The movie tells the story of the first emperor of China, Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), who in 320 B.C. decided to end feudalism and unify all the disparate kingdoms into one body, one idea, "one nation under heaven." Like all great emperors, Ying Zheng loved only one woman, Lady Zhao (played by Gong Li, the most beautiful actress in the world). The two grew up together in the kingdom of Zhao, dreaming of fame and fortune. But when Ying Zheng became emperor, power corrupted him; instead of making the world a better place, as he had promised the people and his only true love, he turned it into a realm of blood and death. To end this mfecane (to borrow a Zulu word which means "a time of trouble"), Lady Zhao (Gong Li) hired a great assassin (Zhang Fengyi) to kill the man she once loved.
The bottom line is this: One cannot make a film about Ying Zheng, the King of Qin, without in a way becoming him. A film about a man who was as insane as Zheng -- he not only unified China, but built the Great Wall, ordered that all books written before him be burned, and even tried to build a bridge to the place where the sun set -- cannot be captured in 90 minutes; the film would have to be as huge and mad as the emperor's obsessions. This is why, when I met director Chen Kaige in his hotel room, I was not surprised that he looked like a man who wanted to crawl back in bed. Though his fatigue was probably caused by his busy American schedule, I couldn't help seeing it as a consequence of completing his massive movie.
"It was very difficult to do," he said as he sipped coffee. "I felt very, very tired after finishing this film. There were three major jobs I had to do. One was the historical research. I wanted to make sure everything was real, to capture exactly what the palace looked like at this time. The other job I had was to work with 5,000 soldiers [5,000 soldiers!] every day. It's a tough job. And then filming lasted 28 weeks. When we shot the palace scenes, for instance, you can't imagine how many lights we used; probably 2,000 lights. Because the palace was too big, we needed a lot of light, and it took five days to set the lights before we started shooting. That is why shooting took so long. But it was worth it. I think it is beautiful; everything is beautiful in the film."
In keeping with the film's scope and size, Chen never allows the film to collapse into the ordinary or mundane. At every moment, the dialogue, the movement and placement of the actors, even Gong Li's small gestures, are motivated by poetry rather than plot. Indeed, while watching the movie I often thought of the great Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty, because the dialogue sounded so much like their melancholy poems ("I met you often when you were visiting princes/And when you were playing in noblemen's halls/Spring passes.... Far down the river now, I find you alone under falling petals." -- Tu Fu).
"I wanted everything to be very poetic," Chen said near the end of our talk, "especially the battle sequence. Everyone understands that war is terrible, but [in my film] you see it differently. For example, there is a major difference between the battle scenes in this movie and Saving Private Ryan. In the beginning of Private Ryan, you see how people got killed, you see a lot of blood, but in my movie you don't really see blood. You feel that it is very violent, but you don't really see blood. The whole thing then becomes more poetic. And with the music, it's magnificent; it is poetic."
