Famous Asian filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun, director of “Comrades: Almost a Love Story” and “The Warlords,” said he will likely use AI in filmmaking but “definitely not use AIGC or AI-generated content, and the two-hour feature film will hold its own against short-form and vertical dramas, at least in its lifetime.”
Speaking at the In Conversation event at the Singapore International Film Festival, an audience member asked Chan if he ever doubted his decision to enter the film industry. His advice to aspiring filmmakers: “This is probably the toughest time for cinema, but do I believe this medium will fade away and become short-lived entertainment? No.”
He said the industry will likely use artificial intelligence as a technique, just as it already uses CGI and special effects, and noted that CGI has been relying on artificial intelligence in this way for years without naming it. “I would welcome anything that would help me make movies. But they won’t know the art. Movies are still made by people,” Chan said.
Chan said younger viewers’ decreasing attention spans have caused them to turn to short, vertical series, while people are listening to hour-long podcasts, and Christopher Nolan has made podcasts around the world to explain his naive approach to making “Oppenheimer” the way movies were made in the ’50s. “So there are two completely opposite ends of the spectrum that survive and thrive at the same time. That’s why I believe the film will be around for a long, long time,” he told an enthusiastic audience at the Marina Bay Sands Grand Ballroom.
Chan’s latest film, “The Road Not Taken,” premiered in Toronto. “My new movie is about Alzheimer’s, but it’s not really just about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a broken family going through every kind of problem a family can go through,” he said.
The story centers on his wife, who, in the middle of divorce proceedings, suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and no longer remembers the divorce, and her mind flashes back to when they were in love in their 20s. A stern grandfather and his relationship with the couple’s Generation Z daughters complete the picture. The girl in the film is 20 years old, the same age as Chan’s own daughter, who is training to be an actress. Chan’s partner is actor Sandra Ng.
The English title comes from a Robert Frost poem that Chan calls his life motto, while the Chinese title, “Ming Tian Hui Geng Hao”, means “Tomorrow Will Be Better”. “There really is no right way,” he said. “Right or wrong, what matters is how you walk on this path. You do the right thing.”
While researching the film, Chan visited an Alzheimer’s care facility in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan province, where he learned the eight-word Mandarin phrase he uses to sum up his career: Go with the flow and know when to stop. In the ’90s, while he was making romantic comedies for the United Filmmakers Organization (UFO), which he co-founded, gangster films and wuxia dominated Hong Kong screens. “We weren’t exactly going with the flow, but we somehow made it flow,” he said.
The same flow carried him to “The Warlords,” which he later described as his greatest film. “I never thought I would make a historical, epic war movie with Jet Li. This has never been on my agenda in my life,” Chan said.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of “Comrades,” which was Chan’s seventh feature film at the age of 34 and was about Hong Kong between 1985 and 1995. He left Hong Kong on Christmas Eve 1996, and it was only after returning from America nearly two and a half years later that he realized how deeply the film had influenced filmmakers in mainland China, South Korea, and Southeast Asia; Even so, he said, he was barely able to get a return on his investment.
“This film gave me a cinematic life for the next 30 years, until now,” Chan said.
He said that 90% of people remembered him for this one film, “as if I didn’t do better afterwards” and that he found it a blessing but also a spell he wanted to break.
Chan also said that the 90s were the beginning of the decline of Hong Kong cinema rather than its golden age, and described the DreamWorks movie “Love Letter” as a difficult experience. He said that he grew up Thai-Chinese and felt like an outsider even in Hong Kong, and that working cross-culturally did not surprise him. What he struggled with was a corporate system where it was unclear who was making the decisions and a reliance on test demonstrations that he likened to today’s algorithms. He said he was probably the first, if not the only, Hong Kong filmmaker to make a non-action film within the US studio system.
“I probably would have been better off if I had gone to America or Hollywood with my knowledge of film, marketing and dealing with corporate affairs,” Chan said. “I was very young then, very naive.”
Asked later by an audience member how he handled censorship in mainland China, Chan said: “It’s very, very difficult to deal with a company. And if I can get away with that, I can get away with anything.” He added that budget, star, studio or censorship limitations push filmmakers to be more creative.
After Hollywood, Chan founded Applause Pictures, a pan-Asian venture that produced 10 films, mostly horror, in two and a half years. His output included “The Eye” series and “Three” omnibus horror films, which brought together directors such as Park Chan-wook, Miike Takashi, Kim Jee-woon and Fruit Chan. He also executive produced “One Fine Spring Day” for Korean director Hur Jin-ho, who directed SGIFF’s opening film “The Assassin(s),” whose first film, “Christmas in August,” he admired so much. However, no investors could be found for the planned three-part love story between Hur and Japan’s Iwai Shunji.
“If we continue this pan-Asian effort, I’ll have to make horror movies all my life,” Chan said of his 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 handled a scene without ups and downs. “I usually don’t fix the problem for them. I make them fix it over and over again,” Chan said, adding that after calling everything in the house “wonderful,” he doesn’t do the same to his writers.
He cited the nine writers on “The Warlords” and said screenwriters joked that the writers of their movies couldn’t fit in a van. “I milk the writer until he dies, then I milk another writer,” he said. “So the writing community doesn’t really like me very much. But making films isn’t about being well-liked.”
Although he is considered a genre enthusiast, Chan said the same concerns apply to his own work, touching on the love triangles in his debut album “Alan & Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye,” “Comrades,” “Maybe Love” and even “War Lords,” which he calls a love triangle between three brothers.
“Making every movie is about answering some of the life questions that I had at that stage, at that point in my life,” he said. “So in a way, I’ve been making the same movie in my head for the last 36 years.”