AS he was overseeing rehearsals for the monumental, multimillion-dollar opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with its cast of 15,000 and fireworks extravaganza, the film director Zhang Yimou faced enormous pressure. Hoping for a distraction, he turned to a book. But far from light entertainment, it was a novel called “13 Female Martyrs of Nanjing.”
The subject was familiar to all Chinese citizens: the massacre of more than 200,000 people when Japanese troops overran what was then China’s capital in December 1937. But the point of view was not, and Mr. Zhang quickly resolved to turn the book into a movie.
“The whole story was told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl, and I found that intriguing,” he recalled during an interview in New York last month. “I was always interested in this topic, of course, but all the many television programs and documentaries I had seen seemed very similar to me. There is always this box, and you cannot go outside the box. So when I read the novel, I saw a measure of light that took me in a different direction.”
Mr. Zhang’s historical epic, retitled “The Flowers of War,” had its premiere in China on Dec. 11, opened on Wednesday in the United States and, as part of what seems to be a campaign by China to soften its image abroad, is its official submission for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. But the movie has also unexpectedly becomeenmeshed in contemporary politics after thugs in plain clothes, believed to be Chinese government security agents, roughed up the movie’s star, the Academy Award winner Christian Bale, on Dec. 16 when he tried to visit Chen Guangcheng, a leading human-rights activist.
At the same time Mr. Zhang, some of whose early films were banned by censors, is being accused of collaborating with China’s Communist regime, a charge that was also leveled at him when he agreed to direct the Olympics event. Chinese bloggers derided him then as “a master of directing totalitarian group calisthenics,” whose “blockbusters create standards for pompous state ceremonies,” and similar criticisms are now surfacing.
Mr. Zhang, however, suggested that the process of making films in China is an elaborate cat-and-mouse game, with artists constantly having to navigate around the limits that an all-powerful Communist Party imposes. Since “all the locations are owned by the government,” and “you must go through censorship after the movie is made,” it is “hard to get approval for every movie in China, not just this one,” he said.
And because he is China’s most renowned director, with credits that include “Raise the Red Lantern” and “House of Flying Daggers,” his own situation is especially complicated, he added. “If you’re well known and under the spotlight, all eyes are on you, and they are more strict about your project — because you have more influence — than with a new, emerging director.”
Made at a cost of more than $90 million, “The Flowers of War,” which has received a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film, is the most expensive Chinese movie ever made. Mr. Zhang, 60, said he envisioned the movie “as a starting point for Chinese cinema to be more globalized,” and the casting of Mr. Bale, who has played Batman and was coming off an Oscar as best supporting actor in “The Fighter,” seemed to symbolize that step.
“The Flowers of War” tells the story of two very different groups of women who seek refuge in a Roman Catholic cathedral during the slaughter in Nanjing. One is composed of teenage convent students, the other of jaded prostitutes, but both are forced to entrust their fates to a drunken and avaricious American drifter, played by Mr. Bale, who has also washed up there.
The Nanjing Massacre, also called “the Rape of Nanjing,” is one of the most searing tragedies in China’s turbulent modern history. But the Communist Party has always managed and controlled its depiction carefully, to reflect current objectives domestically and in China’s relations with Japan, where the bloodbath is sometimes still minimized.
China’s official line was on display when “The Flowers of War” had its Beijing premiere, with Mr. Zhang and Mr. Bale attending, in the imposing government building that houses the People’s Political Consultative Conference. In a ceremony after the film ended, some cast members chanted, “Chinese soldiers!” as they brandished fake rifles.
But Mr. Zhang has also sought to diverge from that orthodoxy in the film. He depicts an officer of the Chinese Nationalist Army — bitter enemies of the Communists — as a self-sacrificing patriot and, in a scene he said was inspired by Roman Polanski’s “Pianist,” shows the human, cultured side of a Japanese officer who prevents his troops from pillaging the church and then listens appreciatively as the convent girls sing.
