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Michelle Yeoh turned her attention to “Blade Runner 2099” at a Busan International Film Festival press conference on Wednesday, before she flies to New York Comic Con to promote the Prime Video series.

“To be given an opportunity to take it to 2099 is indeed an amazing journey, and to work with such a great talent like Hunter Schafer is a great joy,” Yeoh said. “Silka Luisa, who is our showrunner, Alcon, Ridley Scott as well, has welcomed us into this world of replicants and humans, and I can’t wait for all of you to watch it.”

Yeoh will join Schafer, Luisa and other members of the team for a panel at the New York event. All eight episodes of the limited series will be released on Nov. 25. Yeoh plays Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner nearing the end of her life, who partners with Schafer’s Cora, a mysterious new recruit.

“I love being an actor; I actually love being a producer, but I think being an amazing, great director, you have no life,” Yeoh said when asked whether directing might be next for her. “There is so much of your vision of that person, that writer, and I think I am not able to rise to that. So I will stick to what I know a little bit better, and hope to support directors who have that vision.”

Yeoh, who received the festival’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year award at the opening ceremony, said she was most looking forward to Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love” and would love to work with Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho.

“I hope I have the privilege of working more in Korea as well, because I’m a big fan of K-pop, K-drama, Korean food, and especially Korean movies,” she said.

Yeoh is in Busan with “It’s My Time,” a film based on a true story that marks her return to Chinese-language cinema. She also produced the picture, which is directed by Bai Xue and produced by Wen-Hui Yeh. Peter Lam of Media Asia brought her together with the filmmakers.

“I think I spent quite a few years trying to build a bridge from the East to the West, and then now from the West to the East,” Yeoh said. “And hopefully, the bridge will just stay there and I’m able to cross over whenever I want.”

Yeoh plays Zhao Yanhong, a nursing-home resident in her 70s who discovers a gift for the Rubik’s Cube. The role is inspired by Zhao Wenying, a retired math teacher who became the quickest over-60 competitor to solve the puzzle blindfolded. Yeoh said her mother hates the look because she thinks it makes her daughter seem 80.

The actor said she enjoys working with new, young directors. The Daniels were only on their second film with “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and Roshan Sethi, who directed her latest film “The Surgeon,” which premiered at Toronto, is also a second-time director.

“If you read their script, you’d wonder if they were actually a little bit insane. The fact is they are, that’s why they’re such geniuses,” Yeoh said of the Daniels.

Yeoh has a long history with Busan. She took part in the festival’s Pusan Promotion Plan as a producer in 2002 and attended in 2011 with “The Lady.” This year’s visit is her first in 15 years. Earlier in 2026, she received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Recalling her early Hollywood years, Yeoh said she was shocked to be told she was a minority, and that even after the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the parts on offer remained stereotypical. She waited roughly two years before taking on “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

That film brought one of the harder moments of her career, as she had knee surgery partway through the shoot. Yeoh said she now laughs about the scene where Chow Yun-fat dies in her arms. “If you pull back the camera, because I had knee surgery, I couldn’t cross legs and cradle Chow. I had my leg literally on a box,” she said. “So it’s kind of funny looking, with one leg up there and then Chow up here.”

Zhang Yimou is still reworking the script for his film adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem,” years into the process, the Chinese director said during the opening ceremony of the Busan International Film Festival, where he is president of this year’s competition jury.

Questioned by festival director Jung Hanseok, Zhang said he is currently preparing a new film, and that he had just been discussing with several directors backstage how hard it is to make a good one these days.

“‘The Three-Body Problem’ is a great science fiction novel, and I like it very much. But it is very difficult to adapt into a film, which is why we have spent several years polishing the script,” Zhang said. “We are still polishing it now. I hope this film will not disappoint everyone’s expectations, that it will satisfy the audience, and I hope we can make it well.”

Liu Cixin’s novel, the first book in his “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2015 in Ken Liu’s English translation, and has been adapted as Bilibili’s animated series “The Three-Body Problem” (2022), Tencent’s live-action series “Three-Body” (2023) and Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” (2024).

Jung raised the audience reaction that followed the announcement of the project, which he said had stirred as much worry as anticipation. Zhang said that once word got out that he would direct the film, he asked his company to collect online audience commentary, and it came back with around 400,000 comments in one week.

