When Paramount Pictures announced they were to adapt Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel The Kite Runner to the big screen, producers scouted no less than 19 countries in which to film the touching tale. They eventually decided on China and it wasn’t long before a group of individuals from Beijing and beyond were busy making director Marc Forster’s directorial vision a reality. From the Beijing expats who posed as travellers in a busy ‘San Francisco’ airport scene to the Uygur population of Xinjiang allowing their Province to be filmed on an unprecedented scale, almost everyone around in the winter of 2006 seemed to know someone involved.

‘We shot in Kashgar and Tashkurgan, in Beijing and Baoding, and then we shot for seven days in San Fransisco,’ the film’s producer Bennett Walsh tells us over a Coke in Dashanzi. ‘Out of a 68 day shoot, 61 or 62 days of that was shot in China.’

The reason for such a huge, ‘assisted’ Hollywood production taking place in the Middle Kingdom? Not the low cost, insists Walsh, but authenticity. The key events in the early and final chapters of Hosseini’s book are set in Afghanistan – at first in the days before the Soviet invasion and later after the Taliban have taken hold. China’s far west, positioned on the country’s border, was the perfect location to replicate, in a safer environment, the terrain and culture of the country.

‘That was the great thing about Kashgar’ says the film’s director Marc Forster. ‘It provided us with the same landscape as Kabul because it’s just across the mountains from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

’ The Kite Runner’s storyline develops around an educated Sunni Afghan boy named Amir and his servant-friend Hassan, a so called ‘Hazara’ (the country’s slang for someone of Mongol descent and Shi’ite faith), who make a good ‘kite running’ team as children growing up in Kabul. While filming in Xinjiang, the crew trained 200 children in kite flying and put them on 50 rooftops. ‘We had to have two people there,’ explains Walsh; ‘one who would be translating Uygur to Mandarin, then a Chinese person doing Mandarin to English, so that on every rooftop there were at least three people, and to make matters worse we also had Pakistanis and Tajiks so it was a communication melt down...’

In the film, as in the book, the defining moment of the story comes when Amir watches his friend being raped by the local bully and opts to do nothing. Consumed by a guilt that he carries through his adult life, it’s only when Amir is asked to adopt Hassan’s son that he is given a chance to redeem himself.

‘I am trying each time to do something completely different,’ says the Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland director on his decision to make the movie. ‘What is interesting is to choose a project where potentially I can fail…I think it’s important as a filmmaker to put yourself in a position where you don’t know how you can actually make it work.’

However, aside from the difficulty of making a film for audiences already in love with Hosseini’s book (‘Every person you meet tells you this is their favourite book ever and you have to live up to that’), neither Forster nor Walsh could have imagined the scale of the outcry that would follow once those in Afghanistan got wind of the film’s (albeit in reality carefully presented) rape scene. The child actors who play Amir and Hassan – the impressive Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada – have since been moved to a secret location by the studio after their parents feared pirate copies of the film could inflame painful ethnic divisions in Afghanistan and put the boys in danger.

‘It makes me very sad. When I went to Kabul to cast the movie a year and a half ago, the place was pretty safe and the feeling was that it’s a new beginning, a new start,’ the German director laments. ‘I felt like Kite Runner would help the country shine in a sense. But it went back to terror and has become so much more dangerous than it was.’

The Kite Runner is slated for a general release on Thursday 17.