SHOWBIZ> Movies
|
SHOWBIZ> Movies
|
|
The human touch
By Liu Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-14 09:29
As the actors began to live and breathe their roles, the off-screen relationships between the Chinese and Japanese actors changed. The two groups hardly talked with each other during the eight months of shooting. There was even a fight after one Japanese actor accused a Chinese film extra of not devoting himself to the work. "I can feel how estranged the two peoples are," Lu says. The director believes there are three ways to solve China-Japanese relationship problems. "First, we destroy Japan. Second, Japan destroys us," he says. "Or the third way is we try really hard to understand each other. "I think we should choose the third way. "The Japanese should apologize for the massacre, and Chinese should reflect on why we lost and whom we lost to." Renowned humanitarians, such as John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, who set up a safety zone in Nanjing and sheltered about 200,000 Chinese, were given an "appropriate proportion" in the film, Lu says. Their frantic protection of Chinese people and great pain of witnessing the atrocities are fully displayed, but in Lu's film, the two sides in war were the focus. "I respect Rabe and other Westerners who helped us a lot, but this war in my understanding is not about how a Westerner saves hundreds of thousands Chinese," he says. "It is at first about Chinese and Japanese. The primary thing for both of us is to face the history and learn from it." |
