It has been suggested that The Last Emperor made Bertolucci the new Marco Polo, as his film contributed to a renewed cultural interest in China in the late 1980s. The winner of nine Oscars, it is considered one of the director’s near-perfect films. Through a series of flash-forwards and flashbacks, Bertolucci relates the intriguing life of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City through his abdication, decline, and exploitation by the Japanese during World War II, and finally to his obscure existence as a mere peasant worker in the People’s Republic.

"In the beginning, it was of course a very utopic project, which was through the figure of Pu Yi to tell the history of China of this century. But I realized, as it happened to me all the time, that I am much more interested in the destiny of a man than in history itself. So I became more and more close to the story of the character than to the history of China itself. And shooting the movie focused a lot on the character. This is a movie with one character at the center more than a dialectic between many characters, even if it's full of characters. But it comes from an autobiography; it is more less seen through the filter of his eyes. That means somebody who is condemned to prison, all his life, since the age of three. To show China outside the walls of the prison would have meant to abandon the character, to abandon Pu Yi, and that was impossible. When you shoot the reality, it makes you choose or, I would say, the reality chooses for you. This reality has been to stay with the character all the time."—Bernardo Bertolucci