The cast and crew of new movie THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI left a permanent reminder of the time they spent filming in Mongolia's Gobi Desert in the shape of a new pebble road.
Moviemaker Roger Spottiswoode called on his stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Radha Mitchell to join extras and crew members on an all-night hunt for stones to help stop heavy filming equipment and vehicles from sinking into the sand.
The Tomorrow Never Dies director says, "Great areas of the Gobi are just thin crusts of hardened sand, and underneath that it's very soft sand.
"Where we were there was a two-inch crust and, if you break through that it's extremely difficult to get back up, so if you're out there with 50 vehicles and they all sank through the crust one day, you're in trouble.
"We were sent on a detour by the government and we took a crane with us to help pull vehicles out of the sand but that was one of the first things to start sinking. So we had to build a road back.
"Our cast and crew of 500 people went out at night into the desert looking for little pebbles and bigger pebbles for hours and hours when we should've been shooting and watching the dawn come up.
"Over a period of hours we collected enough rocks and slowly we had built our own road to put them back under the wheels of the vehicles that were stuck.
"It was an enormous amount of work but I'm sure the road is still there. It will be there for the next thousand years, this short road that got us out of trouble."
See Also
