Actually, he was physically unwell at that time. When we shot he had also taken on other projects and he was extremely busy. Once he called me in the middle of the night and said he felt really unwell. I had to take him to hospital on two other occasions, because his blood pressure got too high. He was facing immense pressure and feeling negative about his body, and that's why he thought about retiring. But I think he's recovered quite a bit since.

Before , we were shooting on film and thus restricted to 10 minutes for each take. But since we're working with digital now, we can go all the way up to 40 minutes for a take. Tsai is letting his actors do longer takes nowadays. We've done takes that went for about 20 minutes, but the investors asked him to shorten them. When we're filming, a take often lasts 30 minutes.

Tsai has been gradually leaning towards this direction ever since he shot (2009) at the Louvre. When we were shooting , he kept in mind that the film could be shown in museums. That's why he doesn't care too much about the length of each sequence.

The difficulty comes from the fact that I had never been trained to walk so slowly in my daily life. I think this may be regarded as a form of religious practice, or a kind of art performance. It takes willpower to walk so slowly. When I made the first two films of the series [2012's and ], I swayed from side to side because it demands good balance. When I was walking in Hong Kong or other Chinese cities, people often showed sympathy for me, or even gave me money. I was quite afraid of that happening, because they'd block the camera and I'd have to do it again.

Let me ask you this: which scene in our films would you consider crazy?

That's what I think, too. When I first worked with Tsai, I realised there's so much in his films that you wouldn't see in any other films. I've had my own struggles, too, because the director wants everything real. If my character needs to pee, he would demand me to pee for real. We are still adapting to his methods.