Naomi Watts is only a couple of remakes short of having enough to hold her own deja vu film festival. She was in last year's remake of "King Kong," starred in the 2002 remake of the Japanese horror film "The Ring" and is waiting to see a final script for a remake of "The Birds."

Meanwhile, there's "The Painted Veil," an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel about Kitty Fane, an unhappy woman who finds a focus for her life in the midst of a cholera epidemic in China. The movie originally was made with Greta Garbo in 1934.

"I hate to admit it," she said with a laugh, "but I guess I have had more than my share of remakes."

Watts evaluates each remake separately. As for the first version of "The Painted Veil" — which actually had been made before, as "The Seventh Sin" in 1957 — "it's fairly obscure," she said. "Although ... (Kitty was) played by Greta Garbo, I didn't feel that that was going to get in my way."

She even watched most of the first movie, something actors doing remakes often avoid. "Even though it's the same character, we make her more modern," Watts said. "I didn't watch the end, though, so I'm not quite sure how it comes out. We changed the ending from the book, and I didn't want to know what ... (the first filmmakers) did."

Watts joined the effort four years ago after being approached by co-star and co-producer Edward Norton. "It's a great role and a story with lots of twists and turns in it," she said. "And anything with Edward in it interests me."

But they had trouble finding money for it. One hurdle was location: They insisted on shooting the film in China.

"We spent three months in China," she said, and got so far off the beaten track the extras had never seen Westerners before.

"We didn't want to fake it in Hawai'i," she said. "The beautiful locations are a character in themselves."