Acclaimed Asian filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun, director of “Comrades: Almost a Love Story” and “The Warlords,” said he would probably use AI in his filmmaking, but “definitely not use AIGC” or AI-generated content, and that the two-hour feature would hold its own against short-form and vertical dramas at least in his lifetime.
Speaking at an In Conversation event at the Singapore International Film Festival, an audience member asked Chan if he ever doubted his decision to go into the film industry. His advice to aspiring filmmakers: “This is probably the toughest time for film, but do I believe that this medium will fade away and be relegated to short entertainment? No.”
He said he would likely use AI as a technology in the same way the industry already uses CGI and special effects, noting that CGI has relied on AI for years, without saying so. Chan said, “Anything that helps me make movies, I welcome it. But they may not know the art. Movies are still made by people.”
Young audiences are increasingly gravitating toward shorter and vertical dramas as their attention spans shorten, Chan said, while on the other hand, people are listening to hour-long podcasts, and Christopher Nolan did podcasts around the world to explain his purist approach to making “Oppenheimer” the way movies were made in the ’50s. “So there are two completely opposite ends of the spectrum that are surviving and thriving together. So I believe this film will be around for a long time,” he told the excited audience at the Grand Ballroom, Marina Bay Sands.
Chan’s latest film, “The Road Not Taken”, premiered in Toronto. He said, “My new movie is about Alzheimer’s, but it’s not really just about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a broken family with all kinds of problems.”
The story focuses on a couple in the middle of divorce proceedings when the wife, who had early onset Alzheimer’s, no longer remembers the divorce and her mind flashes back to the time they fell in love when they were 20. The couple’s relationship with a stern grandfather and his Gen Z daughter completes the picture. The daughter in the film is 20 years old, the same age as Chan’s own daughter, who is training to become an actor. Chan’s partner is actor Sandra Ng.
The English title comes from a poem by Robert Frost, which Chan said is his life’s motto, while the Chinese title, “Ming Tian Hui Geng Hao”, translates to “Tomorrow Will Be Better”. “There’s really no right way,” he said. “Whether it’s right or wrong all depends on how you go about it. You make it right.”
While researching the film, Chan visited an Alzheimer’s care institute in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, where he picked up an eight-word Mandarin phrase that he has used to summarize his career: Go with the flow, and know when to stop. In the ’90s, when he was making romantic comedies at United Filmmakers Organization (UFO), the company he co-founded, gangster pictures and wuxia ruled Hong Kong screens. “We weren’t exactly going with the flow, but we somehow went with the flow,” he said.
The same flow later led him to “The Warlords”, which he described as his greatest film. Chan said, “I never thought I would make a historical epic war film with Jet Li. It was never on my agenda my entire life.”
This year marks the 30th anniversary of “Comrades,” which Chan made as his seventh feature when he was 34 and which captured Hong Kong between 1985 and 1995. He left Hong Kong on Christmas Eve 1996, and only after returning from the US about two and a half years later did he understand how deeply the film had influenced filmmakers in mainland China, South Korea and Southeast Asia, although, he said, it probably barely recouped his investment.
Chan said, “That movie set me up for a movie career for the next 30 years so far.”
He said that 90% of people remember him for that one film, “as if I haven’t done better work since then,” calling it a blessing but also a spell he wanted to break.
Chan, who also said that the 90s marked the beginning of a decline rather than a golden age of Hong Kong cinema, described his DreamWorks film “The Love Letter” as a difficult experience. Working in different cultures didn’t bother him, he said, as he grew up Thai-Chinese and felt like an outsider even in Hong Kong. What he struggled with was a corporate system where it was not clear who called the shots, and a reliance on test screening that he compared to today’s algorithms. He said he is probably the first, if not the only, Hong Kong filmmaker to make a non-action film inside the US studio system.
Chan said, “If I had gone to America or Hollywood with the knowledge I have about film and marketing and dealing with corporate, I probably would have done better.” “I was very young then, very naive.”
Later asked by an audience member how he deals with censorship in mainland China, Chan said: “Corporate is very, very difficult to deal with. And if I can avoid that, I can avoid anything.” He said that limitations on budget, stars, studios or censorship push filmmakers to become more creative.
After Hollywood, Chan founded Applause Pictures, a pan-Asian venture that made 10 films in two and a half years, most of them horror. Its output included “The Eye” franchise and the “Three” horror omnibus films, which brought together directors including Park Chan-wook, Miike Takashi, Kim Ji-woon, and Fruit Chan. He also executive produced “One Fine Spring Day” for Korean director Hur Jin-ho – director of SGIFF opener “The Assassins” – whose debut film “Christmas in August” he enjoyed. But the planned three-part love story with Hur and Japan’s Iwai Shunji found no investors.
“If we continue this pan-Asian effort, I’ll be stuck making horror movies my whole life,” Chan said of the decision to move to mainland China, where his first film was the 2005 musical “Maybe Love.”
An aspiring screenwriter in the audience asked how he handles a scene that isn’t working out. “I don’t usually fix it for them. I make them fix it over and over again,” Chan said, adding that while everything is “great” at home, he doesn’t do the same with his writers.
He credited nine writers for “The Warlords” and said that screenwriters joked that the writers of their films would not fit in a minibus. “I suck a writer to death and then milk another writer,” he said. “So the writer community doesn’t really like me very much. But making movies is not about being well-liked.”
Although he is often seen as a genre-hopper, Chan said the same concerns run through his work, citing the love triangle in his first film “Alan & Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye,” “Comrades,” “Maybe Love” and even “The Warlords,” which he called a love triangle between three brothers.
He said, “Making every film means answering some questions related to my life at that stage of my life.” “So in a way, I’ve been making the same movie in my head for the last 36 years.”