A book claims that filmmaker Zhang Yimou is a victim of emotional blackmail by his former producer

Who would have thought that China's most prominent filmmaker has more drama in his life than the typical plot of some of his movies?

For 16 years, Zhang Yimou was manipulated by his former producer who did not pay him on time, if at all, and wrecked his relations with family, friends and colleagues. The jaw-dropping expose has been penned by Zhou Xiaofeng, Zhang's script consultant since 2006.

Zhang Yimou and Gong Li attend the 43rd Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Photos provided to China Daily

Zhang Yimou and producer Zhang Weiping at a promotional event for their movie Flowers of War in Beijing in December 2011.

Fate: Zhang Yimou the Lonely is obviously approved by the famed director, who has shown a remarkable degree of reticence when hit by great dollops of mud thrown at him. It also goes against the original intention of Zhou, a well-established writer in her own right, who had previously vowed to eschew public association with the filmmaker.

The decision to give a tell-all account dawned on the day early last year, when Zhang was forced to pay 7,487,854 yuan ($1,098,185) in penalties for fathering three children in violation of China's family planning policy. In her book, Zhou confirms previous suspicion that producer Zhang Weiping (no relation to the director) was behind leaking the decade long secret of the director's unregistered children.

If that accusation comes as no surprise, Zhou drops a real bomb when she discloses that Zhang Weiping and his wife were instrumental in breaking up the director's relationship with Gong Li, Zhang's muse and lover of many years.

They whispered rumors about the actress having dalliances with another man and sowed the initial seeds of distrust. Zhang Yimou, a person uncomfortable with non-work-related communication, never confronted Gong to clear things up. And it took Gong a long time to realize the cause of their breakup. In her renewed collaboration with him, the 2006 epic Curse of the Golden Flower, she put in her contract that under no circumstances should she be placed in the same room as Zhang Weiping or his wife.

Some of the most stinging barbs of Zhou's book are reserved for her employer. She argues that the director bore a major responsibility because of his antiquated people skills. He has a stubbornness, she writes, that when combined with credulousness, often leads to extreme vulnerabilities.

In episode after episode, Zhang Yimou would believe in someone without verifying their claims, which would have been as easy as picking up the phone and calling the person in question. Until very recently, he did not have an agent or lawyer and he would sign documents pushed his way without even reading the boldface or keeping a copy.

Zhou attributes this weakness to his personality, which is described as extremely tongue-tied when it comes to personal topics. Zhang Yimou never asks after his employees' families. He may not even know how to write the name of his longtime personal assistant. And when he talks about work, he is equally inconsiderate, launching into long-winded orations from afternoon to the wee hours.

Zhou says that upon joining his team, she decided not to be a "toady" but speak the truth. Tasked with finding potential stories and scriptwriters for future projects, Zhou often gets into heated arguments with the director over details of their work, so heated that people unfamiliar with their style may mistake it for a verbal battle.

Boss Zhang reluctantly concludes: "You are not my subordinate. You have always maintained the equality of a collaborator, which is good."

The book shockingly elaborates how Zhang Weiping virtually held the director hostage. By driving home to the media that he was the director's savior when he invested in the latter's 1997 Keep Cool - this during the ebb of the filmmaker's career- Zhang Weiping positioned himself on a moral high ground in public and dropped hints that the director owed him big time.

As Zhou explains in the book, Zhang Weiping did not invest any of his own money in Keep Cool or any of the subsequent movies for which he was listed as the top executive producer. He essentially pocketed gains from the movies without any financial risk. The first - and only - movie he truly invested in, was 2011's Flowers of War, which brought their tension to the fore.

Zhang Weiping claimed to the public he invested 650 million yuan in the movie, but Zhou shows that only 128 million yuan went into the production of this Rape of Nanking epic, or no more than 200 million yuan if marketing expenses were included. By inflating the cost, Zhang Weiping could avoid paying dividends or even promised salaries, says the book.

Zhang Yimou fears dealing with strangers and he believes in the age-old honor system. As Zhou analyzes, he would naturally be attracted to the articulate and emotive Zhang Weiping, who, when drunk, would hug the director in tears and say things like "You're dearer than my blood brother!"

The book says that Zhang Weiping did not pay Zhang Yimou the fees for Hero (2002), The House of Flying Daggers (2004), Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005), Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and A Simple Noodle Story (2009) until April 2010, totaling 11,536,400 yuan.

That means the director's decadelong contribution to Zhang Weiping's company would average about just 1 million a year.

In fact, when the director was revealed to have almost no income for 2000, the year that would determine the financial penalty for having his first unregistered child, much of the country laughed it off as a joke.

Zhang Yimou's misplaced trust has tentacles of ramifications. Because Zhang Weiping was for a long time the only non-family member with knowledge of the director's secret, he offered to help obtain birth certificates for the unregistered children. After their split, it was found all three certificates were fake, Zhou writes.

Zhou says her book is just the tip of the iceberg because she does not want to force Zhang Weiping into a tight corner, but she has more "dynamite" locked up that would automatically explode in the producer's face if "something bad" were to happen to her.

Zhang Weiping, who has not produced any movies since he fell out with the director, issued a statement, saying Zhou's book is all "fabrication and lies for the sake of promoting it", and added he would take legal action.

raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

Zhou Xiaofeng and the cover of her book, Fate: Zhang Yimou the Lonely.

(China Daily European Weekly 03/13/2015 page30)