The mere mention of The Pillow Book sparks a similar reaction from those who have already seen the film: 'Oh, Vivian Wu runs around without a stitch on throughout the show!' Wu laughs heartily when this is related to her. 'Actually, I wasn't really nude all that much,' she protests cheerfully over the telephone from her home in Pasadena, Los Angeles.
'Ewan McGregor was naked too. If anyone wants to talk about it, I think he's a lot hotter now. But I felt it was very natural; I never felt it was nude or naked or anything.' It was not always that way for Wu, who used to turn down roles with nude scenes, such as one offered to her in Showdown in Little Tokyo. But the Shanghai-born actress, now married to television producer-director Oscar Costo, still retains much of the conservatism born of her Chinese roots. While she found it a terrific honour to be approached by the director for the role, she still grappled with her concerns about having to shed her clothes. It took Greenaway about eight months to persuade Wu to accept the role.
Wu explains: 'I was born and raised in China. I was educated there. Of course, I had a problem with the nudity. For the eight months, I was having the biggest fight of my life. It was the hardest decision of my life.
'I had turned down parts because of nudity. I never believed in it. I remember telling Peter then that if he took out all the nudity, I would do it.' The cult director just kept asking Wu to read the script again and again. 'So for eight months I was reading the script - again and again and again,' she says. 'And each time I read it, I became more and more obsessed with it. In the end, I just had to do the movie. It was already in me. It would not have been normal for me to say no. It [became] that natural. I just said, 'Okay, I'll do it'. Simple.' Wu never really expected The Pillow Book to make it to Hong Kong screens, and she is unsure how audiences will take to the film, despite the fact it has won rave reviews throughout Europe.
'People see things in a different way in different places,' she says. 'I love Hong Kong and I enjoy the excitement of the place, but Hong Kong is a place I can never understand. So I really don't know if people will go and see the show or not.
'In Europe, people say it is one of Peter Greenaway's best movies. And Taiwanese reporters who saw it in Cannes all loved it. I suppose in Europe if you don't like Greenaway movies, you are criticised as lacking in taste or literature or culture, so they can't say bad things. But in Hong Kong, I guess, people don't care about Peter Greenaway so I won't be surprised how people talk about me or him.' Wu says her performance warrants that she be taken seriously as an actress. 'I don't need to do any nudity for the sake of publicity or to be rich or noticed,' she says. 'The reason I did it was simply because it was Peter. And I consider myself one of the luckiest people to be chosen. You know, Ralph Fiennes, Julia Ormond, Ewan McGregor . . . all the people that he picked have become the hottest movie stars. He doesn't pick actors from nowhere. Some actors in England were telling me they would work for free just to be in a Greenaway movie.' The filming process also helped Wu over the initial embarrassment of the nude scenes. 'Nude, not naked,' she stresses. 'We never talked about naked because to Peter naked is not an art-form. He always corrected me. It was 'nude'.' The first few scenes, shot in Japan, are actually the final scenes of the film. For these she remained fully clothed and 'very comfortable'. Then came Hong Kong which was fine as well. Only when they moved to the studios in Luxembourg were the actors required to take their clothes off. The small crew has been the core of Greenaway's technical support for the past 10 to 15 years. Like Greenaway, they consider their work to be art.