Red Cliff, by Hong Kong director John Woo, includes perhaps the biggest scenes in the history of Chinese-language cinema. The movie included 200,000 different acting parts in the role of soldiers. Filming took eight whole months and featured warfare stratagems made famous in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, such as the eight-trigram battle array, the use of straw boats to capture the enemy's arrows, and the attack of the burning boats. But pleasurable though the movie may have been for audiences, it is doubtful that moviegoers could ever guess at the hardships undergone in the filming. The success of all the difficult fighting scenes depended completely on Zhang Jinzhan.

A graduate of Beijing Broadcasting Institute, the 56-year-old Zhang is a physically large man, free of affectation but full of personality, friendly yet imposing.

56-year-old Zhang Jinzhan is in great demand among filmmakers in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan for the direction of large-scale movie scenes. Practically all battle scenes involving hundreds of warriors are directed by Zhang.

Even the horses obey

In the eight-trigram battle array of Zhuge Liang, soldiers dressed in heavy armor draw into a circle to fend off the attacking forces of General Cao. The scene was filmed during summer in scorching 40-degree heat. Among the thousand extras employed for the shoot, many came down with heatstroke, while others suffered from unbearable itching. Before shooting a scene, Zhang would always give a stern pep talk: "Director Woo is very picky about his scenes. Anyone who messes this up is responsible for the whole scene!" Despite the gruff words, however, Zhang was actually very attentive to the needs of his actors, and tried everything he could to ease the discomfort of the heavily clad warriors baking in the summer sun. "The shields concealed the soldiers all the way up to the top of their necks. Nothing from the neck down was going to be visible to the camera." So he gave an order to allow the soldiers to take off their armor from the waist down so they wouldn't be so hot.

Unpredictable weather was another problem, for a storm could blow up at a moment's notice. Once, after a huge effort to get everything set out for a shoot, a sudden telephone call came in to warn that storm clouds were gathering just three kilometers distant. There was no choice but to postpone the shoot. Zhang gave an emergency order for everyone to head for safety. Once the weather had passed, over a thousand soaking-wet soldiers' outfits had to be set out to dry. On another occasion, a rainstorm blew up too fast for them to react. A flash flood swept away a castle wall on the set, injuring crew members and forcing the team to work frantically to rebuild the set so they could get back to filming.

Odd as it may seem, Zhang is able to command not just actors and crew, but even the horses.

Filming a horse falling down, says Zhang, takes some skill. "The horse's feet are tied up with a wire held in hand by the rider, and as soon as he pulls the wire, the horse will fall down. But horses are smart. They'll fall twice at most, then the third time you try it, they don't fall down anymore, so you have to switch to another horse."

The horse trainers had to get started three months ahead of time, and train them to the point where hundreds of the animals, upon hearing the command, "To your positions," would all start stamping their feet in anticipation, knowing what the next command would be: "Charge!"

General on the set

There is an unwritten rule in the film industry: Once you've worked with a particular director, you're basically a part of that director's "team," and you're not likely to ever work with any other director.

"But it's extremely rare for so many big-name directors to all come knocking at your door," says Zhang. "That's not to say that I am especially talented or anything. It just shows how important the job is that I do."

So how did he get so good at what he does?

In 1969, at the age of 16, Zhang and thousands of other youths from Beijing jumped on a train and rode for four days to Kunming, where they switched to minibuses bound for the border area of Xishuangbanna. Once there, they reported to the Yunnan military production corps for their Cultural Revolutionary duties. While in Yunnan, Zhang got to know Chen Kaige and Zhong Acheng, both of whom would one day become notable cultural luminaries.

The Yunnan Province theatrical troupe just happened to check in with the production corps to recruit performers, and Zhang was selected. This "fluke of history" enabled him to acquire a grounding in the fundamentals of the performing arts. He acted, wrote scripts, and on two occasions even went to the front lines as a military journalist to report on the war between China and Vietnam. The experience inspired him to write a play called Jun Hun ("spirit of the military"), which he later made into an award-winning television drama.

It was the first time for him to film his own television drama, and there was much to learn. The People's Liberation Army lent 5,000 troops to act as extras, and Zhang had them arrayed on four hilltops, ready to charge into battle. But the first time he picked up his bullhorn and shouted out commands, the soldiers just ignored him.

