(Yicai Global) June 22 -- Chinese director Jiang Wen, the head of the jury for awarding Golden Goblets at Shanghai International Film Festival this year, spoke about the decade-long process for making his latest film the Hidden Man, and the idealist's love behind his filmmaking.

"I make films for the love of creating a new world," said Jiang, speaking about his movies at a forum during the festival. "Sometimes I feel I can escape from the current world by immersing myself in movies. The world of films is more beautiful and more romantic."

The Hidden Man, a thriller based on 1930's China, will be premier on July 13.

Jiang acquired the copyright for the novel called Hidden Hero, which the upcoming movie is based on, from its author Zhang Beihai ten years ago. But Jiang could not accept the first script adaptation. The "intolerable perfectionist" sent scriptwriter Sun Yue back to work with "endless" revisions. "There will always be room for improvement before the camera begins to work," Sun remembered him saying.

The Hidden Man's main actor Eddie Peng who plays protagonist Li Tianran in the movie said that Jiang has a skill of finding an actor's pressure points and pushing them to bring the performance to new dimensions.

"Performing is actually a kind of exposure rather than pretending," Jiang said. "I want to combine the lives of both actors and these fictional characters and then film them. Once they watch their performance from the screen, they will not regard it as a performance but instead as an act of exposing their inner minds, which will be a valuable experience for themselves too," concluded Jiang.

Jiang Wen rose to domestic fame from acting in another renowned director Zhang Yimou's debut film Red Sorghum (1988) and has starred in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).

Editor: Emmi Laine