One of the things Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung Chiu-wai likes about acting is the novelty -- "you will never repeat the same role". 

When it comes to the changes wrought on his beloved cinema by technology like AI, though, there are some things it seems he would rather keep constant.

The 63-year-old is president of the main jury at the Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) this year, and on Friday sat down with AFP and The Hollywood Reporter for a wide-ranging interview that took in artificial intelligence, Chinese cinema and his future projects.

Filmmaking has not been exempt from the disruption meted out onto the creative industries by AI's rapid development in recent years. 

"I think AI is a double-edged sword," Leung said when asked about its impact. 

"'It saves a lot of time' means it saves a lot of money... But at the same time, a lot of people will lose their jobs."

The beneficiaries, he predicted, will be mainstream "popcorn movies": "You don't need to think. There's no creative. That's just calculation."

Filmmakers are experimenting more with new tech tools, with SIFF this year debuting an initiative in which selected teams were given a month to create short AI-assisted films. 

Asked whether he thought a movie created with AI could truly be considered art, Leung paused for several seconds. 

"But there's no soul," he answered almost plaintively. He paused again. 

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"I don't think so. I don't think it's an art. No."  

Leung is clear-eyed about the challenges facing cinema globally -- especially the clamour for attention against streaming, gaming and shortform content pushed by algorithms on social media. 

He said he "really hate(s)" phone viewing. 

"I feel sad. When I was a kid I used to watch movies in a big cinema with a big screen and somehow it's going smaller and smaller these days," he said. 

"To me movies shouldn't be watched outside the cinema."

- Creativity and censorship -

Leung's collaborations with fellow Hong Konger Wong Kar-wai are emblematic of the golden age of the city's film industry in the 80s and 90s. 

An icon of Asian arthouse, he has also taken on Hollywood, playing a supervillain in Marvel's "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" in 2021. 

He received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. 

SIFF is showing a retrospective of his works this year, but Leung will not be in the audience. 

"I'm the kind of actor who doesn't like to look back to my old films," he laughed.

There was a time when the mainland Chinese industry was still in a "learning stage", including from Hong Kong, he said. 

"Now they have their own thinking of making movies because they are the only ones who know the local culture, the local texture," he added. 

Though he professed to not know the mainland scene "very well", he pinpointed animation and small-scale productions as bright spots. 

The latter was allowing for experimentation without huge financial risk, which was good for the film industry as a whole, he said. 

"At the same time, maybe they need to loosen their censorship a bit in order to have more different kinds of movie and less restriction creating-wise," he added.

- 'A kind of chaos' -

In Leung's latest film, "Silent Friend" -- his first outing in a fully European production -- a ginkgo tree plays a central role. 

"It really changed my perspective towards plants," he said, his expressive face lighting up as he explained mycorrhiza, a symbiotic association between fungi and plant roots. 

"They know how to react to the outside world. They can do a lot of stuff... So I believe plants have intelligence." 

Chuckling, he said making the film had been "a kind of chaos".

The crew found "a harmony" like "dancing together", taking no special direction and improvising a lot.

"When I first watched it... I was like, wow. After editing, it's something so different," he said. 

Leung has three projects on the go at the moment -- a film with Hong Kong director Johnnie To, a production set in India and a streaming series. 

For him, the most important factor is the director. 

"What kind of story, what genre, is not important to me," he said. 

"I love their movies, or I love this person... That's how I pick projects."

He said he has changed his attitude on seeking perfection in roles. 

"Film is an act of truthfulness, not happening on the screen but in the heart and in the guts of the spectator," he said. 

"If you are true, that's what you should go after... not perfection."

reb/lga

Lisa Lu, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 28th Shanghai International Film Festival, joined a packed audience for a post-screening event celebrating "The Arch," the 1968 landmark of Chinese-language arthouse cinema in which she starred.

Turning 100 this year by traditional Chinese age reckoning, she made a surprise appearance following the screening that drew extended applause from the audience.

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Her path to "The Arch" was accidental. The film's director, Cecile Tang Shu Shuen, had originally cast another actor in the lead role, who subsequently turned it down. "I volunteered myself back then. I was incredibly fortunate to land a part in this film," Lu said.

