The Greatest Film Director In The World

A cutesy, elfin stalker chick breaks into an unsuspecting policeman’s apartment every day to secretly tidy up and replace dishcloths. A mute kidnaps passers-by and force-feeds them ice-cream. A hitman bumps into someone from high school and laments his isolating profession. Playboys keep breaking their coy mistresses’ hearts only to be seized with regret. A beautiful gambler never removes one black glove. A swordsman sits in the desert paralysed with melancholia. Everybody looks to ticking clocks and dates on cans of pineapple. Time just keeps running out for the lost souls and beautiful losers that inhabit Wong Kar-Wai’s drowned world, leaving them alone with painful memories of a paradise now lost.

Nobody makes moping and heartache look more desirable than Wong Kar-Wai does in his movies. If you want to hang out with the hippest looking mortals around, then cancel your next Bob Dylan character pageant and inform your friends that they’ll all be representing Wong characters this year. Logistically speaking, it’s a lot easier than strolling around with a Siamese cat on your shoulder, and of course, if your guests really can’t choose between the sixties wide-boy drainpipes, the ornate embroidered red dress or the trench-coat and gun ensemble, they can always go minimal and arrive as the director himself.
It’s often occurred to me, that with his trademark all-black garb and eternal need for sunglasses – even at night – Mr. Wong could easily have wandered in from one of his own urbane scripts. In person, he somehow contrives to look cooler still. Standing at – by my rough estimation, around nine feet tall – I suddenly realise that if he went around in culottes and a monocle with a megaphone to hand, he couldn’t look more like a superstar director.
Not that I’m intimidated. No sir. I’ve been prepping for this interview for the best part of a decade. I’ve even brushed up on my pigeon Cantonese, and should my pronunciation let me down, then I still know how to ask for a beer in Mandarin. That could obviously be incredibly useful during the interview.
“Hi, I’m Kar-Wai,” he says, shaking my hand firmly. (Always a good sign. I have no time for limp gentlemen.)
“Eek, hello, I’m Tara,” I squeak, barely remembering the relevant words in English.
“I love your clothes. I’ve never met a journalist in all red before. It’s very memorable. I thought you guys only wore grey and black.”
Then he smiles. I’m extremely glad that I’ve already told him my name, because I’ve now completely forgotten it. My knees remember how to work long enough for me to make it to my chair, which is good because I already probably look less like a professional than a wide-eyed autograph hunting teenager.
Forgiveness please. It is, after all, far too easy to start gushing about Kar-Wai. Anyone old enough to remember the entirety of the ‘90s will recall how his films surfed the zeitgeist with aplomb to rival Kurt’s or Coupland’s. In 1994, having already made his mark with the tortured gangsters of As Tears Go By and the lavish heartbreaker, Days Of Being Wild, Wong Kar-Wai become the most celebrated arthouse director on the planet. Already a fan, Quentin Tarantino picked up Wong’s hipper-than-thou Chungking Express for his own distribution company, Rolling Thunder, and declared that he had the “crush of his life” on the movie. You didn’t have to be a Tarantino diehard to follow suit.
Chungking’s freewheeling, gunslinging romance harked back to the nouvelle vague with its knowing movie iconography, existential longing and tales of capricious fate. As lovelorn cops and heroin traffickers made like ships in the night, it reminded you of Pauline Kael’s notion of ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ cinema, or Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that in order to make a movie, what you really, really need is a girl and a gun.
Chungking and its companion film, the beautifully sordid Fallen Angels, had those in spades, and though set against forbidden, disenfranchised zones – the scuzzy subways of Kowloon and the bottom-rung immigrant township of Chungking Mansions – they looked sumptuous and exhilarating against a whirl of urban lights and throngs of insomniacs.
Unfortunately, lots of other people, some of them from the dreaded advertising industry, thought so too. In the mid-’90s, the groundbreaking, zippy, hallucinogenic aesthetic forged between the director and his long-time cinematographer, Chris Doyle, became perhaps the most sampled visual style since Da Vinci hung up his paintbrush. Suddenly super-fast edits, variable camera speeds and distorted wide-lens-in-a-tea-cup shots started popping up in car commercials, most of MTV’s output and – Lord help us – a Texas promo video.
“I don’t get upset about it myself,” Kar-Wai tells me. “But Chris does. He’ll often say ‘Have you seen this?’ and point out something someone has used of his. But I don’t think anyone can copy him exactly. He gets drunker as the day goes on and the visuals start to change. Nobody else can even operate a camera in that state.”

