"Warlords" a departure for Hong Kong filmmaker

"This film is pure dramatic entertainment, but it’s the anti-war message that drew me to it," says Chan, 44, smiling.

In the early 1970s, the Hong Kong film "Blood Brothers" told a similar story and though Chan says it was among his favourites as a teen, he denies he is doing a remake.

For Chan, known for low-budget, intimate love stories he calls "feminine" -- "She’s a Woman, He’s a Man" (1994), and "Comrades, Almost A Love Story" (1996), and the musical "Perhaps Love" (2006) -- "Warlords" is a radical departure.

Chan is well into work begun in December that will last into late March. The crew -- including six assistant directors, two units and seven cameras -- topped out at 860 people before the 1,000 PLA extras, now lunching on plain steamed buns.

Calm and happy as he is to be working with such acting talent, including actress Xu Jinglei, Chan doesn’t feel quite right helming this big masculine movie.

"This is a one-shot thing for me. When I see so many people on the set, I think it’s such wastage. If we shot this in Hong Kong we would not need more than 200 crew," Chan says.

"Warlords" is a bold experiment: it is a Chinese film made for Chinese. There are no martial arts, no flying swordsmen, none of the gilt Ming Dynasty trappings of recent big-budget mailand movies. It is not tailored to match the Western image of what a Chinese war movie should look like.

To conjure a film about peasants fighting peasants, Chan read about trench warfare in Afghanistan. ("Andy’s beard: it’s like Bin Laden’s!" he says).

Working closely with industry experts gathered by Beijing’s official Film Bureau (read: censors), Chan was able to pass the script he’d worked on with eight different writers over three years - a script portraying a China at war with itself.

"It’s not set for the present, so it makes it a little bit less sensitive," says Chan with a laugh. Nowadays, he counts Film Bureau officials as "friends, not bureaucrats," who "really help you navigate the tough waters," with the notoriously thin-skinned censors.

While real war rages half a world away, Chan’s is not the only war film coming out of China. When Chan spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, director John Woo was shooting "Battle of the Red Cliffs," an hour away, and Feng Xiaogang was shooting "The Assembly" in Northeast China. All are due for year-end premieres.

Chan wants to show war’s grit and says he was inspired by "Paths of Glory," Kubrick’s WWI classic, and by the verbal violence of "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," last year’s Cannes-winner from Ken Loach.

"The way Chinese write history is so out of touch with reality. Maybe because of Confucian teaching, we believe that people should be noble, so we hide anything that is real," Chan says. "It’s a tradition of Chinese movies, dramas, operas and literature. We tend to sweep everything under the couch and show what we want."

Chan says he and long-time producer-partner Andre Morgan are talking to buyers, but won’t sell "Warlords" until the Cannes Film Festival in May, when they plan to show at least 20 minutes of footage.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter