For Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, her new work Silent Friend began as an instinct, an idea circling her for decades about how humans seek connection with the natural world. “I wrote this script very instinctively,” she says. “These topics were interesting to me for decades.” The film moves across three vastly different eras—1908, 1972, and 2020—each anchored by a centuries-old ginkgo tree and characters whose curiosity pushes at the limits of their time.

For the 2020 chapter, Enyedi wrote the role expressly for Hong Kong star Tony Leung. She had no personal connection to him, yet she sent the script anyway. “Everyone, my producers, said to me it’s hopeless. He’s very choosy, and he never did a European film,” she recalls. “But I wrote this role for him.”

Yet, against those odds, Leung replied.

For Leung, who plays a neuroscientist living in quasi-isolation during the pandemic, Silent Friend demanded one of the most intensive preparations of his career. “Because I play a neuroscientist,” he explains, “I need to at least have a basic understanding of neuroscience. I studied early cognitive development of babies. And at the same time I needed to study plants.”

That meant research, experiments, and travel. “I tried to make experiments on plants,” he laughs. “I went to different universities to visit neuroscientists. Three universities.” He also wanted the character’s voice to reflect the character’s academic background: “Because he studied in Cambridge, I wanted a little bit of a British accent. I worked with an English teacher from England.”

It became, he says, “one of the longest preparations in my acting career – six months, with so many books, which were not easy reads for me.”

Though the film centres on plants, Enyedi is quick to point out she is no gardener. “I’m really clumsy with plants,” she admits. “I’m deeply thankful to the plants living in our apartment to accept us and survive.”

But for her, the stories in Silent Friend are less about botany than about longing. “The humans in this film, none of them have a natural, easygoing connection with nature,” she explains. “They are very aware of the separation. So it’s a discovery, a reaching out, building a bridge. And the bridge is science and experiment.”

Her inspiration includes Goethe’s notion of the “participatory experiment”: that scientist and subject exist in one system, influencing each other. “It’s about being separated, being sad about being separated, and trying to reach out,” she says. “And it’s not an easy thing to do.”

Leung was struck instantly by the unusual tone. “After I read the script, I found it very special. A sci-fi film with a sense of humour, with a tree for a protagonist.”

He remembers a quote included in Enyedi’s materials from a neuroscientist: We are all hallucinating all the time, but when we agree on the hallucination, we call it reality. “I thought, there are some hidden layers here.”

But ultimately, it wasn’t the script that convinced him, it was their first Zoom meeting. “The script is not the most important thing,” he says. “The person is the most important. Even if you have a good script, you put it in the wrong hands, and it doesn’t come out to be a good movie. I try to feel the director. And I found her very easygoing, very intellectual, but humble, and confident. I trust my gut feelings. That’s why I agreed.”

Enyedi had come prepared to persuade him. Instead, “after some minutes in our conversation, he just said, ‘Here you go. I want to make this.’ The elephant in the room was out, and it became a free-flowing conversation.”

Their connection deepened when Leung brought up parallels between the film’s worldview and Buddhist or Chinese philosophy. “I didn’t know how important it was for Tony,” Enyedi says. “It was a very, very nice surprise.”

Though his character communes with plants, Leung approaches gardening with a mix of pleasure and melancholy. “I love plants,” he says. “I have a small garden with different kinds of plants. Before this movie, I really enjoyed my garden. But now sometimes I feel a little bit sad. Because, like Léa Seydoux says in the movie: ‘it’s a zoo’. They’re supposed to be in natural surroundings, but now you plant it for your own pleasure.”

Still, he takes care of them (“I don’t do gardening… I have a gardener,” he jokes) and keeps strong preferences: “My favourite flowers are Osmanthus and night-blooming jasmine, which fills the whole street with such a nice scent if planted along it.”

Asked to describe himself as a plant, Leung chooses the night-blooming jasmine too. “Besides work, I’m just an ordinary person. But when I’m an actor, sometimes I can entertain people, kind of like a flower that blooms at night.”

For Enyedi, he chooses a sunflower: “She’s very energetic, sunshine, and altogethe lovely. She never complains and is always very positive.”

Working on Silent Friend left Leung with a transformed sense of the natural world. “Before, plants were just plants to me,” he says. “But now I see them as sentient beings. And if you respect plants like that, then you respect all other living beings, you become more humble.”

He also credits Enyedi with deepening his perspective. “She gave me a lot of advice and books to study,” he says, though laughing that he can’t remember the titles.

For Enyedi, watching Leung work was a revelation. “It was a very, very special once-in-a-lifetime experience to see Tony work,” she reflects. “It underlines my belief that real greatness and humbleness go together.” She admired his attention to the crew: “That tender attention to even the smallest crew member, and the way he transformed, even when alone on screen, well, alone with a tree.”

Enyedi reveals she asked Leung to bring more of his private self to this role. “He has such powerful personas in different films,” she says. “Here, I invited him to bring not just the imaginary professor, but also the real Tony Leung.”

Leung admits he found that challenging. “I know you want to capture something from me that I tend to hide,” he tells her. “Once the camera starts, I become somebody else. I don’t do it intentionally. It’s many years of acting. You want to capture the genuine me, and it’s something I want to make happen, but I don’t know how. Yet you did.”

Off screen, Leung prefers solitude. “My ideal holiday is going somewhere nobody knows who I am, or a city where I don’t speak the language. I love that kind of ‘lost in translation‘ feeling. Sometimes, I just want to be alone.” His daily pleasures are simple: cycling through cities, cooking for himself, naps in the park. “I go to the park almost every day,” he says. “Just stay there, napping, doing watercolours, or just doing nothing.”

The film’s 2020 storyline mirrors global lockdown, but Leung experienced it in unusually transient fashion. “I went through sixteen quarantines,” he says. Between shoots in Australia and Asia for Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, he found himself wandering famously crowded sites now eerily empty. “I could go to all the tourist areas, and there were no tourists. No one knew who I was. I spent three months in one country, and loved how I could just go anywhere and everywhere.”

Enyedi shares his fondness for solitude. “It’s very refreshing and necessary for me,” she says. The shared global experience of lockdown, she adds, felt unprecedented: “Beside the fear and the horrible things, it was a chance to reboot. But whatever we had the chance to learn from it, we forgot too quickly.”

Despite Silent Friend being his first European art-house production, Leung found the experience familiar. “Working with Ildikó feels like working with Wong Kar-wai, or Ang Lee, or Hou Hsiao-hsien,” he says. “It’s the same art-house atmosphere. Good directors are good at leading actors. I didn’t find any differences, just a few cultural ones.”

His time shooting in Marburg left vivid impressions. “It’s a very peaceful city,” he says. “I never went to university, but because of this movie I had the chance to stay on a campus, shoot in the library. It felt like I went through university life. That means a lot to me.”

And then: “The ice cream was so good. I ate it every day.”

Enyedi speaks warmly of Marburg’s medieval architecture and its botanical gardens. “Space is so important in film,” she says. “The environment can help express a lot. This tiny, very old garden and the nineteenth-century building—it was a silent partner for Tony.”

Enyedi first encountered Leung through Chungking Express. “These films were real events when they arrived in Europe,” she says. Visiting Hong Kong years later, she retraced the film’s opening shot with her phone and sent it to friends, to which they cheered. “They remain very important for us. They are elementary points of reference.”

Asked for advice to young actors, Tony keeps it simple: “Passion is the most important thing. Discipline and hard work.” Then, with a grin: “I think in this film it’s easier than other films because my scene partner is a tree. She won’t complain whatever I do.”

Silent Friend emerges as a contemplative tale about science, curiosity, and the silent companionship of a ginkgo tree. But behind the scenes, it’s also a meeting point between two artists who share an instinctive trust. In Enyedi’s gentle, searching vision and Leung’s quietly vulnerable performance, the film becomes a meditation on how we reach toward the world—toward nature, toward one another, toward parts of ourselves we rarely show. Their collaboration, born out of instinct and sustained by mutual humility, mirrors the very premise of the film: that connection requires attentiveness, patience, and the courage to stand still long enough to listen.

Photo Credit: Singapore International Film Festival

More information about Silent Friend available here

The 36th SGIFF runs from 26th November to 7th December 2025. More information available via their website here