He also presents a favorable portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church and its faithful; Mao Zedong broke diplomatic relations with the Vatican 60 years ago, and contacts remain limited and tense. In addition he gives prominence to the humanitarian role played by the 22 foreigners, mostly missionaries and business people, who stayed behind in Nanjing, an aspect of the massacre that Communist Party propaganda has traditionally preferred to gloss over.
“I wanted to be truthful to history,” said Mr. Zhang, whose own father was a Chinese Nationalist Army officer. “With this kind of subject the government already has its own perspective and set of rules. It’s very sensitive and really hard to make, which is why most directors don’t want to address this, and why the number of projects based on the Nanjing massacre is far less than those in the West about the Holocaust.”
The attack on Mr. Bale, whose character, John Miller, is an American undertaker pretending to be a priest, is already focusing attention on “The Flowers of War” that it would not have gained otherwise. But much of the publicity is negative, which could swamp both Mr. Zhang’s artistic goals and the Chinese government’s larger, long-term political objectives.
“Few foreign people watch Chinese films,” Zhang Weiping, the film’s main producer, recently told the Chinese press. “Now our government attaches great importance to the film and culture industry. If we can work with Hollywood and continue the win-win cooperation, it is of great importance to us to promote Chinese film and Chinese culture to the outside world.”
The novel that inspired Zhang Yimou was written by Yan Geling, a Chinese-born and American-educated writer whose mother was evacuated from Nanjing as a small child. Reading diaries and other firsthand accounts of the massacre, she came across brief references to prostitutes who offered themselves to the Japanese as substitutes for other women, which gave her both the kernel of her story and a license to fictionalize.
“Women are the ultimate victims of war, and these women sacrificed their bodies for the tender lives of others,” Ms. Yan, a 53-year-old former People’s Liberation Army officer, said in a telephone interview from Beijing. “I wrote for all of us to remember together. Even though Westerners helped so much at the time, the historical event itself has become very vague in the West, and some people are completely ignorant of it. So that made me more aware that the story has to be told.”
Mr. Zhang, with three previous Oscar nominations, has always worked with Chinese themes and actors. So when it came to casting the John Miller role, he consulted with David Linde and Bill Kong, a pair of producers who had worked with him on some of his previous films, and other Hollywood veterans.
“I’m pretty good friends with Steven Spielberg, and when I showed him the script, I asked him for suggestions on what kind of actors he thought I should be getting,” Mr. Zhang recalled. “I did want to get an actor famous in the West, because I want this film to be globalized and reach a lot of audiences. They all said one thing: You don’t need a big star, but you need a really good actor, and Christian is both.”
The character of John Miller, which does not exist in the novel, is largely a cipher. That forced Mr. Bale, who starred in Mr. Spielberg’s Chinese-themed “Empire of the Sun” early in his career, to invent a past for him — that of an opportunistic refugee from the Dust Bowl who, with exquisite bad timing, has turned up in Nanjing after escapades in Shanghai — and to help write his dialogue.
“This was not his war, not his business, and he has no personal connection to it,” Mr. Bale said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles just before leaving for China for the premiere. “It was just something to be told as a story in a bar some day, over a few beers. But then, against all his desires, he comes to find that he just can’t live with himself to desert these people, knowing he’s their only chance. That’s what I started to find intriguing: This most unlikely of characters placed in that position.”
Even before he was attacked in a small village eight hours from Beijing, Mr. Bale had been made aware that making and promoting a film in China is an experience different from the process in other places. He noted, for example, that cast and crew worked seven days a week “because they don’t have unions over there.”
But other cultural gaps were less ominous. Mr. Bale said he was baffled by the sepulchral silence on the set the day he arrived, which his Chinese colleagues apparently thought was a Western custom, and never fully adjusted to expectations that he, as the “senior actor,” should offer acting tips to junior members of the cast.
“That was hilarious” as an example of cross-cultural misunderstanding, Mr. Bale said. “When they explained it to me, I stood with mouth agape, because it’s the absolute antithesis of anything that would be acceptable on a U.S. set. For me it would clearly be gross arrogance to suggest to another actor how to do a scene, so it was fascinating to be considered rude because I was not consulting with other actors.”