An assistant division commander came to his aid: "Director Zhang, you step back and let me do it for you." One command from the old pro was all it took. The commander's power and precision, and the way he modulated his voice for maximum authority, were not lost on Zhang. "Are you fully confident giving orders to thousands? Are you able to force them to come to attention and be so attentive to you that you could hear a pin drop? That's what's needed in my job. You've got to be like a general who knows both how to lead, and how to look after the needs of his troops."

Gun-toting director

Chen Kaige was filming Life on a String in 1990 when he ran into his old friend Zhang and asked him to help out with a scene in which hundreds of people are attending an opera in the evening. Zhang pulled it off with aplomb, and went on to do an even more scintillating job on another scene involving an armed melee between village residents.

Despite his civilian status, Zhang had no problem establishing his authority with the soldiers assigned to work as extras, because he carried an infantry rifle around with him.

He explains that he used artful camera angles to make the fighting look realistic, but from time to time an actor would accidentally hit another guy really hard and the two sides would end up getting in real fights. With the opposing sides facing off two meters apart from each other, commands given through a bullhorn would have gotten carried away by every gust of wind, causing the two sides to get out of synch. So he dispensed with the bullhorn and gave his commands by firing into the air, which made him all the more authoritative.

The filming of Hero involved many scenes in which marquee performers Jet Li, Tony Leung, and Maggie Cheung fight with hundreds fighting around them as a backdrop. Tony Ching Siu-tung, the Hong Kong action director in charge of the fight scenes, came to the job as a heavyweight director in his own right, and there were overtones of rivalry between him and Zhang, with whom he had never worked before.

One day the schedule called for Li, Cheung, and Leung all to fight in a big pavilion, with 800 soldiers brawling all around them. Zhang suggested that they first do a dry run, and when he boomed out his orders, the power of his presence brought the entire cast to subdued attention. At a signal, 800 soldiers and the leading actors roared into furious action, chaotic yet orderly at the same time. Ching was in awe of Zhang's abilities, and later enthused to the director Zhang Yimou: "This kind of guy must be hired, no matter what the cost!"

Double duty

It is not unusual for a big-name actor to accept two jobs at the same time, and be required to run back and forth between two different shooting locations. The same thing has happened to Zhang, as well.

In November 2006, while Zhang was in Hebei Province filming The Warlords, Ang Lee was in Shanghai making Lust, Caution and insisting on getting Zhang to handle the big scenes. The two sides came to an agreement whereby Zhang would be allowed to work both films simultaneously.

Every single day, Zhang would get up at 5 a.m. in Hebei, where he worked on The Warlords until 5 p.m. before jumping in a car and rushing three hours to Capital Airport in Beijing to catch the last flight for Shanghai. The film crew there would meet him at the airport and whisk him to the studio, arriving at 3 a.m. After wolfing down a bowl of noodles, he would proceed to location and film until 5 p.m., then rush back to the airport to catch the last flight for Beijing, where he would arrive at 1 a.m. Zhang kept up the routine for a week, sleeping only in planes and cars.

Zhang recalls that Ang Lee was very demanding about how a street scene should be filmed. In a 600-person scene, for example, he would not allow extras to simply walk around in any which way. Instead, each person had to have a specific identity, and be out and about for a specific purpose.

"People on the street are all different, of course. They've got different jobs and lives. They each have their own way of walking," says Zhang. Is this person headed to work? Or is he out shopping, or on the way to a movie? Or maybe he's going to visit a friend in the hospital? Why is his friend in the hospital?

A person just out for a stroll will have a relaxed demeanor, while someone dealing with an urgent matter will look tense. "If everybody is walking around with the exact same expression, moving at the exact same pace, viewers can tell immediately that they're not acting natural, which detracts from the movie."

Going global

Because of his outstanding abilities, Zhang's services have been specifically requested by 10 directors of Western cinema for filming on location in China. Quentin Tarantino hired him to work on Kill Bill, for example, and Zhang has also worked on The Kite Runner and Mao's Last Dancer.

Asked about his view of Chinese-language cinema, Zhang notes that Hong Kong movies used to be made strictly with an eye to the box office. They were very poorly done, and the Hong Kong movie industry began to decline, but since filming The Warlords he has come to feel that Hong Kong filmmakers have begun to pay more attention to artistic merit.

"In fact, it's China where people have begun to lose their bearings and act like entertainment is the sum total of the market. It's like in a sports contest, where the team that was on offense switches to defense, and vice-versa." But cinema is without borders, says Zhang. He feels that the main trend in Chinese-language cinema has not changed, and that there is a lot of opportunity for technical specialists to display their abilities. In his view, Chinese-language cinema will always be an important presence in the global film industry.