Preselling your film to Sony Pictures Classics would cause most Canadian directors to erupt with joy.

Not Roger Spottiswoode. Last year, soon after the U.S. indie distributor acquired the North American rights to Spottiswoode’s The Children of Huang Shi, the Canadian director got an inkling his 1930s period drama starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Chow Yun-Fat might get consigned to the DVD bin.

The China/Australia/Germany copro features Meyers as George Hogg, a real-life British journalist who, in 1938, attempted to lead 60 Chinese orphans to safety in Japanese-occupied Nanjing.

Spottiswoode feared executives at Sony Pictures Classics’ parent Sony Corp. of Japan might feel they risked losing face by releasing a film that depicts barbaric wartime atrocities by Japanese soldiers.

But Sony Pictures Classics ultimately gave The Children of Huang Shi a limited U.S. theatrical release on May 23 after a world premiere in China. Mongrel Media was scheduled to release the epic drama on Canadian screens on June 6.

‘I’m very pleased and slightly surprised,’ Spottiswoode says.

But it was a close-run thing. After all, Spottiswoode knows a thing or two about the Japanese tendency to downplay or deny World War Two events.

He collaborated with Japanese filmmaker Koreyoshi Kurahara on the 1995 TV movie Hiroshima, a Japan/Canada copro about the events that led to the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War Two.

Kenneth Welsh earned a Gemini Award for best dramatic actor for his star turn as U.S. president Harry Truman.

Using historical footage and survivor accounts, Spottiswoode said Hiroshima never aimed to apportion blame or judge historical participants in hindsight, only to air both sides of the conflict, as portrayed by one Canadian and one Japanese director.

But with Japanese officials still questioning the scale and significance of the Nanjing massacre – a continuing sticking point in Japan-China relations – Spottiswoode fully expected Sony executives not to argue or even discuss opposition to The Children of Huang Shi, but instead to bury the film silently.

He notes that he never fully depicts the Nanjing massacre in the film, only hints at it.

‘It’s a film about people on the edge of war. It’s really a conventional story about a man who looked after some kids in the middle of the war,’ he explains.

He still doesn’t expect a Japanese market for the film, however.

‘I don’t think the Japanese are going to show a film about Nanjing. My suspicion is the Japanese distribution of the film isn’t going to happen,’ he says.

Indeed, every stage leading up to the release of the feature, which shot in China, has been marked by complication and intrigue.

In all, Spottiswoode worked for 10 years to get the film to the big screen. He spent three years polishing a script by James MacManus and Jane Hawksley, another two years looking for financing, and two more years casting the epic drama.

He toyed with making the film as a China/Canada copro before managing to access private financing in China, Australia and Germany.

Michelle Yeoh, whom Spottiswoode worked with on the James Bond thriller Tomorrow Never Dies, and fellow Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat were early casts. By 2005, Brendan Fraser was tapped to play the lead role, just as Spottiswoode was spending six months in China to cast the young Chinese students.

But when key British financing fell through, the project was thrown into doubt, and he signed on to shoot the Canadian Rwanda drama Shake Hands with the Devil, another true-life historical drama about a Western man attempting to save local innocents as he witnesses first-hand barbarous conflict.

It was finally left to Oscar-winning producer Arthur Cohn (One Day in September) to complete the financing puzzle for The Children of Huang Shi by securing the presale to Sony Pictures Classics in late 2006.

Finally, Spottiswoode could start official preproduction.

With Fraser now out of the picture due to a scheduling conflict, Spottiswoode hired Irish actor Meyers to play the lead, with indie veteran Radha Mitchell as an American nurse and Hogg’s love interest.

Another obstacle was finding old buildings in China against which to shoot the period drama. Historical events and recent economic growth in the country have erased much of that country’s period architecture.

‘Finding the past in China is extremely difficult, because the Cultural Revolution destroyed everything that was old or honorable and venerable,’ he notes.

The shoot also spent time at the giant Hengdian World Studios complex in eastern China to take advantage of a scale-size reproduction of Beijing’s Forbidden City.

For his next project, Spottiswoode hopes to bring to the screen another passion project he’s worked on for a decade, an adaptation of the 1964 William Golding novel The Spire, a portrait of one man’s will to construct the spire atop the medieval Salisbury Cathedral.

‘I think we can do it as a Canada/British copro. But it’s one those things – no one is crying out to see this kind of film,’ he says with a sigh.