What was it like, as a Chinese person, confronting Japanese veterans directly about this subject?
Actually, in the end I only met two Japanese soldiers. Most of them weren’t interested in meeting me, and neither were their relatives. With the two soldiers I met, it was just a short encounter, we didn’t have any deep conversation. They just said hello and talked about the weather–if I mentioned 1937, they closed their eyes and didn’t answer. But it did help me get a physical impression of them; in particular, I saw that they weren’t very tall. And then I read more than two hundred letters between Japanese soldiers and their relatives, and several diaries, and I collected more than forty thousand private photographs. Back then, Japan was a comparatively rich country, so many Japanese soldiers from different ranks carried cameras with them into Nanking. Those images helped me a lot.

Getting permission to make the movie took a long time. What was that process like?
I delivered my script to the Chinese Film Bureau–it was a very long script, and nobody really had the time to read it all the way through. So I visited the office again and again to talk with the people there and explain the true spirit of the script. It took six months, and finally they gave me a license. Basically, I told them I wasn’t going to make a movie that would stir up trouble and make people hate Japanese people; I would just make a movie about the truth of human nature and history.