MovieChat Forums > Ngo si seoi (1998) Discussion > Was this movie originally filmed in Mand...

Was this movie originally filmed in Mandarin?

posted 17 years ago by ssj3brian
6 replies | jump to latest

Because I'm a purist when it comes to movies; what language was this film originally recorded in? The "uncut Asian versions" out there contain only spoken Mandarin. Wikipedia claims this movie was recorded in Cantonese. Most, if not all, of Jackie Chan's movies are originally in Cantonese. Help?

Edit: Nevermind guys. I found out that the film was mostly shot in English. I honestly never really noticed when I first watched the US version of this film years ago that when people spoke it was in-sync. Thanks be to: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Fuji/2055/jcdvd-whoami-hk.html

[–] ganpondorodf 17 years ago

i smell blatant self-promotion.

[–] Maniac-9 16 years ago

Actually I think that it was originally filmed in English.

[–] soue37-1 15 years ago

In some parts of the film, even the non-asian actors looked like they were speaking another language, with English dubbed in later. I thought it stood out quite a bit in the CIA meeting at the beginning of the film.

[–] neko-neko-1 14 years ago

It's definately filmed in English, I've seen one of Jackie's cantonese movies where Jackie dubbed himself in the English version, he sounds a lot more natural here

[–] Lightbrand 11 years ago

It's English, any Mandarin or Cantonese you see are dubs.

[–] zee944 10 years ago

Well, most of it was shot in English, yes. (Maybe there were some Mandarin/Cantonese lines, I don't remember.)

But in some scenes (for example, the FBI meeting after Jackie's fall from the helicopter) certain actors speak in their (or whatever) language and they're overdubbed in English, so the mouth movements are not always in sync. They never used these actors' voices (they may not even recorded it), it's not part of the original audio track.

In the older days (in the '70s and '80s) it was even worse: it was very common in Hong Kong to get the actors to speak in whatever language they can, and overdub everything afterwards. They didn't even use sync sound yet.