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While researching “The Road Not Taken,” his drama premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, celebrated filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun visited what he calls one of the finest Alzheimer’s care facilities in Chengdu, known for managing patients without their condition rapidly worsening. He came away with eight words he says shaped nearly every decision on the film: shun shi er wei, shi ke er zhi – go with the flow, know when to stop.
The facility offered the phrase as guidance for families of dementia patients: don’t correct them, don’t argue, follow wherever their sense of reality has drifted, but recognize the point at which you have to let go. Chan says he ended up applying the same rule to himself as a director on the film, which stars Zhou Xun as a television host confronting early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“Go with the flow, know when to stop, because that’s how an Alzheimer patient’s family should treat an Alzheimer patient,” Chan tells Variety. “Not just for Alzheimer patients, but also for a director.”
The project didn’t start as his to shape. It arrived to Chan as a completed script that had been in development since the COVID-19 pandemic, before he made “She’s Got No Name.” He read it, liked it and stepped back, intending only to produce while another director took over. Several filmmakers cycled through the project over the following years. Once “She’s Got No Name” wrapped, the producers and an already-cast ensemble came back to him. Chan rewrote the script from scratch, keeping a single line from the original draft, and worked through it with an assistant because his written Chinese, he says, trails his spoken fluency (his formal Chinese schooling stopped in the sixth grade).
That rewrite is also where the motto’s other half showed up: knowing what not to do. Chan says he was determined not to turn the material into an issue movie about a disease.
“I’m very much against putting an issue, or an illness, or a societal issue and being preachy,” Chan says. “I would really want to explore a disintegrating family relationship movie, and how something that tragic that happens to a person sometimes could actually heal the family.”
That extended to how the illness first surfaces. Rather than open with a dramatic medical event, Chan introduces it through an ordinary slip: Jia Jia, a talk-show host played by Zhou, forgets the term “AI” during a live discussion and substitutes “artificial talent” instead. Chan says the choice was tied to a broader decision to root the film in the patient’s own experience rather than a family’s or caretaker’s view of her.
“What really interested me was the fact that we wanted to get into the perspective of the patient,” Chan says.
That perspective device runs through the whole film, beginning with a leaking faucet that distorts, in Jia Jia’s mind, into a flooded parking garage. It also produced the film’s most difficult creative decision. Chan’s original ending pushed the “go with the flow” idea as far as it could go: he cast four unknown actors to silently replace the film’s four leads in the final scene, visualizing Jia Jia’s perception of her own family as strangers. He shot it. It didn’t survive the edit.
“It didn’t work, because it was jarring for the audience,” Chan says.
That was the “know when to stop” half taking over. Chan returned to set and reshot the ending, instead having Jia Jia recite lines from a decade-old broadcast while addressing her real family as if they were unfamiliar to her, arriving at the same idea through performance rather than a literal cast switch.
The same instinct shaped how Chan directed Zhou, who reunites with him 21 years after starring in his 2005 musical “Perhaps Love.” Chan says he wasn’t certain the actor — typically cast in warmer, more innocent roles — could carry a character who is cranky, financially strained and dismissive of her daughter before her diagnosis surfaces. Rather than push her toward a harder-edged performance, he let her find it herself.
“She’s still that innocent girl,” Chan says. “It’s God’s gift to her as a person, but I’m not sure that helps her as an actress.” He adds that Zhou handled the character’s harsher moments without needing direction to get there, and that the production’s average of two takes per shot reflected a cast he found unusually in sync from the start.
Chan applied similar logic to Jia Jia’s profession. In the script he inherited, the character sold products as an online influencer, a livelihood Chan considered too narrowly local to the Chinese market for the film he wanted to make.
“That would not be a Peter Chan movie,” Chan says.
He rewrote her as a television talk-show host instead, a change he says let him identify with the character on his own terms. “As a talk-show host, I could identify with that character, because I’m a director,” Chan says. “Everything she says on a program is about her take on the world, or on humanity, or on society, or on lives.”
Chan extended the same casting logic to Tian Zhuangzhuang, the Fifth Generation director with a handful of acting credits, whom he cast as the father rather than reach for a more conventional stern-patriarch type. Tian initially turned the role down, telling Chan he wasn’t a trained actor and could only play what he already was. Chan told him to hold a stern face and let the part do the rest. “I want him to be someone that you ended up liking,” Chan says of the character.
The production moved fast by Chan’s standards, wrapping in 32 days against a scheduled 40, with no days off, a pace Chan attributes partly to the absence of union-mandated rest periods on Chinese sets. He estimates the budget at a fifth to a sixth of his previous film’s, a scale he says gave him more room to make the movie on his own terms.
The motto extended to the film’s release strategy as well. With no major festival campaign planned beyond Toronto, Chan says he pushed specifically for a world premiere there ahead of any release in China, wary of how quickly social media backlash can define a film’s reception regardless of its quality.
“Social media frenzy could kill a film, and the audience would judge the movie based on one line of a post,” Chan says.
He adds that private screenings in several countries have surfaced a consistent response: much of the audience has some personal connection to Alzheimer’s, whether through a family member or fear of it themselves.
“It’s a movie that people could relate to, wherever you are, because it’s an illness that we’re facing, increasingly, in numbers,” Chan says.
English (US) ·