I also want to say in the film that resistance meant more than physically fighting; it was also about the Chinese people's unyielding will and spirit, too.

But for various reasons the public knows little about the resistance. I went to a military school before I pursued graduate study at the Beijing Film Academy. Even guys like me who have a military background know little about the Nanjing Massacre, let alone the ordinary people. You ask a child about the Nanjing Massacre, and the answers you get are regurgitated facts like "300,000 people killed" and John Rabe's diary. They can recall nothing else—nothing about the resistance. There are many stories that have been left out by our history textbooks. The audience can find in those resistance stories the unbending spirit that has helped our nation survive to the present day.

We learned that you've put a lot of work into finding out about the backgrounds of each of the people who resisted and are depicted in the film. Can you give examples?

I have too many examples! The Chinese child soldier in the film came from a Japanese soldier's diary. It said the child fired a shot and killed a Japanese soldier. The child was caught and was found to be a small boy who was wearing an army uniform.

The scene of prostitutes sheltered in the international safety zone sacrificing themselves was based on real accounts. It was mentioned in John Rabe's diary, "Today Japanese soldiers came to the refugee camp to ask for prostitutes, and we had to let them take some away." Minnie Vautrin, a farm girl from Illinois who had dedicated herself to the education of Chinese women at Nanjing's Ginling College, wrote in her diary, "Some of the prostitutes stood up voluntarily and they were taken away." I also read in Japanese accounts that one Japanese solider said he wanted a prostitute but one of them went crazy and tried to kill Japanese soldiers with a bayonet.

The best way to demonstrate humanity is under such terrible circumstances. I just present the truth and made none of it up. There's something big and powerful inside the Nanjing story, and it is something that survives in our nation but has been long neglected.

You are trying to let the audience feel that every victim was once so alive and vigorous, that they are not just cold numbers.

"I saw vividly the face of every Chinese one by one," our photographer Cao said to me when he finished reading my initial script. His words accompanied me all through the shooting. The 300,000 victims didn't leave their faces to be memorialized by history. What I want to do is make those faces come back from 70 years ago.

Even the actors playing war prisoners were chosen according to pictures of the victims. It takes an average of three to four hours to pick actors and get the makeup on them.

All the locations we used in the film were required to resemble the real places. The clothing of Japanese invaders is based on their real outfits. A piece of newspaper that John Rabe tore apart in the film was copied from a real issue from December 13, 1937.

How do you look at China's interna-tional friend John Rabe?

I respect him for what he did to help Chinese, but I don't want to show him as a savior. I don't think it's accurate to put the lives of 200,000 refugees on just one man's shoulders. In fact, there were many other foreign helpers, like Minnie Vautrin. My film's purpose is to give a full picture of that period of history, instead of magnifying one person's role.

You are trying to restore the real face of history and the people in it, including Japanese soldiers.

What I see in the Japanese criminals is that they are also ordinary people. In the past people tended to demonize them as men who were out of their minds. That's an excuse for the butchers—once diagnosed as insane or unbalanced, it would be justifiable to label them innocent of the atrocities they committed. So the logic becomes: don't blame the slaughter on people, blame it on the war. That's not the fact.

Reading through 102 publications about Japanese soldiers' diaries or interviews, you'll see much of it concerned trivial daily life. One was about how the soldiers found a can of sugar and made a pot of delicious red bean soup. I'm reminding the Chinese audience that the invaders were ordinary people when they committed these crimes, and that's the most horrible part about war.

My understanding about massacres and wars kept changing and my film is about how the war released from a cage the hidden darkness inside humans, which led to massive killing.

You had a character—a Japanese soldier who released two Chinese and shot himself. This made many in Chinese audiences think you were trying to show Japanese criminals in a positive light.

I paid at least six visits to Japan for the film. I know that most of their war veterans didn't feel guilty. I've found in historical documents that many of them had opposing views on the war, but they had no choice but to commit these killings.

My film is about understanding war rather than hatred and violence. There are actually two kinds of slaughter depicted in the film. One shows the Japanese killing Chinese soldiers and civilians. The other one, which many have overlooked, is the scene in which Japanese soldiers hold ceremonial sacrifices in Nanjing. I think the second one shows the nature of war: an invading culture dancing on the ruins of the invaded. At its core, any war is about the slaughter of a culture and that's what we have to think about.