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INTERVIEW-Nanjing Massacre film anti-war, not anti-Japan-makers

04 Jul 2007 10:09:05 GMT
Source: Reuters

BEIJING, July 4 (Reuters) - Far from opening old wounds, "Nanking", a film documenting accounts of war-time atrocities by Japanese troops in China, should help the frosty Asian neighbours overcome historical differences, the filmmakers say.

"Predominantly, this is an anti-war movie, not an anti-Japanese movie," the movie's producer and AOL vice-chairman Ted Leonsis told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday, a day after the film's Beijing premiere.

"My ultimate goal was to make a film that activated a lot of discussion... that these activities happened 70 years ago -- that two great countries and two great people -- they should acknowledge what happened and they should move on together in friendship," Leonsis said in a conference room at a five-star hotel in Beijing.

U.S.-made "Nanking" is one of a clutch of movies about the Nanjing Massacre to be released this year in the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the fall of China's war-time capital to invading Japanese troops on December 13, 1937.

Described as a Schindler's List-style movie about Westerners setting up a safe zone for refugees in the war-torn city, the film weaves grainy images of stacked bodies of infants with tearful accounts of rape and torture committed by Japanese soldiers from Chinese witnesses.

Hollywood actors, including Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, do staged readings of diary entries kept by the Westerners in the safe zone, and retired Japanese troops confess to participating in mass killings.

"I look at this (movie) as a charitable act of love," said Leonsis, who bankrolled the film after drawing inspiration from Iris Chang's book, "Rape of Nanking".

A group of conservative lawmakers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party see "Nanking" differently, and last month denounced it, and the Nanjing Massacre itself, as fabrications.

'APPALLING DENIALS'

"I think it's appalling that there are people in Japan who deny that anything bad happened in Nanjing," said co-director Dan Sturman.

While such people were "on the fringe", Sturman said the production team had encountered an "interesting range of reaction" about the massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, while shooting in Japan.

"It's a very sensitive topic there as it is in China, there's a lot of controversy around it. We were sort of wading in as somewhat naive Americans thinking it was going to be a lot simpler than it ended up being."

In Japan, the film makers had hired "a handful of very experienced, very talented people" who ultimately stopped working on the project, Sturman said.

"They felt uncomfortable being involved."

Sturman, who with "Nanking" co-director Bill Guttentag produced "Twin Towers" -- an Oscar-winning documentary about the Sept. 11 terror attacks -- said the film makers had left out some of the more harrowing images and testimonials for balance.

"Definitely some of the stuff that we encountered was too difficult to process for the average person... Some of the images are absolutely devastating and will never leave me," he said.

Sturman, who sifted through footage of war-time Nanjing from China, Japan, Taiwan and Western countries, said the movie's Western take on a distinctly Asian tragedy was deliberate.

"I went to college. I consider myself decently educated and yet I knew very very little about Nanjing.

"We do believe that by approaching the story through their point of view, we are telling history in a way that will be accessible to a Western audience, that I suspect like me, would not know much about this aspect of history."

The movie steered clear of speculating on death tolls and the scale of the massacre, and stuck to presenting reality from contemporaneous witnesses, Sturman said.

"The fact is, it seems that a lot of the argument and tension between China and Japan relates to the number issue, which doesn't really make sense to me," Sturman said.

China says Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 civilians in Nanjing. An Allied tribunal after World War Two put the death toll at about 142,000. Some Japanese historians say the numbers are exaggerated, estimating as few as 20,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.

"It doesn't matter if it was 50,000 people or 500,000 people. The fact is that something truly tragic happened in Nanjing in 1937," Sturman said.

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Last updated:Wed Jul 4 10:10:32 2007