Directing with wolves

French director Jean Jacques Annaud attends a press conference to promote his new movie Wolf Totem in Beijing. Photo provided to China Daily

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Filming started in July 2012, when the grass in Inner Mongolia's Wu La Gai area was green. Over the following 18 months the team experienced all kinds of extreme weather in the grassland. In winter the temperature fell to 30 C, while in summer everybody wore masks to keep the thousands of mosquitoes away.

"I should have made a Mosquitoes Totem," jokes Annaud.

Although well trained, the wolves are still dangerous animals, so the crew built small zoos to keep them inside fences and electronic nets. The crew spent six weeks to film a sixminute opening scene of wolves fighting with horses.

Annaud also reveals that the team, including him, once had to walk 8 to 10 kilometers to set up the cameras every day.

"If we shot on land we could only see grass," he says, "but if you want to have a view of the grassland and the landscape, you have to climb the mountain. We cannot go by car, because that would ruin the grass".

Filming wrapped in December. The fourmonth postproduction has finished, too. Coproducer Wang Weimin says he took the film to the Berlin Film Festival in February this year and sold the copyright to "more than half the European countries", including some countries that do not traditionally buy Chinese films, such as Switzerland. The price for minimum guarantee was $8 million, says Zhang Qiang, executive of China Film Group, one of the investors.

The SinoFrench coproduction, in Chinese with English subtitles, will premiere on Christmas.