是中国很受推崇的古典小说《三国演义》里的一个中心人物。和亚瑟王(King Arthur)或戴维·克罗克特(Davy Crockett)一样，曹操既存在于现实中，也存在于小说中，以至于关于他的现实和虚构交织在了一起，难以分清。科斯-瑞德选择这个名字是因为它很好记，而且他喜欢曹操的聪明和自立。这个决定在多年后会被证明相当明智。在中国观众看来，它表明，这个美国人虽然在电影电视中饰演愚钝的角色，但他对中国的历史和文化感兴趣。
Kos-Read acted in film and television for almost a decade before he truly found fame. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, he landed his own segment on a Chinese news program called “Sunday.” Dubbed “Cao Cao Lai Le” (“Here Comes Cao Cao”), the weekly reality bit was designed to help increase the show’s ratings and give it a more international flavor by allowing Chinese viewers to experience their country anew through a foreigner’s eyes. The segment eventually devolved into Kos-Read more or less being goofy in front of the camera and enlisting Chinese people to cut loose with him. In one episode, for example, he trains to be a Hooters girl. (In China, the chain is known as “American Owl Restaurant.”) The show was enormously popular, and soon Kos-Read was being recognized on the street. “One of the reasons I liked ‘Cao Cao Lai Le’ — it was me,” he says. “Instead of playing stupid stereotypes on TV and in movies, I could go out and be me. It’s my personal prejudice that I’m more interesting than the characters I play.”
科斯-瑞德演了近10年的电影和电视剧后才真正成名。在2008年北京奥运会前，他在一档名为《第七日》的中文新闻节目中有了自己的节目环节，叫《曹操来了》。这是一个真人秀节目，每周一期，设计的目的是帮助提升栏目的收视率，并用让中国观众通过一个外国人的眼睛重新感受自己的国家这种方式，来让节目更国际化。这个节目最后退化成了科斯-瑞德或多或少地在镜头前举止滑稽愚蠢，请中国人和他一起放开束缚。比如，在其中一集中，他接受了在Hooters当女服务员的培训。（在中国，该连锁被叫做“美国猫头鹰餐厅”。）该节目大受欢迎。很快，便有路人会认出科斯-瑞德。“我喜欢《曹操来了》的原因之一是，那就是我，”他说。“不是在电视和电影里扮演那些愚蠢的模式化角色，我能做我自己。我个人认为，我比我演的那些角色更有趣。”
In 2009, Kos-Read began writing a column called “Token White Guy” for an expat publication, Talk Magazine, in which he chronicled his on- and off-screen adventures. He wrote about the time an acquaintance enlisted him to act in an ad campaign, Kos-Read’s first. His friend told him the product was “some sort of medicine.” Then, Kos-Read showed up on set and read his line, which was written in English: “Do you want to be thicker, longer and harder? Then be like Cao Cao and use Strong Balls Hormone.” (He dropped the ad.) He wrote about the time he was cast to play an English Jew who falls in love with a prostitute and, riddled with guilt, drops to his knees and prays for forgiveness — from Jesus. And the time a Chinese magazine wrote a multi-page, entirely fictitious profile of him, and then emailed him a copy.
2009年，科斯-瑞德开始为一本面向外籍人士的刊物Talk Magazine撰写一个名为“Token White Guy”的专栏。在专栏里，他记述了自己在屏幕内外的生活。他写到了一个熟人请他拍广告的经历。那是他的第一支广告。他那个朋友告诉他，产品是“某种药物”。然后，科斯-瑞德便出现在拍摄现场，阅读自己的台词。台词是用英文写的：“想更粗、更长、更硬吗？那就像曹操一样，使用壮阳激素吧。”（他放弃了那个广告。）他还记述了自己被选中扮演英国的一个犹太人的故事。那个犹太人爱上了一个妓女，充满罪恶感的他跪着祈求饶恕，而对象居然是耶稣。还有一次，一本中文杂志写了一篇介绍他的文章，还通过电子邮件给他发送了样刊。文章洋洋洒洒好几页，但全部都是杜撰的。
“Cao Cao Lai Le” ran for about three years before the struggling “Sunday” dropped it (“Sunday” soon went off the air as well), but it led to better roles in film and TV and a long line of travel-show hosting gigs, which took him to virtually every region of China — from the deserts of the west to the grasslands of the north to the hilly metropolis of Chongqing.
