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Feng Xiaogang may have the lowest profile in the West of any successful Asian film-maker. Even though most of his movies have been blockbusters in his home country, China, and have revealed him to be an accomplished satirist, it’s Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Jia Zhangke who have become synonymous with Chinese cinema around the world. If this lack of recognition overseas is a source of regret or anger, he does a good job of disguising it. “Fortunately, I was born in a big country with a huge population,” he says. “China is a big market. If I came from a smaller country, I’d be frustrated.” There is no doubting his status at home. The release of a new Feng Xiaogang film is the cue for people to rush to cinemas across China.

His latest, Assembly, is a case in point. It has raked in £17.8m in China since its release in late December, a huge sum in a country where cinema tickets are far cheaper than in Europe or the USA. Equally important, however, it is only the second of Feng’s films to be released in the UK; it will be followed later in the year by his 2006 movie The Banquet. Feng is hoping they will demonstrate to British audiences that there’s more to Chinese cinema than bleak art-house films or crowd-pleasing period martial-arts epics.

Assembly follows the sole survivor and commander of a communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit massacred in the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s, who carries on fighting through the Korean war, all the time trying to get his dead comrades’ sacrifice recognised by the authorities. Based on a true story, the film is graphic, relentless and moving, and has been tagged as a Chinese Saving Private Ryan. “It’s a completely different story, but they’re similar in trying to depict war in a realistic way,” says the casual 50-year-old director as he chain-smokes through our interview in the Beijing flat that serves as his office. “I think Spielberg made a great contribution to the genre by showing how horrific and brutal war is.” Despite the scenes of carnage, Assembly has proved popular with women in China. “I think they are touched by the lead character, even if they don’t fully understand his behaviour. They can see how responsible and persistent he is.”

But Assembly is very much a reaction against the propaganda war movies churned out by the Chinese film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than an attempt to copy Saving Private Ryan. “Those old movies were all fake. The lead characters always want to fight and be a hero, whereas the truth is that most people are reluctant to fight. And the men show no fear, which is completely unreal. The men in my film have to fight their fear as well as the enemy,” Feng says.

Both Assembly and The Banquet - a loose adaptation of Hamlet, with Zhang Ziyi in the Gertrude role - are a departure for Feng, who is best known in China for his comedies. He admits he had one eye on the overseas market when he made them. “The western audience likes these sorts of films. Comedy doesn’t travel as well as other genres.” That perception, though, is the West’s misfortune, because, more than any other Chinese director, Feng has proved a master at satirising the enormous changes Chinese society has undergone in the past decade.

Since 1997, he has been behind a string of comedies that have made him the most popular film-maker in China. The 1998 film Bu Jian Bu San, a catch phrase that translates as “Be there or be square”, poked fun at the Chinese obsession with emigrating to the USA through its story of two illegal immigrants adrift in LA. The bittersweet A Sigh was the first Chinese film to deal with divorce in a realistic fashion, while Big Shot’s Funeral and Cell Phone mercilessly targeted China’s new urban middle class and their obsession with status and the latest trends.

“I like to satirise the people who are pretentious and self-important, who think they’re on a higher level than everyone else. I’m a big fan of Woody Allen’s films, because I think he does the same thing to New Yorkers that I do to Beijingers,” Feng says. “There’s a new group of people emerging in China who are rich and want to live a western sort of lifestyle. I find that ridiculous and funny, because I don’t think it’s compatible with being in China.”

The middle classes, he says, are just about the only people he can attack. “It’s no fun satirising the poor and, because of censorship, I can’t do politicians, so I have to do the rich. Satire is hard to do in China, because there are so many people you can’t have a go at. Some of them would actually come after me if I did. But the rich are so self-satisfied, they can’t be bothered to react.” His approach has ensured he has avoided the attentions of the government censors. “A lot of ordinary people are angry about the way Chinese society is so money-obsessed, but I think it’s useless to get angry about that stuff. It’s better to be funny about it. If you’re too angry, the censors won’t pass it, but if you mock it and satirise it, people laugh and the censors pass the films.”

Despite being just about the only film-maker in China who can make the sort of smart, commercial films Hollywood was once known for, Feng is no favourite of China’s critics. In part, that’s because he is about the only Chinese director of note who didn’t attend the Beijing Film Academy. Instead, he spent eight years as a set designer for a PLA theatre troupe, graduating to directing hit television shows before making his film debut with The Dream Factory. Being outside the mainstream has left Feng with trenchant views on the value of film school. “Any person with a normal IQ can learn how to make a movie in a month. It’s finding a good script that’s hard.” Nor is he convinced by the academy’s guiding ethos. “The guys who go there are taught that films are either art-house or commercial rubbish. That idea is so deep-rooted, it’s hard for them to make movies for a wide audience.”

Many critics share the same attitude, leading some to dismiss Feng as a television director who got lucky. It’s a bizarre judgment on somebody who has made nine hit films in different genres. But Feng is happy enough being the man Chinese audiences can rely on to entertain them. “The masses don’t like fake people any more than I do,” he says. “That’s why my films are popular.” Now he needs the West to catch on.

Assembly opens on March 7

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