Peter Chan Draws the Line at AI-Generated Content, Defends the Feature Film

Peter Chan Ho-sun, the director of "Comrades: Almost a Love Story" and "The Warlords," says he will probably use AI in his filmmaking but "definitely not AIGC" — AI-generated content — and that the two-hour feature film will survive the rise of short-form vertical dramas, at least in his lifetime.

Chan was speaking at an In Conversation event at the Singapore International Film Festival, held in the Grand Ballroom at Marina Bay Sands. Asked by an audience member whether he had ever doubted his decision to enter the film industry, he didn't hedge. "This is probably the toughest time for film, but do I believe this medium is going to be lost and gone to short-form entertainment? No," he said.

What does AI actually change for him?

Chan draws a practical line between technique and creation. He compares AI to CGI and special effects — tools the industry already uses, and which, he noted, have relied on AI for years without calling it that. "Anything that helps me make movies, I welcome. But they won't know art. Movies are still made by people," he said.

His case for the feature film rests on a two-ended market. Young audiences with shrinking attention spans are turning to short and vertical dramas — made for phones — while at the opposite end, people listen to podcasts for hours. He pointed to Christopher Nolan, who did podcasts around the world to explain his purist approach of making "Oppenheimer" the way movies were made in the 1950s. "So there are two completely opposite ends of the spectrum that are surviving and thriving simultaneously. So I believe that movie will be around for a long, long time," Chan said.

The new film and the 30-year shadow

Chan's latest film, "The Road Not Taken," premiered in Toronto. "My new movie is about Alzheimer's, but it's really not just about Alzheimer's. It's about a broken family that has all sorts of problems a family could have," he said. The story follows a couple mid-divorce; the wife, with early-onset Alzheimer's, no longer remembers the divorce and drifts back mentally to when they fell in love in their 20s. A harsh grandfather and the couple's Gen Z daughter — who, at 20, is the same age as Chan's own daughter with actor Sandra Ng — complete the picture.

The English title comes from the Robert Frost poem, which Chan called his life motto. The Chinese title, "Ming Tian Hui Geng Hao," translates as "Tomorrow Will Be Better." "There's really no right path," he said. "Whether it's right or wrong, it's all about how you walk it. You make it right."

This year marks the 30th anniversary of "Comrades," his seventh feature, made at 34. He said 90% of people remember him for that one film, "as if I have not done better afterwards" — a blessing but also a spell he wanted to break. He left Hong Kong on Christmas Eve 1996, and only after returning from America about two and a half years later did he grasp how deeply the film had affected filmmakers in mainland China, South Korea and Southeast Asia, though it probably only barely recouped its investment.

Hollywood, horror and milking writers

Chan described his DreamWorks film "The Love Letter" as difficult — not because of working across cultures, but because of a corporate system where it was unclear who called the shots, and reliance on test screenings he likened to today's algorithms. "Had I gone to America or Hollywood with the knowledge that I have of film and marketing and dealing with corporate, I probably would have fared better," he said. "I was too young then, too naive."

After Hollywood came Applause Pictures, a pan-Asian venture that made 10 films in two and a half years, mostly horror: "The Eye" franchise, the "Three" omnibus films with Park Chan-wook, Miike Takashi, Kim Jee-woon and Fruit Chan, plus an executive-producer credit on Hur Jin-ho's "One Fine Spring Day." A planned three-part love story with Hur and Iwai Shunji found no investors, and Chan moved to mainland China, starting with the 2005 musical "Perhaps Love."

On censorship, he was blunt: "Dealing with a corporate is very, very difficult. And if I can survive that, I can survive anything." He added that limits of budget, stars, studios or censorship push filmmakers to be more creative.

His method with writers is equally unsentimental — he credited nine writers on "The Warlords," and screenwriters joke that his films' writers wouldn't fit in a minibus. "I milk the writer to death, and then I milk another writer," he said. "But making movies is not about being well-liked."

Whatever the genre, Chan sees one through-line: love triangles in "Alan & Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye," "Comrades," "Perhaps Love" and even "The Warlords," which he called a love triangle between three brothers. "In a way, I've been making the same movie in my mind in the last 36 years," he said.