(From right) Director Feng Xiaogang alongside actor Huang Xuan, actresses Yang Caiyu and Lydia Peckham, who plays a waitress, at the Beijing premiere on Dec 17. [Photo by Zou Hong/China Daily]

Since a number of Huang's lines were written in English, he recruited a native speaker to act as a voice coach to "force" him to only speak English for the entire duration of the shoot.

On the other hand, Yang studied in the United States and has a good command of English, so she devised a way to make herself sound like a novice speaker.

"I wrote the Chinese characters under the English lines on the script to make me pronounce each phrase a bit awkwardly. So my lines in the film came across as sounding quite 'Chinglish'," Yang smiles.

Both stars also received culinary training to help them perform their scenes in the kitchen at the restaurant owned by the protagonist couple in Clyde.

"I'm still a bachelor and I have yet to reach the same age as the character's age (who is depicted in the movie as being in his mid-40s). So I had to draw on my most mature and complex emotions to imagine the psychological state of this middle-aged man who had suffered the pain of his wife passing away," Huang says of his approach to the role that spans 17 years in the movie.