"Zhang said he was moved to cast Bale on the recommendation of Steven Spielberg. Bale starred in Spielberg's 1987 hit "Empire of the Sun," playing a young boy struggling to survive in Japanese-occupied China during World War II. (Bale, for his part, said he was "completely oblivious" to the connection between the two films when he committed to "Flowers." "It's a different lifetime for me," Bale said of "Empire of the Sun." "I barely remember that experience.") Zhang had seen only Bale's two Batman films and said he initially had doubts, from those viewings, about Bale's ability to play the Miller character. But when he arrived for a meeting at Bale's house and found books about the rape of Nanjing on his coffee table, he was convinced. "It showed he was serious about this, more serious than anyone else I talked to," Zhang said."