Among Hollywood actors, Edward Norton probably knows most about China, and has used his experience to highlight its differences with the Western world in his new film "The Painted Veil".

Norton, 37, plays the serious-minded British bacteriologist Doctor Walter Fane in the third film adaptation of the classic novel of the same title by W. Somerset Maugham.

The love story set in the 1920s is about "a man of forgiveness and a woman of awakening" in Norton's words.

The mismatched Walter and Kitty, an upper-class woman played by Naomi Watts, move to Shanghai, where she has an affair. When he discovers her infidelity, in an act of vengeance, he accepts a job in a remote village in China ravaged by cholera, and takes her along. Their journey brings meaning to their relationship and gives them purpose in one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.

As a producer and leading actor of the movie, Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale and lived in the southern Chinese city of Kunming with his father for six years, sought to expand the scope of the story in the film version during his six-year preparation for the movie.

"The book of 'The Painted Veil' is a little bit narrow. It's really just about two British people. It's not really about China, " Norton said in Beijing Thursday while promoting the film.

"We wanted to make a film in which you can really feel the presence of the country, the presence of the people, and in which what was happening in China at that time is discussed with the Chinese people's perspective on that moment of history."

Norton, who has twice been nominated for an Oscar, including for his first feature role in the 1996 thriller "Primal Fear", said Walter is ultimately forced to confront the fact that he won't help the Chinese if he simply imposes his vision of the world on them.

Norton, with screenwriter Ron Nyswaner and director John Curran, incorporated more of China's political situation at the time, including an infamous massacre in Shanghai that occurred on May 30, 1925. British troops killed a large number of Chinese demonstrators at a major rally, provoking unprecedented anti-foreign outrage and China-wide demonstrations.

"There was this incredibly chaotic moment during which half the country was screaming for the foreigners to get out," Norton said in an ealier interview.

A favorite book of Norton's called "To Change China: Western Advisers in China" by Yale history professor Jonathan Spence helped Norton and Curran organize their ideas about China and the film. The book illuminated the challenges of the countless foreign missionaries, soldiers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and revolutionaries who have been trying to "change China" for more than 300 years.

Norton used some of the themes in the book to reshape the character of Walter - a western scientist who comes to rural China during the cholera epidemic and is utterly mystified when the Chinese don't welcome him with open arms.

"This book really helped bring Walter into focus for me," said Norton. "Walter became one of those people who was in China and rather myopically saying to himself, 'I'm not involved in politics or social reform. I'm just here to do science that will improve people's lives.' These people told themselves that they were not a part of the British military presence."

Source: Xinhua