When news broke several years ago that filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang was considering adapting the novella The Warrior and the Wolf, the general reaction was one of disbelief. Written by the late Japanese novelist Yashushi Inoue, the book's content seems at odds with the gritty realist fare that established the Beijing-born Tian as one of the mainland's most audacious filmmakers.
Set during the Han dynasty amid the wilderness of what is now Xinjiang province, the novel revolves around a soldier's transformation into a wolf resulting from his carnal relationship with a tribeswoman.
The story is a far cry from Tian's previous work. This is, after all, the director who made The Blue Kite (1993), a historical epic that charts the life of a young man caught in the political upheaval of the mainland during the 1950s or 60s, and The Go Master (2006), a drama about the mainland-born, Tokyo-based Go player Wu Qingyuan. But the film offers even more surprises to those familiar with the director's oeuvre: there are massive battle scenes, a wealth of computer-generated imagery, and revealing sex scenes involving the protagonists, played by Joe Odagiri and Maggie Q.
'But it's all about making an issue out of the story,' says Tian, who was in the city last week to attend The Warrior and the Wolf's screening at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. 'It's just like when light hits a mirror. Suppose the mirror is the source material; what's reflected is filtered through the artist's own experience.'
What piqued Tian's interest was the rite of passage undertaken by the film's leading character, Lu Chenkang (Odagiri). Originally a meek shepherd, the young man is drafted into the army by battle-hardened general Zhang Anliang (Tou Chung-hua) and becomes a killing machine as his lieutenant. When Zhang is carted home after suffering a humiliating defeat, Lu takes over and leads his troops into a village where he rapes and then falls for an unnamed woman (Maggie Q). Lu then undergoes his second transformation, turning into a wolf and ending up, several years later, in a showdown with his mentor.
Tian says he's intrigued by Inoue's ambivalent attitude towards wolves and human beings. 'Wolves are just creatures from nature - and it's human beings who decide what they stand for,' he says. 'So we have all these Chinese proverbs that revolve around the evilness of wolves - which then provides a rationale for men to annihilate them. To me, however, whatever exists in a place from the very beginning deserves the utmost respect - and in the wilderness in the story, it's the wolves who have been there long before humans.'
Looking at the 57-year-old filmmaker's life story, it's easy to understand his pessimistic view of the destruction that human beings are capable of. Tian's parents were actors who chaired official film studios after 1949, but he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and exiled to the rural backwaters of Jilin province.