Director Tsui Hark's latest production, The Taking of Tiger Mountain, is adapted from a classic Peking Opera of the same title. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

He considers the film a tribute to war heroes.

Tsui spent five years collecting historical materials and began 130 days of filming in 2012.

The director led 1,100 crew members to shoot in the snowy forests of Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, where winter temperatures are often around-30 C.

"It's the most dangerous film I've shot," Tsui says.

"The slippery ground and hidden ditches made action scenes difficult. Anyone who fell in a ditch would be buried by snow. We gave everyone a whistle to alert others if they got trapped."

The film, which stars four time Hong Kong Film Awards best actor winner Tony Leung Kafai and 2008 Taiwan Golden Horse best actor ZhangHanyu, is expected to be a box office blowout. It'll compete with Jiang Wen's Gone With the Bullets, which may be 2014's most controversial movie.

But some insiders who watched the film at a trial premiere on Tuesday say the revolutionary film appears more like a martial arts flick than a modern military movie.