《曹操来了》播出了大约三年，后被处境艰难的《第七日》砍掉（很快，《第七日》也停播了），但它让科斯-瑞德获得了更好的电影和电视角色，和一长串的旅游节目主持工作。因为这些工作，他几乎去到了中国每一个地区——从西部的沙漠到北部的草原，再到山城重庆。
Hengdian World Studios is sprawling and surreal, covering 8,000 acres and featuring a one-to-one scale model of Beijing’s Forbidden City. “You walk around, and you can’t tell the difference,” Kos-Read told me as we drove past the complex on the way to the set the next morning. Around the lot, different shows were being filmed. Tourists are allowed on set for 199 yuan ($30) per person, and groups of them were huddled around as filming took place. It offered a considerably different experience from the one you might encounter at a Universal Studios theme park. “Instead of ‘Jaws,’ it’s, like, killing Japanese or hanging out with the emperor’s concubines,” Kos-Read said.
横店影视城是个庞大而离奇的地方，占地8000英亩，其中一比一原样复制的北京故宫是主要建筑。第二天早上开车去拍摄现场的路上，我们正好经过那里。科斯-瑞德对我说，“你可以四处走走，根本看不出区别。”在那附近有几部戏正在拍摄。游客每人花199元便可进入片场。拍摄过程中，现场围聚了一群又一群的游客。这里给人的体验，和在环球影城(Universal Studios)主题公园是有很大不同的。“不是像《大白鲨》(Jaws)那样的惊悚电影，而是杀日本人，或是和皇帝的妃嫔消磨时间，”科斯-瑞德说。
Despite the breadth of roles he has played in China, Kos-Read is passed over for most co-productions. Hollywood producers want to bring in their own talent, he says. And once, Chinese producers told him that because of the ubiquity with which he appears in Chinese cinema and television, he would make their production seem too local. He has acted in only two East-West movies: a deep-sea epic funded by a Chinese billionaire with a predominantly foreign cast, and a bigfoot movie shot in Shennongjia, a mountainous region in Hubei Province, where there have been hundreds of purported bigfoot sightings. Each film was plagued with on-set dysfunction, and neither has been released.
尽管在中国扮演过各种各样的角色，但大部分合拍片都不考虑科斯-瑞德。他说，好莱坞的制片方想用自己的人。有一次，中国制片方对他说，因为他的身影在中国的影视作品中随处可见，使他们的作品看上去太本土化。他只参演过两部东西合拍影片：一部是深海题材的史诗片，由中国的一名亿万富翁投资，演员大部分是外国人，另一部是在湖北山区神农架拍摄的一部野人题材的电影，那里有过成百上千次据称看到野人的报告。每部影片都在拍摄现场频频出问题。迄今为止，两部影片均未发行。
Kos-Read says that the reason most co-productions fail is as much about the chaos on the Chinese side as it is the arrogance on the Hollywood side. “They come here and say, ‘We’re from Hollywood, we know better and whatever it is that you think is the right way to do it, it’s by definition not,’ ” he says. “You come in with an attitude like that, you will have a lot of problems. You will misunderstand the kind of stories they want to see.”
科斯-瑞德说，大部分合拍片都以失败告终的原因，中方的混乱和好莱坞的傲慢各占一半。“他们来到中国说，‘我们是从好莱坞来的，我们更在行，你们认为是对的东西，必定就是错的，’”他说。“如果带着那种态度过来，就会遇到很多问题。你对他们想看到哪种故事就会有误会。”
And as Chinese filmmakers have figured out what sorts of stories Chinese audiences really want to see, the nature of Kos-Read’s work has changed for the better. Although his part in “Knight’s Glove” wasn’t groundbreaking, he is now often cast in increasingly complex parts.
随着中国电影人弄明白了中国观众真正想看的故事，科斯-瑞德的工作性质发生了好转。尽管他在《Knight’s Glove》的角色并不具有开创性，但现在，他经常会扮演越来越复杂的角色。
After the morning’s shoot, we drove across the lot to film another scene. In the back of the van, Kos-Read scrolled through photos on his phone of some of the roles he has played over the last two years, each with a distinct facial-hair style. They included: an American engineer who worked on the first locomotive in China; Gen. Douglas MacArthur; an “[expletive] lawyer”; a World War II radio announcer; a hip-hop dancer; a wisdom-dispensing alcoholic barfly; a Mafia boss; an antiquities expert; a sleazy Russian lounge lizard; a cowboy; a bisexual fashion designer; and a French detective.
上午的拍摄结束后，我们开车穿过影视城，去拍摄另一个场景。在面包车的后座上，科斯-瑞德在手机上翻看他过去两年里扮演过的一些角色的照片，全都留着特征鲜明的胡须，其中包括：在中国首个火车头上工作的美国机师、道格拉斯·麦克阿瑟(Douglas MacArthur)将军、一名“[脏话]律师”、二战期间的电台播音员、嘻哈舞者、妙语连珠的酒吧醉汉、黑帮老大、古董专家、不务正业的俄罗斯花花公子、牛仔、双性恋时装设计师和法国侦探。
Kos-Read believes the growing variety of roles for foreign actors like him is a result of more Chinese exposure to outsiders. “There are more foreign actors now,” he says. “Chinese know some foreigners. So they write more interesting characters. I’m lucky because I usually get to do the better stuff.”
