Key Takeaways
At a Busan International Film Festival press conference, Fan Bingbing said Lee Chang-dong's film Possible Love left her shocked all over again by the power of acting.
She said AI short-form dramas often feel too uniform, with faces that are hard to remember, and argued that human emotion and lived experience still cannot be replaced by machines.
Fan also discussed her BIFF films Mad Fathers Diary and She Said, and chose Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden for the festival's Carte Blanche program.
It is rare for an actor with three decades of experience to say another performer has shocked her back into admiration.
That was Fan Bingbing's reaction after watching Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love at the Busan International Film Festival, and she used the moment to make a larger point about artificial intelligence and acting.
In an era when technology is rapidly reshaping visual storytelling, her defense of human performance sounded less like nostalgia than a firm belief in the accumulated life inside an actor's body.
Why Fan Bingbing was moved by acting again
Fan said she was deeply impressed by the performances in Possible Love, which she watched at the Toronto International Film Festival. What stayed with her was not a flashy premise but the density that comes only when a director and actors know each other well. Her reference to Lee Chang-dong was not incidental. Having worked with Korean filmmakers, she seemed to see in Korean cinema a freedom that lets actors move more naturally and push emotion deeper into a scene.
What stands out in her reaction is that she did not praise a single technical flourish. She was struck by the feeling that the actors were swimming freely inside the film. Acting is not just about delivering lines; it is about how alive a performer feels within a scene. If it is only imitation, technology can catch up quickly. But the tiny turns of tension, hesitation, and emotional temperature still emerge most clearly from a human being who has lived through time.
What AI can imitate, and what it still misses
Fan said she sometimes watches AI-generated short-form dramas, but finds the characters difficult to remember because the faces look too similar. That observation gets to one of generative AI's strengths and weaknesses. It can produce images quickly and at scale, with polished expressions and near-identical aesthetics. But that sameness often fails to leave a mark on the viewer.
For Fan, an actor's power comes from what is imperfect and specific. She insisted that the emotions that appear in human performance, along with the experience and expressive habits built up over a life, cannot be replaced by AI. That is not really a rejection of technology so much as a statement about what acting is for. Audiences do not go to the movies only to consume smooth images. They also want surprise, discomfort, and silence that cannot be fully predicted. AI may improve, but it is still hard to believe it can reproduce those irregularities because they come not from data alone, but from lived experience.
How her festival choices reflect her taste as an actor
This year at BIFF, Fan appeared in Wayne Wang's feature Mad Fathers Diary and emerging Singaporean director Evann Tan's short She Said. Mad Fathers Diary adapts the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki and turns the story of a stroke-stricken man and the Chinese daughter-in-law who cares for him into a black comedy about desire, aging, and death. Fan called it a meaningful work because it takes on serious themes such as age, illness, mortality, and desire. It also challenges the common assumption that desire fades naturally with old age.
That view lines up with how she chooses roles. Fan said the most important question is whether she can have fun while working. Good characters and scripts matter, but she also wants to play with new characters and directors in a way that keeps her in good condition and reduces stress. It sounds light, but it is actually a strict principle: in an industry that can wear actors down, longevity depends on how the work is done as much as on talent.
Why she chose The Handmaiden
Fan also took part in BIFF's Carte Blanche program, which asks film and culture figures to choose a work that has deeply influenced their own artistic world. This year she selected Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden. She said the women filmed by Park's camera are dangerous yet free, and that their clarity, boldness, and vitality drew her in.
In the end, Fan's remarks point to a single idea. She is not dismissing AI outright; she simply believes there is still a clear boundary it cannot cross. That boundary is not technical skill but experience. Faces age, memory shifts, and emotion refuses to behave as expected. Those disruptions are what make an actor an actor. The shock she felt watching Possible Love and the vitality she found in The Handmaiden lead to the same conclusion: no matter how precise moving images become, human acting still carries traces of human time.
