Award-winning Hong Kong actor Tony Leung (梁朝偉) yesterday joined Hungarian film director Ildiko Enyedi at SPOT-Taipei to promote their new German philosophical drama, Stille Freundin (Silent Friend).
The film, written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, stars Leung alongside a stellar cast including Lea Seydoux, Martin Wuttke, Sylvester Groth and Luna Wedler.
It explores the connection between humans and nature through three stories set in 1908, 1972 and 2020.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
The timelines are connected by a central focal point, a ginkgo tree, and take place in a botanical garden in the old German university town of Marburg.
Leung plays Tony Wong (黃志雄), a neuroscientist from Hong Kong who works as a professor in the town and uses advanced neurological technology to try to read the emotions of the ancient ginkgo tree during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Leung returned to Taiwan for a visit for the first time in three years with his actress wife Carina Lau (劉嘉玲) on Monday to promote the film, which is to be officially released in Taiwan on Friday.
The actor, who has multiple best actor accolades from a wide range of international film awards, shared his preparation process with reporters in Taipei yesterday.
“I could’ve actually been ready to play the character in three months,” he said. “But I spent six months instead, as it was like [a big meal] you don’t want to consume too quickly.
“You want to enjoy it slowly, and that was the philosophy I went in with in this project. I am lucky to have met such a good director,” he said.
Both Ildiko Enyedi and Leung are known to be very introverted people.
When asked how introverts work together on such an undertaking, Ildiko Enyedi said the fact that the crew was small helped, as it was easy to turn the camaraderie into a family rather than just a work group.
On Monday, as the keynote speaker at a Golden Horse Master Class held as part of the Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival from Friday last week to Sunday, Leung shared his experience working with acclaimed Asian directors such as Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai (王家衛).
Leung said his experience with Hou in the 1989 classic Taiwanese film A City of Sadness (悲情城市) changed the way he behaves and performs, such as reading novels as a hobby.
Reading also became key to Leung’s ethics as an actor enabling him to get closer to his subject matter, with the actor revealing he read books on neural science, botany and philosophy provided by Ildiko Enyedi for his latest work.
The 63-year-old actor said that after 40 years in the industry, he is in the twilight of his career, which encourages him to get out of his comfort zone and work with unfamiliar crews such as the one for Silent Friend and his 2021 Marvel epic Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
“Now is the final phase of my performing life,” Leung said. “[I have] nothing to fear, and I want to try more new things.”
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