Slick as a whistle

With the idea of depicting an ordinary person-turned-hero movie, she convinced producer Bill Kong-known for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's Hero-to get on board as one of the film's major financiers.

Graduating as a literature major from the Beijing Film Academy, Xue initially worked as a scriptwriter in the film and TV industry, gaining recognition for penning such hits as Don't Talk to Strangers (2001) and Autumn Rain (2005).

Despite also working as a deputy professor of literature at the academy, the writer-director doubted her ability to write a successful suspense story. So she gathered together two teams of storytellers-one group of writers from China and one from Hollywood-to jointly develop "the basic structure of the tale" in late 2015.

After a script-polishing process spanning 2016 and 2017, the story-which is set in China, Australia and the landlocked African country of Malawi-finally began to take shape, unfolding the story of a Chinese expatriate working for an Australian energy company who stumbles upon an old flame, the wife of the head of a Chinese mining group.

When the two rekindle their former romance, their controversial relationship leads to an intercontinental adventure that sees the duo try to unravel a large-scale bribery case and an international trade deal that threatens the lives of an entire city's population.

With The Whistleblower as her third feature directed by Xue, Tang says her new role as a wife is more complicated than her previous lead characters in Finding Mr Right and Book of Love.

Speaking of her role as a wife who helps her husband receive bribes but is later betrayed and hunted by hitmen dispatched by her ruthless spouse, Tang describes her character as a flawed soul plagued by desperation and fear who eventually finds redemption.