In Conversation With... Andy Lau

The star of Ning Hao’s The Movie Emperor, Andy Lau has been a leading figure in Asian cinema for the past four decades. Like many of his contemporaries, Lau started out in the early 1980s as an actor for Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), Hong Kong’s premier television network. He landed his first feature film role in Ann Hui’s Boat People (1982), a central work of the Hong Kong New Wave. In the late 1980s, Lau fully transitioned to working in film and enthralled audiences and critics alike in Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By (1988) and Days of Being Wild (1990). Lau launched his own production company in the early 1990s and has starred in over 160 feature films, including Johnnie To’s relentless police thriller Running Out of Time (1999), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s twisty and unpredictable Infernal Affairs (2002) and Infernal Affairs III (2003), Zhang Yimou’s martial arts extravaganza House of Flying Daggers (2004), Tsui Hark’s delirious fantasy whodunit Detective Dee: The Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), Hui’s grounded drama A Simple Life (2011), and Frant Gwo’s mega-action blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2 (2023). A natural entertainer and multi-faceted artist, Lau has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor, received the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award at the 2006 Busan International Film Festival, and holds the Guinness World Record for “Most Awards Won by a Cantopop Male Artist.” He joins us for an in-depth conversation about his storied career as an actor, producer, and celebrated Cantopop singer-songwriter, as well as his new film The Movie Emperor, which is a Gala Presentation at this year’s Festival.