From his office hidden away in the Beijing Film Studio, Tian explains what makes him tick.

"When I wake up in the morning, the first thing that strikes my head is film, the film I am working on, the film I am preparing and the film I have done," he says, sipping the tea in front of him. "This tea is from Yunnan province and given by my friends there. Over there is Pu'er tea grouped by age."

Tian's latest movie The Go Master is now shown in London as part of a festival of Chinese films.

Rather than discuss cultural events, either at home or abroad, Tian, 56, prefers to talk about his works.

The Go Master, Tian's latest film, is a somber biopic of the go master Wu Qingyuan. "He has a very special quality in that the outside world never influenced him," Tian says. "He's a person who is quite pure and only lives in his beliefs. I deeply respected and liked him very much. Most people are chasing material things or results. The goal in his life was a kind of belief."

One of the most prominent filmmakers of China's Fifth Generation, a group credited with revitalizing the Chinese movies, Tian was born to parents who were prominent in the film industry. His father Tian Fang was a noted actor from the 1930s and a director for the Beijing Film Studios and his mother Yu Lan was a popular 1950s film star who later became the head of Beijing's Children's Film Studio.

Tian is noted for his ability to extract delicate emotions from strong or even barbaric material. This style is best exemplified in his movies Horse Thief in 1986 and On the Hunting Ground (Liechang Zhasa) in 1984.

Although his parents were highly involved in the film industry, as a child Tian didn't expect to follow in their footsteps. He says that he fell "accidentally in love" with movies.

"I hated film in the beginning," Tian recalls. "Because of my parents' jobs, I had many opportunities to watch movies. In those days all we had were propaganda films and Russian films in black-and-white, which were not that interesting for kids.

"And the air inside the cinemas was bad. I remember I stopped going to cinemas when I was 9 or 10 after I vomited there once due to the muggy air. The situation didn't change until I went to study at Beijing Film Academy in 1978.

Like many of his contemporaries who were in their teens or early 20s during the 1970s, Tian joined the army and traveled extensively, visiting remote parts of China. He later became a photographer, and it is this period in his life that undoubtedly provided the inspiration for many of his films.