Director John Woo honed his craft in Hollywood but returned to his native China to film his latest, Red Cliff, a movie he says he had waited 20 year to make.

Whose demands would you rather deal with, Tom Cruise's or China's?

John Woo, who directed Cruise in Mission: Impossible II, says he found relative freedom in making the venerable war tale Red Cliff, the most expensive Chinese movie yet made, at $80 million.

And the powers that be? Pussycats.

"Even though we are spending that kind of money, it's still much cheaper than making it in Hollywood," Woo says over the phone from Shanghai. "The other thing was everything was so simple. We got huge support from the Chinese government and a lot of creative freedom. I would walk into their office and say what I need.

"I had no need to take notes from anyone, and no need to take advice from anyone. I didn't even need to take any meetings.

"And we had 1,500 army soldiers on set almost every day, playing warriors and helping us build the roads for the movie. They did everything."

Red Cliff opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Friday and rolls out across the country afterward.

Bringing Hollywood to China is a complete circle for Woo.

His 36-year career began in Hong Kong, with classic gangland "bullet ballets" such as The Killer, Bullet In The Head and Hard-Boiled (the last two featuring Tony Leung, his star in Red Cliff). In the '90s, he headed to Hollywood and made Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II, Hard Target and Windtalkers.

"I have had a great opportunity to work in Hollywood and learn from so many great people," Woo says. "It's time to take what I've learned and use it in Asia. There are a lot of young and talented film people in China. They all have a great passion about movies, and I wanted to give them the opportunity to work on a big-budget, Hollywood-type movie."

Red Cliff, Woo says, is a movie he has wanted to make for 20 years. It's the story of The Battle of Red Cliff, which took place in 208 AD, and was chronicled a millennium later in the classic novel Romance of The Three Kingdoms.

With a nod to Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Battle of Red Cliff involved Xu and East Yu, two small provinces facing an invasion by an army of nearly a million soldiers under the command of the power-hungry Gen. Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi).

The imperilled heads of state are the star-crossed Liu Bei (You Yong) and the young, untested Sun Quan (Chang Chen). But the masterminds of the defence are Lui Bei's strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Sun Quan's viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung), two independent spirits who become fast friends.

For Woo, bringing Red Cliff to life meant treading on the sensitivities of two separate groups -- fans of the book, and devotees of Chinese history.

He also had the task of turning a Gone With The Wind-like four hour-plus epic into 21/2 hours for Western audiences.

He did this by excising one of two love stories, and cutting down on the sprawling cast of characters.

As for messing with history, Woo says, "it was a challenge. I had done quite a lot of research, and then it turned out I didn't follow the book that much. I finally didn't care much about the history, and I think some people didn't feel comfortable about it. But I decided I wasn't making a movie for the History Channel, I was making a movie."

After 36 years, Woo says, "I'm still learning, I just want to make a different kind of movie every time, same as always. Of course I feel much more relaxed. I don't need to yell or panic anymore.

"But creatively I have changed. I used to love making tragic hero movies. But now, I care more about the world. The economy is getting worse, there are a lot of young people in Asia so frustrated and lonely.

"That's really why I wanted to make Red Cliff, since the movie was about how a small army can defeat a much larger and more powerful enemy with a combination of teamwork, innovation, intelligence and courage ... It's just to let the young people know there's always hope, there's always a friend. Just work together and face the challenges."

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