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. 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. 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.
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.
It didn’t survive the edit. 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.
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