科斯-瑞德认为，现在有越来越多样化的角色可以供他这样的外国演员出演，这是中国向外界进一步开放的结果。“如今有了更多的外国演员，”他说。“中国人了解一些外国人。所以他们写出了更有趣的角色。我很幸运，因为我通常有更好的角色可以扮演。”
This trend is likely to continue. The money coming from Chinese producers, and the spending power of Chinese audiences, is simply too great to ignore, and anyone venturing to China from Hollywood — whether producer, actor or cameraman — has to learn how to play by Chinese rules. That means adapting stories to the changing desires of film fans, and learning how to cooperate on China’s less regimented movie sets. Hollywood pros may be arrogant, says Jonathan Landreth, editor of the website China Film Insider, who has been covering the Chinese entertainment industry for more than a decade, but “in the melding of minds between China and Hollywood, there’s been a tipping in the balance of power. So much money is driving these productions that the folks in Hollywood have to listen.”
这种趋势很可能会延续下去。中国的制作方撒的钱太多，中国观众的消费能力太大，实在不容忽视，任何从好莱坞到中国拓展的人——无论是制片人、演员还是摄影师——都必须学会如何遵守中国的游戏规则。这意味着适应影迷不断变化的口味，学习如何在中国不那么成系统的电影体系中展开合作。“中国底片”网站(China Film Insider)编辑林嘉瑞(Jonathan Landreth)报道中国娱乐产业已经十多年，他说好莱坞的专业人士可能是很傲慢，但“中国人和好莱坞合作的时候，在权力平衡中存在一种倾斜。这些制作背后有这么多钱，好莱坞的人不得不听。”
In the afternoon, the director of “Knight’s Glove,” a young man with bleached blond hair, recruited me to play an extra in a scene with Kos-Read. I would be a driver. I wondered aloud who was supposed to have played the driver, but no one answered, and instead I was shepherded outside to a wardrobe truck and outfitted in a World War I-era military uniform with a Brodie helmet.
《Knight’s Glove》的导演是一个头发漂成金色的年轻男子。下午的时候，他招募我跑龙套，在一个场景中和科斯-瑞德配戏。我演一名司机。我询问，本来由谁扮演司机，但没有人回答，结果我被领到外面的一辆服装车里，换上了一战时的军事制服，戴上一顶布罗迪式钢盔。
As I dressed in the truck, Kos-Read approached with a Chinese crew member and said, “They asked me to make sure you knew that they weren’t actually going to pay you or anything.” I laughed. As absurd as it may seem to be yanked from the sidelines in an instant and thrown in front of the camera, this kind of thing happens with surprising regularity for foreigners in China, and moments like these become the kind of China Stories that keep people like Kos-Read around for so long.
我在卡车上换衣服时，科斯-瑞德与剧组里的一个中国人走过来说，“他们让我告诉你，他们不会付钱给你。”我笑起来。突然从场边被抓去扮演一个影视角色，这似乎非常荒诞，但对于在中国的外国人来说，这样的事情惊人地常见。这些时刻成了一种“中国故事”，让那些像科斯-瑞德一样的人在这里待了这么久。
We filmed four or five takes of a short scene in the car. I pretended to drive, yanking the steering wheel back and forth with the kind of comical exaggeration you might see in “The Andy Griffith Show.” Two cameras glided on a track and crane outside the car while Kos-Read, sitting in the back, and a young Russian actor, who sat beside me, exchanged a few lines of dialogue. The Russian had until recently been a student in Jinhua, a nearby city, but was now trying his hand at an acting career. Maybe it would have worked out for him had he started a decade and a half ago, like Kos-Read, but his performance didn’t bode well. He struggled with the lines; his English was wooden, the delivery stilted.
我们在车里拍了一场短短的戏，反复拍了四五条。我假装开车，来回转动方向盘，带点滑稽的夸张，就好像在《安迪·格里菲斯秀》(The Andy Griffith Show)里表演那样。车外的轨道和吊臂上有两台摄像机，科斯-瑞德坐在后座上，一名年轻的俄罗斯演员坐在我旁边，戏里有几句对话。这个俄罗斯人不久前在附近的金华市读书，现在则在试水演艺事业。如果他在15年前尝试这一行，就像科斯-瑞德那样，可能还有希望，但是他演得不怎么样。他说台词很费力，他的英语很蹩脚，他的表演很呆板。
Kos-Read, on the other hand, naturally eased into character as soon as they started rolling. He said his lines in a British accent, smoothly and barely above a whisper, looking out the window as the camera swept by.
而科斯-瑞德则一开拍就轻松进入了角色。他用英国口音流畅地讲着台词，在摄像机划过之时，一边喃喃低语，一边望向窗外。
