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Taiwanese filmmaker Giddens Ko, presenting “Kung Fu” at the Far East Film Festival on Saturday, revealed that Stephen Chow contributed to the film’s development and reflected on the more than decade-long journey required to bring his most technically ambitious project to screen.

Speaking on a panel moderated by Kevin Ma, Ko and his longtime collaborator Kai Ko – who stars in “Kung Fu” and wrote, produced and acts in “I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish,” which has its world premiere at the festival Sunday – discussed the pair’s 15-year working relationship, the demands of wuxia filmmaking and their respective next projects.

Ko adapted “Kung Fu” from his own novel, written some 25 years ago, and first attempted to shoot it as his second feature around 2013. Fresh off the commercial success of his debut, “You’re the Apple of My Eye,” he pulled back from the project, attributing the retreat to an excess of confidence.

“I was so happy with the success of that story,” Ko said. “Right away when I got into this novel, I said, wow, this is a martial art, it’s kung fu. Everybody would love it.”

The abandoned project stayed with him. Ko described it as a creative wound he eventually resolved by returning to it alongside collaborators who shared the same history with the material. The finished film – which he described as Taiwan’s largest-budgeted production – incorporates footage from classic wuxia works. These clips, Ko noted, are not simple homages but narrative threads planted early in the story.

“Those classic clips at the beginning, they are not just being there because they were classic clips,” Ko said. “They were actually clues laying down the foundation for you to see the future character.”

Ko’s conception of the wuxia genre centers on imagination as a martial force. “Wuxia is not just action choreography,” he said. “Wuxia is really talking about stretching the audience imagination when you watch it.” To illustrate the spectrum, Ko contrasted Jackie Chan’s grounded physicality with the more heightened combat of Jet Li’s Wong Fei-hung films, where movement begins to exceed what the body could plausibly achieve – placing “Kung Fu” firmly in the latter tradition. He cited “The Matrix” as a structural touchstone, specifically the idea that a protagonist empowered by belief can transcend the rules of a constructed world. Ko also confirmed he showed the script directly to Stephen Chow – whose “Kung Fu Hustle” loomed large in the discussion – to talk through choreography and story.

Kai Ko, making his fourth film with Giddens, said the collaboration’s dynamic remained largely unchanged despite the production’s scale. The actor has grown into a presence in Giddens’ post-production process, a development the director welcomes. “He inspired me a lot,” Giddens said. “He’s no longer just a presence. He’s there, participated in a lot of ideas we discussed.”

Having directed his own debut, “Bad Education” – written by Giddens – Kai Ko said the experience reshaped his approach to acting, though he drew a clear line. “Don’t forget the director is the real general,” Kai Ko said. “The real captain of this whole collaboration. And he has the power of cutting.”

In “I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish,” Kai Ko plays a Taiwanese man who relocates to Macau, falls into financial failure and crosses paths with a young girl. The role required him to deliver much of his dialogue in Cantonese, a language he had to learn for the part. “Mastering Cantonese was the hardest part for me to play this role,” he said. “Cantonese has nine tones. If you make the tone incorrectly, it turns into a completely different meaning of the word.”

He traveled to Macau to research the character, interviewing people who had gone there during the city’s casino boom, many of whom, he noted, came back empty-handed.

Looking ahead, Giddens confirmed he is developing his next feature in Taiwan, with a role written in for Kai Ko. Kai Ko is separately working on a second directorial project with a new screenwriter and said the film would likely arrive in 2027 if the script comes together. “We are going back and forth discussing a new script,” Kai Ko said. “I hope in the end it would be something interesting and better.”

Adam Scott already knows the ending of “Severance.”

“Oh Yes. I’m an executive producer on the show, so I’m involved in all of it. We talk with the writers, and Dan [Erickson], all the time. I know everything about what’s going on. [As an actor] I like having as much information as possible.”

Just like the whole world, he’s more than ready for Season 3.

“It’s going to be great. There’re so many surprises. I can’t wait to shoot it,” he said. As previously announced, Ben Stiller won’t be directing this time.

“Ben is still very involved in the show. It’s going to be great. You know, it’s been over two years since we finished shooting Season 2. We’re all anxious to get back. We miss each other.”

Scott, who will be receiving the Canal+ Icon Award at Canneseries this week, admitted he really, really wanted the role.

“I don’t know if I would categorize it as a battle, but I certainly had to prove I could do it. Which makes sense: It was a big show, a big investment for Apple, so they needed to see that,” he recalled.

“It’s an incredible role in an incredible world. It’s everything I’d always wanted to do. When I read the script, first of all, I thought: ‘I probably won’t get this job. But if I do, if I’m able to land this, it will be because I’ve been earning this over the last 30 years. The opportunity to be considered for something like this and a role where you get to explore different sides of this person.”

