Tony Leung Chiu-wai told a full house at the Shanghai International Film Festival that his restrained performance style demands the full cinematic experience to be felt, speaking at a masterclass following a screening of his film “Silent Friend.”
“Sometimes it might just be something on my fingers, you must watch very carefully, and it must be in cinema,” Leung said.
The actor, serving as jury president of the festival’s Golden Goblet Awards competition, spoke at length about his collaboration with Hungarian writer-director Ildikó Enyedi on “Silent Friend,” which traces a relationship across three generations of scholars and a more than 200-year-old ginkgo tree. Leung admitted the script did not immediately draw him in.
“In fact, after I read the script she sent, I really wasn’t that interested in it,” he said. “The script was a three-chapter story; I could not imagine what it would be like as a film. Also, that was before the time I started to learn more about plants, so to me it was like, just plant, humans and animals’ background.”
What changed his mind was a video call with Enyedi after he had watched her previous films “On My Body and Soul” and “The Story of My Wife.” Leung said he trusted instinct over analysis when assessing potential collaborators.