“I felt that people had a great many concerns. Audiences today have high expectations of us,” Zhang said. “In the age of AI, where visual media has become democratized, the audience’s discernment has risen considerably compared to the past. Because of that, we all feel tremendous pressure, and we hope not to disappoint their expectations.”

He added that he would look closely at what viewers want from the film in the hope of getting it right.

Zhang widened the point to the filmmakers at the festival, saying they all want to make a film that satisfies themselves. “Many people spend an entire lifetime wanting to make a truly great film, yet no one knows where that great film comes from. From a Chinese perspective, it might be luck – your effort combined with luck,” he said. “But regardless of luck, the love and passion for cinema in our hearts will always keep burning.”

Jung introduced the project as an adaptation of a sci-fi novel with an enormous global readership, and noted that Zhang, more than 40 years into his career, still puts out new work almost every year.

Zhang leads a seven-member jury for Busan’s competition. The 31st edition of the festival runs through Oct. 15.

Maggie Gyllenhaal told a Busan International Film Festival press conference on Wednesday that the best directors she worked with as an actress, who were usually also the most successful, understood the value of drawing on the minds of the people around them.

“It was the people who were very scared… or just not very smart, who tried to squash other people’s voices,” Gyllenhaal said.

Gyllenhaal is in Busan with “Flesh Impact,” a short film she wrote and directed in which Ellen Burstyn plays Marilyn Monroe at 100 and Dakota Johnson plays the star in her youth. When she made her feature directing debut, “The Lost Daughter,” her main concern was that everyone on set, from the actors to the cinematographer, production designer and gaffer, felt free to contribute.

“The truth is… it is ultimately up to me as the director. I have the power, so there’s no reason to squash anyone else’s voice,” she said. “I mean, it’s just so obvious that the movie that I will make that includes all the minds of the people on my crew, at least as things I can draw from, is going to be exponentially better than the movie I can make trying to recreate something I imagined all alone by myself in my room.”

“Flesh Impact” began as a commission from Genesis, the luxury car brand and a longtime Busan sponsor, to mark what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday in June. Gyllenhaal said she knew the star mostly through her image as a screen icon, and took a week to decide whether she had anything to say about her. She spent it reading about Monroe and watching her films.

“I don’t think that when Genesis came to me and asked for a film about Marilyn Monroe to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday that they imagined she would actually be 100 years old in the movie,” Gyllenhaal said. “I thought, ‘Okay, I have this idea. They’re never going to go for it.’”

Genesis approved the pitch, and Gyllenhaal finished the script within a weekend. The film, which also features Peter Sarsgaard and Sepideh Moafi, world premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Gyllenhaal said that as much as the film celebrates Monroe, “it is also 100% a celebration and an honoring of Ellen Burstyn and her incredible career, and Dakota Johnson and her incredible career.”

Gyllenhaal said the move from acting to producing and then to writing and directing felt natural. When she was young, so few women were directing that acting seemed the obvious outlet for a woman who loved movies and wanted to tell stories.

“It felt satisfying and exciting for a long time, and then I think I hit the edge of what I was able to do as an actress,” she said.

Her move into writing and directing began eight years ago with “The Lost Daughter,” and she said she has felt more at ease and more inspired behind the camera ever since.

Film runs in the family. Gyllenhaal’s father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a director and her mother, Naomi Foner, a screenwriter. Growing up, the family went to the movies almost every Friday night, Gyllenhaal said.

“My mom directed her first film as a grandmother. I think she might be the only person to have directed her first film as a grandmother,” Gyllenhaal said, calling her mother “probably the best note-giver that I have.” Her brother Jake Gyllenhaal, who appeared in “The Bride,” is a close friend whose different taste she called a gift.

Gyllenhaal said she has begun writing two “kind of budding ideas” and is “in that very exciting place where I’m kind of like, ‘What is this going to ultimately be about, you know?’” Variety reported in June that she will direct and produce an adaptation of Rachel Kushner’s novel “Creation Lake” for Warner Bros., which also backed “The Bride.”

On the subject of women filmmakers, Gyllenhaal pointed back to her remarks at Venice, where she served as jury president and only one woman had a film in competition.