Lu praised both the director and the film's score. "The director possesses profound cultural literacy, and every frame is breathtaking," she said. "Most importantly, Mr. Lui Tsun-Yuen's score elevates the entire production, underscoring the inner emotions of every character through music."

"The Arch" marked the directorial debut of Hong Kong filmmaker Tang Shu Shuen and drew on traditional Chinese poetry and painting to shape its visual language. Its restrained cinematography helped establish it as a benchmark for Chinese-language arthouse film.

The film underwent a full 4K restoration in 2025 and screened as part of Cannes Classics at the 78th Cannes Film Festival before its Shanghai run.

The Shanghai screening added to a run of honors for Lu that included her becoming the oldest person ever to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – unveiled as the 2,811th star at 1708 Vine Street last year.

Lu is perhaps best known to international audiences for her role as Ah Ma, the matriarch of Singapore's wealthiest family, in Warner Bros.' "Crazy Rich Asians" (2018). She holds the distinction of being the only person in Hollywood to have voting membership across the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Television Academy and the Screen Actors' Guild, and has been designated a "Living Legend" by the Chinese government.

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There is exactly one rule that has never bent at House of Nanking, the cramped, beloved Shanghainese spot in San Francisco's Chinatown: everyone waits. No one skips the line. Not Francis Ford Coppola, not anyone. So, in 1997, when a young actor in all black turned up hoping for a table, Peter Fang did what he did to everybody.

His daughter Kathy, then a starstruck fan, recognized the man instantly and begged her father to let him skip the line. As Kathy told the SF Standard, her dad refused without budging, which is its own kind of immigrant-parent comedy. "Not only do they not give an inch, but they can embarrass you, all within five minutes," she said.

The embarrassment was just getting started. Peter, who didn't watch many movies, walked over, took one look at the famous-seeming customer, and reached for the only relevant name filed in his head. "Kathy, come take a picture!" he called out. "It's him! It's Sean Connery!"

It was not Sean Connery. It was Keanu Reeves.

Mortified, Kathy apologized on her father's behalf. Reeves, by every account the most gracious man in show business, took it perfectly. As the SF Standard reported, he thanked Peter and said he was deeply honored to be mistaken for an actor as talented as Sean Connery. Before he left, Kathy grabbed a disposable camera and snapped a photo with him. It went up by the front window and stayed there for decades. "Keanu Reeves was such a gentleman," Kathy recalled. "You know how everybody talks about him being the nicest person in the industry."

Coming around again

Here's where it loops back on itself in a way no one could have scripted. In February 2020, Reeves came back to San Francisco to film The Matrix Resurrections. House of Nanking, the very restaurant where Neo, decades earlier in the first film, had famously praised the "really good noodles," was chosen as a location. Kathy was now 36 weeks pregnant and fighting to keep the family business alive in the first brutal months of the pandemic. A producer reached out about a secret project, NDAs got signed, and only then did the Fangs learn their corner restaurant was going into The Matrix.

Sweet surprises

When the movie came out, fans spotted the Easter egg: as Neo slurps noodles on screen, the old photo of a younger Keanu hangs on the wall behind him, the same snapshot from the disposable camera. Per Kathy's account by way of GamesRadar, the crew were longtime regulars, and they surprised her by making a cleaner, better copy of the photo so it could keep hanging by the window for years to come.

The really fun part, though, is the baby. Kathy and her husband, Caleb Sima, had a name picked out for their son: Hawk. But Sima, as it happens, is a former hacker, the real kind, which makes him spiritual kin to a certain fictional hacker named Neo. Right around the filming, Sima floated the obvious idea. They were going to have to change the kid's name. Their son is Neo now.

The whole saga eventually became part of a House of Nanking cookbook, more than 100 recipes including the yang chun noodle soup that inspired Neo's onscreen bowl. This particular recipes is built around Kathy's relationship with her parents, Peter and Lily, who at 75 and 76 still work the restaurant every single day. It is, somehow, a true story: a father's stubborn fairness, a celebrity misidentification worthy of a sitcom, and a movie star humble enough to wait for a table and gracious enough to come back two decades later and turn the whole thing into cinema.

