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SINGAPORE: She was the one "temperamental diva" among the blueblood of the acting community that included Adrian Pang, Tan Kheng Hua, Lim Kay Siu, Neo Swee Lin, Pam Oei and Patrick Teoh.
But Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion - the museum-cum-hotel that is the titular building in Glen Goei's black comedy whodunit The Blue Mansion - apparently wasn't very happy when her usually empty courtyard pool was filled with water for the film's funeral wake scene.
Not happy at all.
The very next day, more than 30 of the film's cast and crew came down with food poisoning; some even had to be hospitalised. "And one of the lights fell when we were filling the water," said actress Claire Wong, who plays Yen Ching in the film.
Patrick, who plays the patriarch and tycoon Wee Bak Chuan, added: "During the filming of one of the scenes, we could see a streak of blue light across the monitor screen and no one could figure out where it came from."
Spooky? Yes. But as most astute directors like Goei know, casting creaky, old buildings, especially Unesco Architectural Heritage Award recipients, always pays off.
"The initial location I had in mind was in Gurney Street (but) just didn't feel right when I went up to Penang to see it," Goei told Today. "And then I realised that the boutique hotel I was staying in was perfect for the film."
Perfect not just as a shooting locale, but you could even say that Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion was the star of the show. The 19th Century indigo-coloured restored mansion may externalise Gothic lourve windows, Chinese cut-and-paste porcelain work, cast iron pillars and art nouveau stained glass, but internalises human, familial and historical bonds.
The Blue Mansion is not just an exploration of the longstanding Asian patriarchal order, the cost of individual happiness and the unrelenting bonds of family ties, but also a house haunted by unresolved crises of family and past.
"Being and filming inside the mansion was very evocative," said Adrian, who plays youngest son Wee Teck Ming. "Not to sound too cliched, but that house is alive. There is a very spiritual feeling about the house. And undoubtedly, the movie would have been very different if we had shot it elsewhere."
Added Kheng Hua, who plays Veronica: "The house itself - let alone the inhabitants - has a lot of secrets. The house and the real family who lived there have so much history... there definitely was an energy reverberating throughout the house."
Of course, throughout cinematic history, houses have often stolen the show from the cast - anyone remember Amityville Horror? So, let's take a look at five of my favourites houses in films that have become vital characters in themselves.
WROTHAM PARK AND SYON HOUSE
(in Gosford Park, XX)
The sprawling English country manor has always been a leading lady in her own right, signifying grace, tradition, nature, hospitality and socioeconomic structure.
The genius of Robert Altman's wonderfully restrained murder-mystery with its "upstairs" (Syon House) and "downstairs" (Wrotham Park) dissertation is that house is not only a panoramic platform of English character acting, but more importantly, a powerful tool for social commentary and the expose of the moral corruption of the social elite.
THE ROSE HOME
(in War Of The Roses, 1989)
War Of The Roses is black comedy at its acerbic, sadistic and cynical best. Oliver and Barbara Rose's (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner) bitter divorce degenerates into a free-for-all, with smashed furniture, shattered antiques and plummeting chandeliers as they turn their home into a battlefield.
The ultimate prized possession each stubbornly refuses to relinquish: The house itself. It's the location where their "war" is waged, the crucial emotional marker and director Danny DeVito's indirect commentary on both yuppie materialism and love lost.
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL
(in The Shining, 1980)
Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece, based on Stephen King's novel, stars Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance, winter caretakers of an isolated hotel.
But it's the enormous Overlook Hotel that unyieldingly lingers in our heads: From its long eerie hallways where little Danny rides his creaky tricycle up and down, to the bloodied elevators and claustrophobic hedge maze.
Whether the hotel's growing maddening grip is the literal cause of the unhinged Jack's descent into madness or merely a hallucinatory metaphor doesn't really matter.
It's simply a terrifying emblem of the complex and entrapping power of structure, insidiously sucking both the characters and the audience in. As The Eagles once sang about another hotel: "You can check out anytime you like, but you just can never leave."
BATES MOTEL
(in Psycho, 1960)
Alfred Hitchcock always liked to set his films in the perfect locale. But without a doubt, the infamous Bates Motel and its adjoining creepy homestead, the centrepiece of his classic thriller Psycho, will forever be revered as one of the genre's most terrifying film settings to be mentioned in the same breath as "Norman", "Mother" and "shower scene".
Even today, almost 50 years later, its original movie set buildings are still a regular tourist attraction on the Universal Studios Tour.
THE APARTMENT
(in The Spanish Apartment, 2002)
In French, "l'auberge espagnole" is a metaphorical expression for a place where people come together and share some part of themselves with each other.
In the movie, it's an actual apartment where all that precisely happens in this refreshing lighthearted comedy where a bunch of frolicking exchange students from all over Europe engage in a series of cosmopolitan adventures and comic tribulations.
This apartment is not just a character, but also symbolic microcosm of Europe's own bumpy path to unification.
- TODAY/yb
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