We often hear that directing animals and children is hell on a filmmaker. So why is Jean-Jacques Annaud nostalgic about the 200 horses, 1,000 sheep, 35 wolves and smattering of young humans he worked with for his new picture Wolf Totem? Maybe his fascination with wolves has something to do with it. As the title indicates, they're the real stars of this gorgeous 3-D spectacle. 

Drawn from Jiang Rong's semi-autobiographical novel, Wolf Totem tells the epic saga of a young Beijing student who is sent to Inner Mongolia in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution. The ready student, Chen Zhen (Feng Shaofeng) teaches the nomadic herdsmen to read and write while he studies life in the craggy steppes. There are the man-made trappings of a society in flux and an inevitable affair of the heart, but the soul of the film is a romance between Zhen and the wolf pup he takes in and raises. It's only the cuddliest of the wildlife stories to unfold in this endangered region, where nature is literally on thin ice.

Annaud partly credits ecological awareness with the film's success in China. The Chinese-French co-production is among China's top-grossing films of all time, and it is that country's submission for a foreign-language Oscar in 2016. This has all come as a pleasant surprise for the director. His 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet was denounced by the Chinese government for its portrayal of military brutality and for its favorable take on the 14th Dalai Lama; Annaud and his stars were banned from stepping foot on Chinese soil. And that's to say nothing of the controversy that Rong's Wolf Totem stirred in China when it came out in 2004. Ultimately it would go on to become a literary sensation like Mao's Little Red Book.

The environment had been something of a taboo subject in China prior to the book's release. But it struck a chord with readers who were increasingly alarmed by the daily scourge of pollution. When Annaud was approached to direct the screen adaptation, he quickly grasped its potential to heighten ecological awareness. Now, nearly a decade later, the green message is more resonant than ever. "Chinese viewers are suffocating," the director told me during his late August visit to New York not long after the explosions in Tianjin. "Even now on official television, you see people getting home with their GPS because they can't see their building."

Annaud, for his part, had a clear vision: to tell the drama of China's northeastern grasslands, he would have to capture the pulse of the wild. The film's aesthetic -- with rugged landscapes and mystical wind and sky -- was fashioned to convey how it feels to roam free amid the constant threat of predation. Human expansion presents a formidable foe in this Darwinian narrrative. But it's the wolf cast that relates the emotional charge of what's at stake. "What you have to get is the intensity of desire," said Annaud. "Wolves are hunters. If they they don't hunt, they die."

What techniques did Annaud use with his wolf actors? Fortunately, he had considerable experience in directing animals. The lead role to went to an Alaskan grizzly in his 1998 orphan tale The Bear, and the titular siblings of his 2004 adventure Two Brothers are tigers. For those productions, as for Wolf Totem, the methods he had developed while directing TV commercials and movies featuring babies came in handy. "Bascially it's the same trick," said the 71-year-old filmmaker. "You cannot ask a five-month old baby to smile, and you cannot ask a ten-month-old to walk to a certain mark and put the yogurt all over his face. But what you can do is think about how you could have this baby do it by itself, by its own instinct. And that will give you something very authentic."

Take for example the scene in Wolf Totem where wolves climb the wall of a sheepfold. Annaud recounted, "We had to train the wolves to climb the wall for them to know that they could do it, the same way that you could show a baby to climb on a stool in order to climb on a table where he could have chocolate cake." During the day the wolves were allowed within tantalizing distance of the enclosed sheep. For the night shoot, the sheep were removed, but the wolves were still licking their chops. To ensure that they hit their marks, wolf wrangler Andrew Simpson and his crack team of trainers took up strategic positions inside the fold and called to the wolves. More persuasively, hunks of meat were set out on a ladder inside the wall as a reward for the enterprising wolves who would scale it.

Beyond food-driven schemes, how did Annaud connect emotionally with his four-legged performers in order to direct them? The veteran of 13 features dug into some of his best-known titles to set up his answer. "My function as a director is to identify with the individuals I have in front of my camera," he began. "So when I do a movie like Quest for Fire, set in the Stone Age, I have to identify with a very primitive, pre-human creature. When I do a medieval mystery like The Name of the Rose, I am supposed to identify with the Italian monks of the 14th century. When I do a movie like The Lover, I have to identify with a 15-year-old girl who is going to discover carnal love in the arms of a Chinese man. So my job is to identify with my stars. And my job when I do a movie like Wolf Totem is to identify with wolves."

I pressed Annaud about his process with the pack alpha named Cloudy, cast as the leading wolf. What helped the Frenchman understand how this creature thinks, what he likes and dislikes? He mused, "If you read with an open heart, you will discover the wolf inside you. I know there is a wolf inside me, just as there is a man inside my friend Cloudy."

