BERTOLUCCI SETTING THE SCENES FOR A CHINA EPIC

Award-winning Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has taken on his most ambitious project--a $20-million film about China’s last emperor who was born into decadent luxury and died a humble gardener.

It is Bertolucci’s first film in Asia and is, he says, the first time China has allowed a Western director to make a movie about its modern history.

“This movie is difficult for me, about a culture I don’t know. Western concepts are inappropriate here. I must read, study and speak with people,” he said, as he walked around locations in Peking’s former Imperial Palace.

He decided to make the film after reading an autobiography of the emperor, Henry Pu Yi, in 1984.

Foreign film makers have shot a handful of movies in China since 1979, including “Marco Polo” and a dramatization of James Clavell’s best-selling novel “Taipan.”

The 20 weeks of shooting on Bertolucci’s epic are due to begin in June in former palaces and homes of Pu Yi in five Chinese cities and in studios in Peking and Rome.

The infant Pu Yi became emperor of the decaying Manchu dynasty in 1908, only to be overthrown in 1911, when the Chinese Republic was founded.

In 1934, the Japanese made him “emperor” of Manchukuo, the puppet state they created in occupied northeast China. As the Japanese empire crumbled in 1945, Pu Yi was captured by advancing Soviet troops, imprisoned in the Soviet Union and handed over to the Chinese in 1950.

He spent nine years in prison in China, and later worked as a gardener in Peking’s Botanical Gardens. He died in 1967.

Bertolucci and two associates wrote the screenplay from Pu’s official autobiography “From Emperor to Citizen,” assisted by the former emperor’s 78-year-old brother, and had it approved by China’s Culture Ministry.

“The ministry made no substantive changes. Things are changing in China. There is now room for movies that are not propaganda,” Bertolucci said.

“It is a fascinating story. Other countries killed their emperors. But in China he was allowed to live, even after collaborating with the Japanese, his biggest mistake.

“Pu Yi was re-educated and forced to think of his past as he had never done before. He became better,” he added.

The logistics of the project are formidable.

China will permit shooting on the grounds of the former Imperial palaces but not inside them. “They are fearful of fire or damage. I am disappointed but it is understandable,” Bertolucci said.

This means construction of expensive and complicated interiors at studios in Peking and Rome.

The script calls for 9,000 costumes, which are being bought, borrowed or made.

“They should not look too new, as they do in traditional Peking opera. They should look like clothes, not costumes,” the director said.