By Lisa Johnson, IFA Hollywood Reporter

It's a golden rainbow, China as you've never seen it before, lavish, glittering, decadent, sanguine. It is also Zhang Yimou's most opulent film to date. That's quite the statement, because the master director is the force behind seminal films such as Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers.

In Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou teams up once again with the mercurially talented Gong Li, (whom he used to date) as well as Chou Yun Fat, to tell a melodramatic story of a dysfunctional imperial family, and all the secrets and sorrows hidden behind its luxurious splendor. Yes, it includes ethereal action that many have come to associate with modern Chinese films - martial arts, sword fights, massive battles, gory bloodshed. But, according to Yimou, "action is only a means to tell the story. It is a conduit through which relationships are revealed and conflicts are resolved."

Through an interpreter, Zhang Yimou revealed other fascinating facts about his most recent work, which opens nationwide at the end of the year.

IFA: Like Martin Scorsese did by basing The Departed on Infernal Affairs, another Asian film, you also based The Curse of the Golden Flower on a work set in another place and time, correct?

Yimou: This is actually based on a play that was popular between the 20's and 30's, a play called Thunderstorm which is a major work, and basically the story of a family suffering under the depression of feudalism. What I wanted to do was take that story and transplant it to the Tang Dynasty. The original story has a very realistic background - it is very much rooted in the reality of everyday life in China during that period. As soon as you move it to the Tang Dynasty, it immediately takes on this rather fantastic kind of aura, and it's something quite different from the original.

IFA: Did basing it on a dynasty that occurred over 1,000 years ago give you more freedom to use your imagination?

Yimou: I wanted to make sure that it was still rooted in the reality of the Tang Dynasty and culture, because the Tang Dynasty carries so many particular connotations for most Chinese viewers. As soon as they see the Tang Dynasty, they start thinking of the poetry and the architecture and there's a whole array of cultural symbols that are associated with the Tang. I didn't want to go against that. So we did a massive amount of research to find out what people wore, the architecture, everything about the Tang Dynasty, and we tried to be as loyal to that as possible, so I would say about 70 percent of the film is based on the actual artistic vision of Tang China, and what we have seen there through various paintings and homes and such. And I had maybe 30 percent to play with my imagination a little. But we knew the Chinese audience would come in with preconceptions about what the Tang is, and we didn't want to let them down.

IFA: We see a very different female aesthetic in this film - Chinese women who look and act like very sexual beings. Is that true to the Tang Dynasty, or is it a sign of the current Chinese culture becoming a bit more liberal?

Yimou: It is authentic to the Tang Dynasty. The aesthetic for women, what was beautiful, was someone who was a little plump and maybe very well endowed, and that was something that we wanted to honor as well - that's something that was represented in all the paintings and the poems.

IFA: We also see more cleavage in this film than we're used to seeing in Chinese cinema. It was that authentic as well?

Yimou: Yes, in fact during that era, if you look at the paintings, that's exactly how women dressed. That was what people looked for in the palace women-they wanted them to have those well- endowed qualities, and those were the types of fashions they wore. And actually, they were even more open than that. So we didn't even go as far as maybe we could have. But the Tang Dynasty is actually looked at as the most open era of Chinese feudal society. It was only after the Tang Dynasty, during the Sung Dynasty, that Chinese society started going down a road that was much more closed and conservative. But the Tang was a period of great openness.

Surprisingly enough, the Chinese government was so supportive of this lavish film that it allowed its massive army to be used in this cast of thousands. In a Western film, the crowd scenes would have been virtually impossible without the use of CGI. "The one resource we do have is a lot of people," Gong Li told IFA when asked about the size of the cast. "We actually borrowed some army units to use as extras. While there are some CGI shots in the film, the people are mostly real."

The result is a very real entertainment experience, for Western as well as Asian audiences. Yimou seems to have mastered the art of merging imagination with reality, while transcending cultural and geographical limitations.

By Lisa Johnson, IFA Hollywood Reporter

Part of the genius of writer/director Matt Tauber’s The Architect was purely accidental. The cast includes red-hot TV stars Anthony LaPaglia (Without a Trace) and Hayden Panettiere (Heroes). They will doubtless draw in multiple TV fans who have never really noticed independent film.

But playing on his stars’ small screen popularity was the last thing on the director’s mind when he cast them. The whispered household phrase “Save the cheerleader, save the world” had not even been uttered when Tauber cast the talented, young Panettiere.

“I cast both Anthony and Hayden just because they were great actors for the roles,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily my concern to think about how the film would be marketed and why people would come to see it. My concern was in telling the story and finding the right actors – especially the smartest and most prepared and trained actors to do this very rigorous, 21-day shoot.”

Add to the list of prepared and trained actors Viola Davis and Isabella Rossellini, combine them with a fascinating script taken from an award-winning play of the same name, and you have a gem of an independent film, not just limited to the art house audience. It was made available to the general public on DVD a mere four days after it was released in theaters.

The play was set in working-class Glasgow, Scotland, but Tauber moved it to modern-day Chicago. LaPaglia plays idealistic architect Leo Waters, who finally notices that he needs to pay more attention to the inner structure of his family, consisting of his disillusioned wife Julia (Rossellini), his adoring daughter Christina (Panettiere), and his maturing son Martin (Sebastian Stan).

Leo is confronted by Tonya, an activist (Davis), who is staging a campaign to demolish the drug and crime-infested public housing project Leo originally designed and built. She believes she’ll have a much better chance of cleaning up the neighborhood for her family and neighbors if she can just get the project’s architect to sign her demolition petition.

But why would Leo lobby to destroy his own work, even though he’s never visited it since its completion? Leo’s son is drawn to explore the blighted environment, and is surprised and forever marked by what he finds. Meanwhile, Leo’s marriage is crumbling from neglect as well, and he leans perhaps too heavily on his 15-year-old daughter for emotional support. All the while Tonya is working desperately to do right by her own family, which has been tragically affected by the decrepit neighborhood.

Filial, as well as social, racial and sexual relationships are explored with a realistic, not idealistic, poignancy that never veers into the obvious or trite. Clocking in at a brief 81 minutes, the film sustains emotional tension up to the very last frame, and has, what is in my opinion, the perfect ending, or perhaps new beginning. Not since Sideways have I seen a film that ends with such satisfaction and potential.

I’m hoping the mass audiences of Without a Trace and Heroes will follow their stars into the deeper, more subtle world of independent film. Save the cheerleader, save the Indy!