BEIJING (AP) – French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who fell out of favor in China after portraying Chinese troops invading Tibet, said he had “incredible freedom” to turn best-selling novel “Wolf Totem” into a movie at the invitation of Chinese producers.
Annaud said he did not yield to censors’ requests to alter scenes but made the film as he wanted to in China, where movies need approval from government regulators.
“I think being your own censor is very bad, so I did the screenplay very freely,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Set in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” tells the semi-autobiographical story of a student sent from the city to the Inner Mongolian steppes for re-education. He lives with the nomads, develops a respect for freedom and nature and becomes fascinated with the wolves. But then a government official orders all the wolves in the area to be killed.
Many were surprised the book “Wolf Totem” was approved by the censors because it was seen by some as a critique of Communist rule. The author, whose pen name was Jiang Rong, was eventually revealed to be Lu Jiamin, a veteran activist who narrowly escaped a death sentence during the Cultural Revolution and later served prison time for taking part in the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which were brutally stopped by the military.