In today’s New York Times, Alan Riding talks to Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, about directing the movie version.

"‘It's one thousand times more difficult to make a film than to write a book,’ he said. And by that, he also meant making his movie version of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which opens on Friday in New York.” – from “Artistic Odyssey : Film to Fiction to Film,” by Alan Riding, in The New York Times, July 27, 2005