He added: “Happily, I auditioned only once. The more you do it, the more you can screw it up.” 

When “Parks and Recreation” ended, he wanted to find something “a little more dramatic.”  “I just wanted to change it up, and I had trouble being considered for anything that wasn’t comedic. I really sought out ‘Big Little Lies,’ for example – that was something I really wanted to do. I wanted to work with Reese Witherspoon and all those actors, and Jean-Marc Vallée. But I really had to campaign for that and audition a few times, and prove to them I could do something that wasn’t comedic.” 

“Severance” “felt like a full meal,” he said. 

“It felt like a complicated character and a complicated world – and an adventure. Everything I’d done up to that point, those were all things that fulfilled me. But this felt like more of a culmination.”

It took him a while to figure out how to portray the infamous scenes of transition. “Switching from one thing to another, in an elevator, could be really corny. Ben had this ‘elevator set’ he would keep off to the side, so whenever we had a few minutes, we could go over and practice, and try to see how that transformation would occur.”

“We must have done it hundreds of times before we landed on something that worked. I think it was Ben who came up with our eyes fluttering a bit. Oh man, I’m sure I did a bunch of stuff that was ridiculous.”

With many questions unanswered, “Severance” has quickly developed a “Twin Peaks”-like cult following. 

“I love ‘Twin Peaks’ so much and I love that people keep discovering it over and over again. I don’t know if [‘Severance’] will live in culture and be remembered like that, but I agree – there’s a lot of power in not knowing.” 

“Something we’re always trying to do on the show is retain an element of mystery. I loved the way ‘The Sopranos’ ended. I was frustrated by it, but it was brilliant and I still haven’t figured it out. I love it not only in TV shows or movies, but I like it in music. I’ve always loved bands that wouldn’t tell you everything about how music was made and who made it. I like when there’s a place for my imagination to reach out and meet the work.” 

Scott doesn’t worry about being typecast again post-“Severance.”

“Something that’s good with a role like Mark is that I’m not sure what aspect of it would pin me down into being typecast. And even if I’m, it would be completely worth it, because I love the show so much.” 

He recently made horror film “Hokum.”

“It’s really scary. I think with horror movies, just as a fan and as someone who participates in them sometimes, I feel like the criteria is it should be a good movie first and a good horror movie second. It should be able to stand on its own as a character, as an interesting character, an interesting story. And then the horror elements are almost a bonus, you know,” he said.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been a lead in something that’s come out in movie theaters. And I love it. It’s what made me want to do this in the first place: sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and watching something that really moves you or gets you excited.”

“Severance” moves people as well.

‘When the show first came out, we were still emerging from the pandemic. People were slowly returning to the office or working from home, and this new work-life balance felt strange for everyone. I think the show evoked those feelings,” he said.

“With something that’s as high-concept as ‘Severance,’ there has to be an emotional element to connect to, and there have to be characters to connect to. Otherwise, it just becomes something that’s interesting, but isn’t emotionally engaging.” 

He added: “If you were presented with this technology, would you do this? Once you really consider that question, you start thinking about your life in a certain way, and it sets you on an interesting journey.”

WASHINGTON — Mentalist Oz Pearlman was supposed to dazzle an audience of hundreds on Saturday night here with mind tricks in a well-lit hotel ballroom. Instead he found himself doing his act for a small handful of media executives in a darkened underground event space close to midnight.

MS NOW had planned to host a festive soirée in the site of an old subterranean trolley station in the heart of the nation’s capital, part of the usual proceedings following the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This year was going to be more auspicious — until horror struck just hours earlier: Authorities are still investigating an incident in which a man was able to get close to a space in the Washington Hilton where President Donald Trump was to attend — and deliver pointed remarks — to an assemblage of journalists, news executives, media honchos and government officials at a celebration of journalism that is woven into the social calendar of this city devoted to the federal government.

President Trump and attendees were unharmed, but many were shaken by an outburst of gunshots and the reminder that political violence seems more prone to break out in the U.S. than at any other time in recent memory.

With that in mind, media organizations backing traditional after-parties worked on the fly to change their purpose.

“While tonight’s event won’t be what we originally intended, we still think it is important to provide a space for friends and colleagues to be together,” MS NOW said in a dispatch emailed to guests for a party that was meant to serve as an elaborate debut of sorts: The news outlet is no longer part of NBC News, and is now a flagship outlet of Versant Media, spun off from NBCUniversal earlier this year.

Meanwhile, NBC News opted to continue with a long-held after-event, deciding that attendees could use a place to gather, convene and process.

