Lou Ye

With all the talk about how his latest film, Spring Fever, will be received by mainland authorities, Lou Ye seems remarkably unfazed. 'I'm still quite free to be here, aren't I?' he says in Cannes, where the film will be screened in competition as part of the French city's annual film festival.

Or maybe it's going to be deja vu again. Lou was barred from making films for two years after he screened Suzhou River at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000 without clearing the censors; he was then hit with a five-year ban in 2006 when he brought his last film, Summer Palace, to Cannes without getting approval from the authorities.

It's hardly a surprise that Summer Palace gave Lou a rough ride: the film was partly set in Beijing during the pro-democracy summer of 1989.

Spring Fever - a co-production between a French company and the new Hong Kong subsidiary of Lou's Beijing film company - contains vivid sex scenes between its gay protagonists, in a story about two love triangles when a man leaves his wife or girlfriend to be with another man. Even without the ban, Lou would have found it difficult to get official approval for his film as it touches on homosexuality, which remains largely a no-go area for the culturally conservative apparatchiks in Beijing.

How is the underlying creative motive behind Spring Fever different from your previous films? I just want to tell a love story - it's the same as before. This time I want to tell a modern-day story which has some sort of a link with history - just as you can see, the [Chinese] film title takes its name from [a 1923 story by Chinese writer] Yu Dafu. My two previous films have been linked with things past: The Purple Butterfly is set in the 1930s, while Summer Palace is about China in the 1980s.

I wanted to tell a story which, like Yu's, looks at individuals, not just ciphers, such as good and bad people, gay and straight people - the film is not meant to be like that; it's to begin from a more human perspective. And it's about how different human beings conduct their lives in a state of freedom.