How open are you to those ideas coming from people on your crew or in your cast?  Sometimes we hear directors have a very clear vision and they want it their way and sometimes we hear directors are very democratic and ask for ideas.  Where does your process fit?

Zhang Yimou: I think throughout my cinematic career I've always been a rather democratic director and I'm very open to actors giving me feedback about their roles their lines and even more so about other characters.  If they tell me some line that another character has in the script isn't quite right, I'm always very open to that.  I enjoy this very collaborative form of filmmaking.  Having wants and the dialogs, not just with the actors but with my crew, the cinematographer, with production designers, the art designer.  I think it's through these different prospectives that we really can make progress and really create something very beautiful. Of course, I don't just accept all of these wholeheartedly.  I make my own decisions, whether it works for the film, sometimes I'll have the same conversation with 3 other people and everybody seems to be on the same page we'll go with it, but if its one lone voice and everyone else seems to think the film should go in a different direction, I take that into consideration as well.  I think I'm pretty open to this collaborative type of filmmaking.

There's a quote here about your desire to make a movie about your experiences during the Cultural Revolution.  I'm curious as to what are some of those experiences and can you talk a little bit about the immediate years after Mao when you guys were beginning the 5th generation. Was there fear?  Any trepidation about the subjects you might cover and how difficult was it test some of those movies?

Zhang Yimou: The Cultural Revolution was an extremely important era for me. That basically was my childhood from the years of 16 to 26.  For me those 10 years had an incredible effect on my life. The first 3 years I spent in the countryside with the peasants, the latter 7 years I spent working in a factory.  That was a time where I experienced so many things. I met so many people, and so many stories. Not just my story, but stories that came from other people.  I'd love to tell those stories one day.  That's something I'm waiting for. Unfortunately the climate in China right now is such that it's still not completely open to telling these stories, especially about the Cultural Revolution. There's still a taboo about that. I really hope in the future things will thaw even further and I'll be able to tell a lot of these stories. But for now I'm just waiting for the right time. As for after the Cultural Revolution, when I first went into the Beijing Film Academy. That was an incredible era. That was during Dung Chou Ping's open door policy. Everything seemed possible and everything was just a vibrant time with all kinds of foreign literature, movies, just flooding into the country.  All kinds of native Chinese things that had been banned.  All of a sudden they were back again.  It was a very exciting intellectual time for us.  I remember how excited I was about seeing so many foreign films that we had never seen before. I remember hearing about a certain foreign film that had just come in and they were going to be screening it.  We were just shaking with excitement about the prospect of going in. I remember taking notes when we were watching it and just sucking in everything. I felt like a sponge just talking in everything around me. That was a grand time for us. It was not just a time to learn about cinema but to learn about life.

Many of your films, in fact I think all of them include the relationship between men and women as the central element.  Did you see that as a political relationship?  Is it metaphor for politics?  Is it a way for you to make statements about society in general by focusing on an individual relationship?

Zhang Yimou: I'm not sure how political those relationships are really.  A lot of them are really tragic tales of women who are oppressed and struggling under the shadow of futile society. I think most recent films is another example of that.  It's really that struggle that resistance against the darker aspects of Chinese futile society that I m trying to express.

Thank you.

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