The Goose Town, the central setting for the movie, has come to symbolize China for some film buffs with a political leaning. Yet, in our dialogue, Jiang repeatedly uses the location as an outing to the murky world of genre-film making.

One of his achievements in his limited directorial canon is genre busting. His debut feature In the Heat of the Sun has the look and feel of a coming-of-age drama, yet it is not like any of the numerous movies that deal with this subject.

His follow-up is a WWII story, which opened our eyes to three-dimensional portrayals of both Japanese invaders and Chinese living under occupation and their complicated mentality. Then came The Sun Also Rises, which is so bold in its expressive flourishes that people left the theater either dazzled or puzzled.

Ambiguity is a major characteristic. Since two of his four features wax nostalgic about the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), a period that evokes painful memories for many Chinese, Jiang has often been accused of harboring conservative ideologies. Without getting deep into the topic, he hints that he is much more complex in his thinking than he is made out to be - by some tea leaf readers. And his personal opinion on some of the Chinese historical figures is far from black-and-white.

He explains that an artist should have his own unique way of seeing the world. He refuses any labels such as "surrealism" or "magic realism". Take the timepiece in Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory. "Do you say the view is warped? No! This is exactly what time is, at least to people like me. It is reality."

The most brilliant touches in his movies all seem to traverse the stream of reality as we see it: In his first movie the teenager jumps into a tall chimney and later plays with an inflated condom with an incongruous guilelessness, The Sun has an otherworldly bird that flies around a big tree, and the latest film opens with a train pulled by white horses.

"I did not invent this set-up. For 30 years in the early 20th century, there was a segment of rail line in Northeast China that was powered by horses," he explains, without getting into the symbolic significance of such devices. "You may conceive the most unlikely scenes, and you'll find that fact is stranger than fiction."

Jiang reminisces that during the production of The Sun he conjured up a scene with beautiful flowers covering a desert. But while scouting for location, he came upon flowers even more over-sized and colorful than he had ever imagined. "Local people didn't know what they were called. The lesson is, never overestimate your imagination."

Jiang Wen was trained at the Central Drama Academy - as an actor. Yet he is known for his bold visualizations. He prefers scripts read to him by someone who can turn the words alive. His storyboards, as drafts for each shot, tend to be cursory. But his verbal description of each scene is so vivid the listener can quickly recreate each frame in his or her mind's eye. In 2007, I came up close and personal with such an experience, when he told me of encounters he had in his youth. It was movie-like, to say the least.

Cineastes have been studying his work for traces of influence from earlier masters. Emir Kusturica, a Serbian and Yugoslav filmmaker, and Sergio Leone, known for his spaghetti westerns, are often cited. But Jiang denies the link: "The pacing of my work stands in contrast with theirs." The only filmmaker whose work Jiang admits as having an impact on him is Martin Scorsese. After watching a string of the American director's movies, Jiang requested a meeting with him on a trip to the United States arranged by the US Embassy. Scorsese has acted like a mentor, sending him detailed materials from his production.

"When a director sees a story or a script he's crazy about, he does not have any towering figures in front of him. He must feel he himself is the greatest. It is nonsense when people say they are paying respect to this or that predecessor. If anything, it should be an apology for throwing those masters behind you," Jiang says.

Often criticized for his arrogance, he says he exercises much more restraint now than when he was a student. He also says that if there comes a day when Scorsese cannot obtain funding any more, he would be willing to raise funds in China for the American master - much as Scorsese and Spielberg did for Akira Kurosawa.

Asked why snippets of music from his previous film were audible in the Bullets soundtrack, he surprises me by saying: "That was me paying homage to myself."