Trivia / The Last Emperor

• Actor-Shared Background: Ying Ruocheng plays the Detention Camp Governor who is purged and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Ying had actually been imprisoned in a labour camp during the Revolution, and at the time of filming was the vice president of Department of Culture. Through his grandmother, he is distantly related to the real Pu-Yi.
• Billing Displacement: Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Cong Su have "Music by" credit in the opening titles. While the other two did indeed write a lot of music for the film (Byrne composed five songs, including the main title music, while Sakamoto composed the majority of the score, including the end credits), the Cong Su track called "Lunch" on the soundtrack album is the only music he composed for the movie. This didn't prevent all three of them from sharing a Best Original Score Oscar. (Had the movie come out more recently, it's likely Sakamoto would have been the only one eligible - if it was eligible to begin with.)
• The Cast Showoff: There's a musical number midway through the film that exists solely to showoff John Lone's singing pipes.
• Deleted Scene: The theatrical release had a few, including the answer to the mouse question. It's not a pretty scene.
• Dueling Movies: This came out within months of another coming-of-age film set in China during the Japanese invasion and occupation, Empire of the Sun.
• Enforced Method Acting: During the Red Guards parade sequence, Bernardo Bertolucci had trouble instilling the right amount of anger in the actors, as none of them knew of the attitudes of the Cultural Revolution. To rectify this, he brought in a group of young Chinese film directors (including Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou), both of whom had been alive during the Revolution, to properly motivate the actors. On cue, they began to act out and cry, and filming proceeded smoothly.
• Fake Nationality: Eastern Jewel and head eunuch Chang are played by actors of Korean (Maggie Han) and Japanese (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) descent, respectively.
• Hostility on the Set: Bertolucci and Victor Wong clashed over the script's historical accuracy, leading to Bertolucci significantly reducing Wong's role in the finished film.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • At the time, private automobile ownership was outlawed in China. As such, John Lone and Peter O'Toole wound up using their prop bicycles to get to-and-from and set.
  • Security was so tight around the shoot that when O'Toole forgot his pass one day, he was denied entrance to the set.
• Role Reprise: Lisa Lu Yan, who played the Empress Dowager, was closely associated with the part after having previously played it in a pair of award-winning Hong Kong films in the 1970s. Twenty years after the film was released, she would play it again in a Chinese TV series.
• Star-Making Role: For John Lone, and Joan Chen in particular, who's now an award-winning director as well.
• Underage Casting: The Empress Dowager was 72 when the film takes place. Lisa Lu, the actress who played her, was 59 when the film was shot.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was one of two different projects Bertolucci pitched to the Chinese government, the other was an adaptation of André Malraux's La Condition Humaine.
  • Marlon Brando, Sean Connery and William Hurt were considered for Reginald Johnson.
  • Tony Leung Ka-fai was offered the role of Pu-Yi, but turned it down because he felt his English wasn't strong enough. Ironically, he wound up appearing in a different film about the Emperor, made in Hong Kong and released the same year.

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