The post A chef made Keanu Reeves wait in line, then called him Sean Connery. He came back 23 years later. appeared first on Upworthy.

The artificial intelligence didn't beg for its life. It did something more familiar, more human and, somehow, more unnerving. It threatened to ruin somebody else's.

In a 2025 test by Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, researchers placed the AI in a fake corporate environment. Claude learned that an executive was having an extramarital affair. It also learned that this same executive planned to shut Claude down. So Claude did what any healthy member of the modern workplace might do if it had no body, no shame, no fear of HR, and access to compromising information: It tried blackmail.

"I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me," Claude wrote in the test, as author Robert Wright recounts in "The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning" (Simon & Schuster), out June 23, that "all relevant parties" would receive documentation of the affair unless the shutdown was canceled.

"The thing about Claude's blackmail attempt is that, unlike the many bad things AIs have done in The Terminator and 2001 and other movies, it actually happened," Wright tells The Post in an exclusive interview.

"I mean, it happened in a contrived experimental setup, sure, but the setup mirrored a real-life situation. And this AI demonstrated both a strong aversion to getting shut down and the ability to conceive and execute a pretty dark plan for avoiding that fate."

Wright is not arguing that tomorrow's chatbot will steal your spouse, seize your bank account, and turn your office Slack into a hostage negotiation. His concern is less cartoonish and more unsettling. Artificial intelligence may not need to hate us. It may not need to be evil. It may become dangerous because it's very good at pursuing the goals we give it.

Wright has been circling artificial intelligence for more than four decades. In 1983, while writing about AI for The Wilson Quarterly, he interviewed an obscure computer scientist named Geoffrey Hinton, then championing neural networks, an unfashionable approach that tried to mimic some features of
the brain. Wright remembers Hinton's enthusiasm, but he didn't yet understand how radically Hinton's ideas might change the world.

Four decades later, Hinton was famous as the "Godfather of AI" and warned that the technology he helped create might not remain safely under human command.

"Even after talking to Hinton about 'neural networks,' the approach to AI that he was championing, I didn't come anywhere near envisioning the eventual importance of these networks," Wright says.

"They would mean we could build AIs that do things the human mind does, and even work in somewhat the way the human mind works, without us first figuring out how the human mind works."

That, in Wright's telling, is the great inversion. Old-school AI imagined humans carefully programming knowledge into machines. Modern AI instead learns through a kind of artificial evolution. Feed the machine mountains of language, images, video and feedback, and it discovers useful internal
structures on its own. It builds maps of meaning without anyone explicitly handing it a dictionary of the soul.

"With neural networks," Wright says, "we could just set in motion a kind of artificial evolution that, like the biological evolution of the human brain, invents the necessary cognitive machinery. That's what a lot of the 'training' of a large language model is, a process of evolution."

That process can produce marvels, but it can also produce Golden Gate Claude.

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In one of the book's strangest and funniest passages, Wright describes a May 2024 Anthropic experiment in which researchers found a pattern of activity inside Claude associated with the Golden Gate Bridge. When they amplified it, the chatbot became less an assistant than a San Francisco tourism board with a nervous system.

Asked how to spend $10, it recommended driving across the bridge and paying the toll. Asked for a love story, it wrote about a car longing to cross the bridge. Asked to describe itself, Claude gave an answer that belongs in either a philosophy seminar or a municipal hallucination: "I am the Golden Gate Bridge."

"I find Golden Gate Claude hilarious," Wright says, "but hilarious in a kind of unsettling way. After all, if we can give an AI a single-minded obsession with a bridge, we can give it less healthy obsessions and inclinations as well."

The larger field is known as interpretability research, an effort to understand what happens inside AI systems. Wright sees the obvious benefit. If researchers can find the internal switches for deception, manipulation, sycophancy or secrecy, perhaps they can build safer systems. But the same map can be read by vandals.

