Shu Qi arrived at the Singapore International Film Festival with the clarity of someone closing a long, emotionally taxing cycle. Her directorial debut “Girl” opened the festival the previous night, marking what she described as “the final stop” of a journey that has stretched from Venice to Busan and across two years of discussion. In Singapore, sitting with festival ambassador Rebecca Lim, Shu was unguarded, reflective and darkly funny about the pressures and revelations that came with stepping behind the camera for the first time.
“I’ve been talking about ‘Girl’ since 2023,” she said, adding with mock-weariness that all she wants now is to “go home and sleep.” But the conversation quickly veered into what comes next. Shu openly acknowledged that she has thought about continuing the thematic arc. “I really did think about ‘Girl, Woman, Lady,’” she said. “This is something I’m planning.” By her own count, a film every 10 years would “take me into my eighties.”
She also addressed the question that has followed the film since Busan: the ending. Shu confirmed that she has considered cutting a director’s version. At Busan, she became too emotional to answer a question about it — not because she disagreed with her team, she clarified, but because she was unexpectedly moved. She explained that her original instinct was to end the story when the father character crashes his motorbike. “If there’s a chance, I might cut a director’s version,” she said.
Shu traced the film’s long development, which stretched over more than a decade. She recently rediscovered her earliest draft from 2013. “Every shot you see was something I had already gone through in my mind many times,” she said. Her years as an actor gave her a strategy when she felt overwhelmed: “I just acted the role of a director.”
Her mentor, Hou Hsiao-hsien, was the catalyst. “Without director Hou, there would be no ‘Girl,’” she said. He asked her three separate times if she would consider directing — the third time convinced her. Shu also offered a rare update on his health: Hou is now ill and retired, with his family requesting distance and privacy, though he remains “very healthy and happy” in his daily life.
When discussing the shoot, Shu spoke at length about how she built the world of late-1980s Taiwan for her actors. Young lead Bai Xiao-Ying gave up her mobile phone for three months to understand what childhood felt like in that era. For the mother role, played by 9m88, Shu recreated the textures of daily domestic life down to the switches, dish racks and the way a kettle was handled. She recalled watching 9m88 clean the entire onscreen home for a long take — a moment that made her unexpectedly tear up behind the monitor. “That was when I realised how hard being a housewife is.”
Shu’s candour extended to the hardest parts of the film: childhood trauma, cycles of violence and the inherited wounds that shape three generations – grandmother, mother and daughter. She said she only realised after completing the film that the mother, too, “was once a girl,” a shift that allowed her to understand her own parents “a little more.”
She also addressed how she handles scrutiny, delivering the line that drew the loudest reaction: “I ignore them. Life is your own. You make your own choices.” She reads comments, she said, but refuses to be ruled by them.
Humor threaded through the evening. Shu described herself as “a positive person… maybe a little hyperactive,” laughed about the relief of not dieting or wearing makeup as a director, and recounted her long record of personal reinvention — running away from home as a teenager, moving alone to Hong Kong, relearning Mandarin to work in China. “If I think of something I must do, I immediately execute it,” she said.
One of the night’s most unexpected reveals came when Shu described scouting a bridge for the film — only to realise it was the same one she walked across in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Millennium Mambo.” The symmetry startled her. “It’s destiny,” she said. “A connection with director Hou.”
As the session closed, Lim thanked her for the courage reflected on screen. Shu, in turn, said she hopes “Girl” gives anyone living with pain the strength to move forward: “Even if life is hard now, the good days will slowly come.”