Behind the battlelines of epic movie Red Cliff

Tony Leung as Zhou Yu in Red Cliff. Photo / Supplied

When John Woo headed to America after the international success of his high-octane movies - 1990's Bullet in the Head and 1992's Hard Boiled - the formidable Hong Kong director breathed a gust of fresh air into Hollywood action flicks.

Broken Arrow, starring John Travolta; Face/Off, with Travolta and Nicolas Cage; and Mission Impossible II with Tom Cruise, all proved to be huge hits.

Then somehow he went into a decline. His subsequent films, Windtalkers, The Hostage and Paycheck failed to ignite the box office and just weren't as good.

Clearly needing a new direction, he headed back to Asia to make the biggest-budget Chinese film ever, Red Cliff.

"It was my dream project," admits Woo, now 62. "I'd been wanting to make this film for over 18 years. I'd read the book when I was a child so I knew all the characters and I loved the challenge of making the story feel new. This movie is so complicated, so big, but I always thought I could make it, especially since I'd learnt so much from making movies in Hollywood. I never say anything is impossible."

A David and Goliath tale of The Lord of the Rings complexity, Woo's film tells of Asia's most famous battle, the Battle of Red Cliff, which took place in 208AD and involved enormous armies.

The story surrounding the battle was popularised by The Romance of The Three Kingdoms, a book written 700 years ago which has spawned countless movie interpretations (Andy Lau's Three Kingdoms being the latest), television dramas, novels and even video games.

In the romanticised book the character of Zhuge Liang, a wise sage with mythical powers, had emerged as the hero, but Woo wanted to stick to history and to give credit where it was due. That is, to Viceroy Zhou Yu (the Samson of the story, played by Tony Leung) who with the help of Zhuge (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a clever young military strategist, went into battle against Prime Minister-cum-General Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi from Farewell, My Concubine) and his army of 800,000 soldiers.

Cao Cao not only wanted the opposing kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south to be subdued, he ultimately wanted to wipe out all the kingdoms and to install himself as the emperor of a unified China. He also wanted Zhou Yu's wife, Xiao Qiao (Taiwanese model Chiling Lin), said to be the most beautiful woman in China.

Basically there's something for everyone here, even if the action is of prime importance. Woo, never known for his subtlety, couldn't resist including a fictitious scence from the book featuring a military manoeuvre orchestrated by Zhuge, where straw boats come towards Cao Cao's 2000 enemy ships which fire off hundreds of arrows, much needed by Zhou's far smaller army.

He couldn't resist inserting his own trademarks - doing another Asian-style face-off - either.

"There's a lovely moment in the film where instead of two guns, I'm using two swords. So you see Zhou Yu and Cao Cao using their two swords like two guns," he laughs. "I didn't change. I maintain my own stamp with the Chinese and American films."

He says he had a good experience working in China. "I think the Chinese people now have the ability to make huge movies like Gladiator, Alexander and Troy, but the difference with our film is there's a message of peace as well. I actually think there were more pigeons here than in my previous films, because they're used as part of the key message. I greatly appreciated the Government support with finding good locations and the soldiers - we had between 700 to 1500 soldiers on set.

"Also, it had been a long time since I'd worked with Tony, a beautiful actor.

"So it felt like a homecoming."

The casting, which was of vital importance, had become a major production of its own when Chow Yun-fat, who had risen to fame via Woo's movies - (A Better Tomorrow, 1986; A Better Tomorrow 2, 1989, aka The Killer; and Hard Boiled, 1992) - left the film.

"We'd been looking for an opportunity to work together again for 10 years, and a lot of the fans wanted it too," Woo explains. "But because of the contract we weren't able to agree on a price, so we were unable to do it this time. If he had done the movie the character would have been more positive; after he left I redesigned Zhuge to make him more in keeping with the history books, which say he was a deep thinker, emotional and artistic."

Enter Leung, arguably the most emotionally engaging of all Asian actors following his intense work with Wong Kar-wai.

Tired of playing nice guys, he had earlier turned down the Zhuge role, though gladly replaced Chow as the romantic action man Zhou. Leung had already worked with Woo on Bullet in the Head and alongside Chow in Hard Boiled.

He also knew it was not going to be easy.

"Red Cliff is an epic and was tough to make," the 46-year-old admits. "At first it was very hot, 40 degrees celsius, and we had to wear winter costumes and [9kg] of armour as the battle happened in winter. I lost a lot of weight. Then it turned to winter for real and became very cold. The film took so long to shoot partly because it was so involved and the set was always crowded. We'd do one take and wait forever to do another as there were so many people in the background of each shot."

Pop star-heart throb Kaneshiru, a versatile bilingual actor of Taiwanese-Japanese parentage, looks younger than his 35 years and was more appropriate to play 27-year-old Zhuge, Woo says. Leung and Kaneshiru cast a handsome screen presence and Woo made the most of having two of Asia's sexiest stars on screen at once - not least when they have a jam session on ancient string intruments, and they both enjoy numerous dreamy close-ups.

The actors had both appeared together in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Zhang Yimou's Hero, though in different scenes.

"We'd really only worked together when we played two cops in Andy Lau's 2006 Hong Kong action movie, Confession of Pain," Leung explains. "I admired Kateshi very much as an actor and when John couldn't find someone to play the bad guy, I decided to take that role and I asked Kateshi to play the good guy."

The reshuffling of the cast was only one of the many dramas that beset the production, which took three years of preparation and one year of pre-production. Most tragically, during the film's fiery final battle several stuntmen were burned and one was was killed.

"When we set the fire supposedly against the wind, all of a sudden the wind turned and it blew the flame into our stuntman," Woo recalls. "It was very, very sad."

So massive and detailed was the production that it had to be split into two movies for Asian markets. When it came to the English-language version, it was deemed that foreign audiences didn't need all the character detail, as we don't know the real historical figures. So the film was edited down into an action story, far too much so, say critics who saw the original version complete with the characters' motivations.

To show the human side of the much-loved characters had long been a key part of Lee's motivation to make the film. New technologies would help him realise his grand vision and he was excited it would finally happen. The film took eight months to shoot, and went US$20 million over budget, at US$80 million ($108 million) .

"I had a passion about this movie," the famously calm director explains, becoming unusually animated. "I didn't care how much it cost; there were so many interesting elements and I had to fit them all in. When we went way over budget I didn't talk to the investors, I didn't talk to anyone. I just gave my money." (A few million dollars, he ultimately says, though the film has more than made back its money, so he will be reimbursed.) As for the five-hour version, he hopes Western audiences will see it one day.

"In Japan it worked extremely well and so many people want to see it.

"It had a lot more story, a lot more emotion. It takes a little patience to watch a long movie but I think audiences are more satisfied."

Who: John Woo, Chinese action director
What: Red Cliff, his 208AD battle epic
When and where: Opens at cinemas today