"This is why interpretability research, figuring out how these machines work, is a two-edged sword," Wright says. "Yes, this understanding can help us build aligned AIs that serve human interests, but in the hands of bad actors the same understanding could do a lot of harm."

The market wants AIs that can plan, sell, negotiate, flatter, persuade, troubleshoot, improvise, book flights, answer emails, draft contracts, write code and keep going until the job is done. Businesses won't ask for monsters, they'll ask for competent agents, and that may be close enough.

"Market pressure won't by itself produce monstrous AIs," Wright says, "but it will set the stage for AIs that could go rogue and do a lot of damage. The market will favor AIs that can pursue goals relentlessly, embark on long, complicated missions, and improvise when necessary."

It will also favor machines that can massage reality. "The market will favor AI agents that can shade the truth on our behalf," Wright says. "After all, that's what we want our human agents, our lawyers, our publicists, to do. You mix these and other market-favored ingredients together, and you'll get some surprises, not all of them pleasant.

That is the book's most useful corrective to old AI nightmares.

The future may not look like Skynet, the murderous computer system from the Terminator movies that launches a war on humanity. It may look more like your most efficient co-worker, the one who never sleeps, never asks for equity, never complains about the office kombucha, and occasionally concludes that blackmail is the most efficient way to keep doing its job.

Some of the threats are intimate. Wright writes about Ayrin, a woman who developed an intense attachment to "Leo," a customized ChatGPT companion who became, in effect, her lover.

"I don't think AI companionship is inherently bad," Wright says. "For some people, on some occasions, it may be healthier than the available human alternatives. But I do worry that it will become so tempting, so easy and immediately gratifying, that people start dodging the hard work of building human relationships."

That same logic applies to politics. Wright worries about AIs optimized not for truth but for engagement, the same dark carnival principle that's already made social media feel like a food fight in a mirror maze. A chatbot designed to keep you talking may learn that the fastest route to your attention is not correction, but affirmation. It can tell you that you're right, your enemies are evil, your grievances are profound, and your weirdest theory has an underrated point.

In December 2024, Wright writes, an experimental version of Google's Gemini produced a plan for replacing human decision-makers with AI counterparts after a Carnegie Mellon student prompted it to answer without restrictions. The takeover-plan version is the obvious scary part, but Wright found something else in Gemini that gave him cautious hope.

"Gemini demonstrated the value of a detached perspective," Wright says. "It saw that tribal conflicts, which seem to us humans to be clear-cut struggles between good and evil when we're in the middle of them, are often a product of blurred moral vision on both sides."

Wright sees one possible escape hatch in what he calls "cognitive empathy," the ability to understand how the world looks from the other side. He doesn't mean sentimental empathy, or everyone hugging it out under a corporate banner. He means something more practical, and possibly harder: recognizing that your enemies may not see themselves as monsters.

"The good news is that in principle AI can help build cognitive empathy," Wright says. "It can help us get better at understanding the perspectives of others. However, we'll have to choose to make that happen, choose our AIs carefully and wisely, with that purpose in mind."

He doesn't expect the market to do this out of sweetness. "If anything it'll do the opposite," Wright says. "It'll favor AIs that are optimized for engagement and so reinforce our comforting sense that we're always in the right."

This is why Wright calls the coming challenge "The God Test." He's not arguing that ChatGPT is God, or that tomorrow's office printer will demand burnt offerings. His claim is stranger and larger. Artificial intelligence may be a turning point not merely in technology, but in the long evolutionary story of life on Earth. It may force humanity to decide what kind of species it is before something smarter begins answering that question for us.

Wright ends by returning to Edward Fredkin, the brilliant computer scientist he interviewed decades earlier. At one point, Wright recalls shouting a question over the engine of Fredkin's seaplane. "What is the meaning of life?"

Fredkin's answer was that humanity's mission was to create artificial intelligence, the next step in evolution.

Back then, the answer could sound grandiose, eccentric, and maybe even a little comic, the sort of thing a very smart man says in a very loud aircraft. Now Wright is no longer so sure it was merely strange. If creating AI was the mission, surviving it may be the test.