After the gunshots, it couldn’t be bacchanal as usual. NBC News anchor Tom Llamas broke into regular programming on NBC with a special report, and many of the news organization’s top executives quietly left the main gathering at the residence of France’s Ambassador to the United States, according to a person familiar with the matter, to watch their team’s effort in a makeshift monitor room.

The tone of both parties was subdued. Each felt designed to accommodate a larger crowd that might not feel comfortable enough to attend. And shuttling back and forth between the two events became onerous: Washington police closed down parts of Connecticut Avenue, a main artery in the city, making a direct route between the events impassable.

Still, people needed to talk — about what they saw and heard, about the reasons why it happened, and about how things could have been much worse.

At the MS NOW gathering, Pearlman performed his feats for Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus and CNBC President KC Sullivan, among others. Still, some of the hoopla was dialed down, though a series of projections on the wall that described ties to the First Amendment were underscored by the events of the evening.

NBC News, meanwhile, played host to journalists and staffers, including anchors and correspondents such as Lester Holt, Christine Romans and Joanna Stern. Executives including Cesar Conde, chairman of the company’s news operations, and Rebecca Blumenstein, president of editorial for NBC News, were also working to navigate the evening.

In the streets of Washington, word of the alarming development spread through discussions with rideshare drivers and in the overheard comments of tuxedoed attendees who blurted out comments in smartphone conversations while walking away from the original site of the dinner.

President Trump said Saturday evening that he hoped to reconvene the dinner within 30 days’ time. In various conversations, partygoers seemed uncertain the dinner could be reconstituted in such a short period of time.

Even a mentalist like Pearlman, after all, can’t make people forget what transpired.

WASHINGTON — Mentalist Oz Pearlman was supposed to dazzle an audience of hundreds on Saturday night here with mind tricks in a well-lit hotel ballroom. Instead he found himself doing his act for a small handful of media executives in a darkened underground event space close to midnight.

MS NOW had planned to host a festive soirée in the site of an old subterranean trolley station in the heart of the nation’s capital, part of the usual proceedings following the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. This year was going to be more auspicious — until horror struck just hours earlier: Authorities are still investigating an incident in which a man was able to get close to a space in the Washington Hilton where President Donald Trump was to attend — and deliver pointed remarks — to an assemblage of journalists, news executives, media honchos and government officials at a celebration of journalism that is woven into the social calendar of this city devoted to the federal government.

President Trump and attendees were unharmed, but many were shaken by an outburst of shots and the reminder that political violence seems more prone to break out in the U.S. than at any other time in recent memory.

With that in mind, media organizations backing traditional after-parties worked on the fly to change their purpose.

“While tonight’s event won’t be what we originally intended, we still think it is important to provide a space for friends and colleagues to be together,” MS NOW said in a dispatch emailed to guests for a party that was meant to serve as an elaborate debut of sorts: The news outlet is no longer part of NBC News, and is now a flagship outlet of Versant Media, spun off from NBCUniversal earlier this year.

Meanwhile, NBC News opted to continue with a long-held after-event, deciding that attendees could use a place to gather, convene and process.

After the gunshots, it couldn’t be bacchanal as usual. NBC News anchor Tom Llamas broke into regular programming on NBC with a special report, and many of the news organization’s top executives quietly left the main gathering at the residence of France’s Ambassador to the United States, according

to a person familiar with the matter, to watch their team’s effort in a makeshift monitor room.

The tone of both parties was subdued. Each felt designed to accommodate a larger crowd that might not feel comfortable enough to attend. And shuttling back and forth between the two events became onerous: Washington police closed down parts of Connecticut Avenue, a main artery in the city, making a direct route between the events impassable.

Still, people needed to talk — about what they saw and heard, about the reasons why it happened, and about how things could have been much worse.

At the MS NOW gathering, Pearlman performed his feats for Versant Media CEO Mark Lazarus and CNBC President KC Sullivan, among others. Still, some of the hoopla was dialed down, though a series of projections on the wall that described ties to the First Amendment were underscored by the events of the evening.

NBC News, meanwhile, played host to journalists and staffers, including anchors and correspondents such as Lester Holt, Christine Romans and Joanna Stern. Executives including Cesar Conde, chairman of the company’s news operations, and Rebecca Blumenstein, president of editorial for NBC News, were also working to navigate the evening.

In the streets of Washington, word of the alarming development spread through discussions with rideshare drivers and in the overheard comments of tuxedoed attendees who blurted out comments in smartphone conversations while walking away from the original site of the dinner.

President Trump said Saturday evening that he hoped to reconvene the dinner within 30 days’ time. In various conversations, party-goers seemed uncertain the dinner could be reconstituted in such a short period of time.

Even a mentalist like Pearlman, after all, can’t make people forget what transpired.