That was when it hit me: Annaud looks almost wolflike, himself. It's not only his silver pate, lupine nose and engaged eye posturing that give him an air of the majestic creatures he has devoted eight years to. There is also a carniverous intelligence, an animalistic charisma. The shape-shifter wanded the air and went on, "What I can say after all those years of directing two-legged animals and four-legged animals is that there is something in common, of course, and that the main emotions you feel in animals are the same emotions you feel in people: the territoriality, the desire for supremacy, for hegemony, for finding a love partner, for enjoying food and the necessity of food." Pawing his chin, he declared, "Fear is something that is absolutely in common."

For evidence, we need only watch the caravan scene where Zhen's caged pup reacts to him with sudden aggression. Annaud explained that three pups played Little Wolf. Each came up in a peer group trained for certain behaviors. The group that was exposed to Shaofeng from infancy performed in the scenes when Little Wolf is playful and cuddly. The snappish pup on the caravan wagon hailed from the group that was kept apart from Shaofeng and failed to forge a relationship with him. Cultivating the wolf actors spanned years. The first group was started in 2008 and reached adulthood in 2011 while the second group was timed to yield the teen wolves, leaving third group as the source for the puppies.

Finding trainable wolves wasn't easy. "The first challenge was to get wolves that would tolerate the presence of a human crew," said Annaud. Mongol wolves are an endangered species, and those that still run free are notoriously shy, he explained. The team found a solution at China's Harbin Zoo. They would raise captive pups from the bottle.

Three years later, one of these fur balls would emerge as king. It was soon after Cloudy took power that Simpson brokered an introduction with Annaud. As the filmmaker remembered, "This wolf looked at me, and he put his ears down, his tail between his leg, and he crawled towards me. I was very impressed. And then, in a very humble way, he went on his back and offered his belly." At Simpson's encouragement, Annaud gave Cloudy a caress, and in return received a lick on his finger. Next the wolf let his approval be known to his subjects. Annaud reenacted the scenario, gestures and all. "He rubbed his fur against my legs and then went to the pack and rubbed himself against the others to have them feel my scent."

From there the bond only deepened. "Day after day, Cloudy became more and more friendly, and the licking became more intense," said Annaud. "By the end of the shoot I had to change coats because he wouldn't start the scene without me getting into their space. He would run to me, put his two front legs on my shoulders and give me a full licking session for 10 minutes. He would bite my ears, bite my nose, bite my cheeks."

Asked if man and beast talked, the director replied matter-of-factly, "Yes, of course. He would go, "Hhhh, mmmhhh, gghhhh, hhhhhh!" Apparently the daily effusions rankled on Cloudy's wife, Silver. "After five minutes she'd start pulling my jeans, like saying, 'Hey, you guys, that's enough!' " recalled Annaud. By the end of the shoot Cloudy became downright moony. "He really reinvented the French kiss," Annaud cracked, adding, "The tongue of a wolf is so long!"

What so compelled Cloudy about the director remains a bit of a mystery. "My crew believed that, because he was the king of the four-legged band, he perceived that I was the boss of the two-legged gang," offered Annaud. "But Andrew Simpson, who is very knowledgable about wolves, said no. He said it's just something personal."

Personal as in his psychology or his scent? I wanted to know. "Probably something to do with body language, with the fact that I'm not scared," said Annaud. Or something to do with the fact that I liked this individual, because he was a very good actor, so I respected him."

Beyond the feel-good vibe, the filmmakers and trainers took constant pains to cultivate the trust of the alpha and his pack. As Annaud put it, "First, the wolves have to feel that those are their parents, their friends, their protectors -- that they will never, ever betray them. If you betray them once, you lose them forever." 

That's why, when it came time to shoot the film's nocturnal blizzard sequence culminating on a frozen lake, there were no retakes with the same wolf. As Annaud explained, a dog may be game to fall through lake ice over and over, but a wolf only once.

In traditional Mongol culture, the wolf is a semi-god. "The wolf carries the spirit of dead people to what they call 'the eternal blue sky,' " said Annaud. "It was seen as an enemy, but a very respected enemy." It was also recognized as an essential partner in the region's ecosystem. "As the wolf population dwindles, the rats and marmots are free to destroy the grassland, and there's no more food, either for wolves or for humans."

What does Annaud most want Wolf Totem audiences to take away about wolves? "That they have a function in the world," he said, likening the dwindling species to the bees that both sting and sustain us. "By changing nature so much, we are in great danger."