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NJ: I get the sense that your decision-making was affected by your nervousness about the drift of the film's direction.

AL: That's often been the case for me. If I'm doing a standard genre film, I always think there are people who know the form better - not least my producer and some of the audience. And then the film begins to seem like a work I have to deliver; it makes me feel like a craftsman. There's nothing wrong with that - you can produce great art from craftsmanship and I'm an avid film learner: I feel I want to be forever a film student, that people are paying me to learn how to make movies. But if I touch a certain genre then I have to exercise it further otherwise I feel uneasy - not only am I not doing my best, but I'm conforming somehow.

NJ: For the Chinese this period was a time of atrocity and destruction, but for the west it's imbued with exotic appeal. The film looks beautiful and seductive and you seem to play those two ideas against each other.

AL: For the west Shanghai was sin city, an eastern Casablanca. So I did have that sense. And inevitably when you put qipao [cheongsams] inside the film, the modern style of qipao - shorter, with short sleeves - and then you put a western hat on her and a trenchcoat over her, it's got to be exotic, even for the Chinese. With qipao you have to walk in small steps and in a trenchcoat you want to swagger, so how do you manage that combination? But I didn't play that up fully because I didn't want the style to take over.

NJ: There are also aspects of the espionage movie.

AL: There's a mix. There's a level of playing, which is lust - including sex - and then there's psychology underneath. And the Mahjong scenes are like a war movie played out on a Mahjong table. But when people say it's an espionage thriller it makes me nervous. The plot isn't as tight as it should be for pure espionage and all the psychology means everything is prolonged. So if you tell a British audience Lust, Caution belongs to the espionage genre you might arouse expectations that the film doesn't fulfil.

NJ: The film seems to depict a surface that barely conceals what's going on, so the texture has to be simultaneously superficial and deep.

AL: Cinema has certain forms you have to borrow from, and one of these is genre. I looked at film noir but instead of a lot of shadow I used depth of focus and colour, trying to find a new way to do it. The other genre I drew on was the patriotic melodramas I grew up with. The old-fashioned, romantic films noirs in which you are lost in the mystery - films like Laura (1944) or Notorious (1946) - have elements of both. And the characters in Lust, Caution emulate that: whether in staging a patriotic play that gets people really worked up or when Wong Chia Chi goes to see Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to pick up their attitude and copy them. I prefer the romantic, over-the-top noirs to the films of the later 1940s, after Hitchcock, which get meaner and meaner and lose that lavish emotion.

NJ: We've never seen anything as explicit from you before. Does that also come out of your midlife crisis?
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AL: It's more a post-midlife crisis. My real crisis was during the five years of making
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
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(2000) and
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The Hulk
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(2003). Throughout
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The Hulk
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I was sort of collapsed: I finally had to admit I'm not that young anymore, and lust was one of the things I had to face up to by not being too repressed or shy to deal with it.
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After a midlife crisis you have to choose what's most important. And facing it was like hell. It went against my superficial nature to deal with deeper, subconscious desires, though I think it was very valuable, very eastern in a way. The psychology of sex comes from a western approach, but 'lust' in Chinese means not just lust for sex but lust for life and also colour. It's a projection of your own desire, of your own point of view, your motivation. But you have to be careful, because any passion - sex, or a lust for being good, such as patriotism - will make fools of us. Caution, however, is rational. So the title
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Lust, Caution
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is in the same realm as
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Sense and Sensibility
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- and
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Se, jie
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is also the symbol of the ring, the diamond ring, the boundaries of love.
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