Ang Lee is having to cut some thirty minutes of footage from his new film Lust, Caution for Chinese cinemas.

However rather than leave his film to someone else to hack apart or for it not to be released at all, he's overseen his own cut and removed sex scenes and some of the more violent scenes so that Chinese children can watch it.

This is because there's no classification in China, amongst other more political reasons, and so the film has to be viewable by all.

According to Xinhua news agency through Yahoo News, Lee was quoted as saying that the film remains relatively clean after the cut, but the spirit of Lust, Caution remains and the fluency will not be affected.

Although it's hard to believe a thirty minute cut in such a film wouldn't result in some drastic changes to the plot and the flow, it is at least good that Ang Lee thought he would better do it rather than let it fall to anyone else to butcher.