One can understand why the director can so easily afford to shrug off the would-be copycats. While there are a few exceptions – Sofia Coppola’s Murakami-inspired Lost In Translation comes to mind – it’s bloody difficult to replicate his dreamy, spontaneous approach to filmmaking. Rather famously, he has no use for conventional screenplays, and prefers writing with his coffee and cigarettes on the actual day of the shoot. Even Chris Doyle, Wong’s hard-living, recurrent Australian lensman has admitted that he rarely knows anything about the films beforehand, except that being Wong Kar-Wai films, they’ll invariably be about “time and space and identity and isolation.”
“I don’t like knowing what I’m going to do everyday,” explains Kar-Wai. “There are some directors, like Hitchcock, who storyboard everything and know precisely what they want before shooting. I’d just get bored with that. And I don’t want to be involved with a process that drags.”
Inevitably, such a strategy is not without risks and Wong’s productions have a habit of bloating in a manner to rival a coach-load of darts champions. Ashes Of Time, the auteur’s swordplay epic – if you can imagine what one would look like having been scripted by Samuel Beckett – became a three-year odyssey. The six-week shoot of Happy Together, his Buenos Aires-set, high-brow tear-jerker, quickly spiralled into four months and 400,000 feet of footage.
“Years ago, when I was making Chungking Express and Fallen Angels it was a lot simpler. Now, because I produce my own films and I only use a minimal crew, I’ve ended up wearing a lot of hats. Also, in those days, I was only making movies for Hong Kong. Now, it is a much more international process and it’s difficult because I’m writing and directing and financing on top of that. Actually, next time I think I’m just going to hire more people because it took three years alone to get the permits done for this one!”
Ah, that might explain the wait. Wong’s latest venture, the sublime 2046 (pronounced ‘two-four-six’, according to its progenitor), has made a fairly tempestuous journey to our screens. Having incurred the formidable Gallic wrath of the Cannes festival bureaucrats last year (‘Watch out! They’re French!’ as Fox News might say), by turning 2046 in only hours before it was due to premiere, the Hong Kong director vowed that, after five long years, he had finally finished tinkering with his magnum opus. Though I would never be blasphemous enough to say so to Kar-Wai, this transpired to be a teeny bit untrue. Indeed, he was still fiddling with the final cut long after its scheduled release date.
“I had agreed to the film being shown at Cannes,” he says. “But it was such a sprint to get it finished that I didn’t even get to see it myself until I was at the festival and I decided some more work needed to be done on the sound and certain shots needed to be put back in. I don’t think the final film is radically different from the Cannes version. To me, the film was already there.”
Happily, despite much publicised teething problems, 2046 was definitely worth the wait. (In fact, I’m doubly relieved, as knowing this publication’s sub-editors all too well a ‘Wong Number’ headline was surely on the cards had the movie been a dog.) If, as Kar-Wai has suggested previously, Chungking Express is Coca-Cola, Fallen Angels is ice-cream and Days Of Being Wild is fine wine, 2046 is, he says, his “hot-pot”.
Coming on like a greatest hits package – a proper one, along the lines of Bowie’s Changes, The Birthday Party’s Hits or all five billion compilations by The Fall – 2046, though officially a companion piece to 1999’s much adored In The Mood For Love, revisits all of Mr. Wong’s earlier films. That’s no bad thing when you consider that he’s never made a movie you wouldn’t show to a friend
Like In The Mood though, and unlike his earlier films, 2046 has swapped fear of the future and racing against the clock with nostalgia for the past and a time-capsule quality. Inevitably, this relates to Hong Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic of China in 1997, a process due to be completed in, well, 2046 when it’s goodbye Cantonese, rickshaws and sing-song girls. It’s a prospect that preoccupies Mr. Wong and with good reason...
Born in Shanghai in 1958, the director’s family were separated after he and his mother made for Hong Kong, where he spent an idyllic, if cerebral childhood reading Russian literature and watching Fassbinder films. Professionally speaking, his life is something of a Made In Hong Kong fable. He quickly rose through the ranks at the television division of the Shaw Brothers’ Studio and wrote the screenplay for Final Victory for director Patrick Tam, before becoming the Far East’s favourite iconoclast by the age of thirty.
“The main reason I wanted to make In The Mood For Love was because in 1999 it was already clear that Hong Kong was going through changes. It wasn’t the same place I grew up in. A lot of the restaurants and apartment buildings and locations I loved started to disappear. So it was a two-pronged approach to change because the film was set against a time of enormous flux in Hong Kong – the late ‘60s – but it was also trying to capture Hong Kong before it slipped away. 2046 is looking back in a more personal way. It’s a reunion film, like running into characters from the other films and having casual conversations with them.”
Rather appropriately, this reunion is headed up by frequent Wong collaborator, Tony Leung, here reprising In The Mood For Love’s playboy, armed with a seedy spiv moustache, enough hair-oil to start a war and a masterly way with the ladies. Clearly wounded from the unfulfilled affair of the previous film, 2046 charts its protagonist’s subsequent relationships with four women. You really have to wonder how Kar-Wai’s heroes always seem to have the girls sitting up and begging.
“I do love playboy characters,” he admits. “It’s probably because I don’t have any playboy tendencies myself that I find it such a novel area to explore.”
But surely he could live vicariously through his party-animal cinematographer?
“Don’t you believe it. Chris isn’t much of a playboy either. He talks about relationships a lot, but he doesn’t have a lot of luck with them. A lot of the time he’s like a character in one of my films – going home drunk in the back of a taxi.”
During 2046, things get considerably trippier than your average relationship movie, but if you just lie back and allow it to ravish you, you’ll be hopelessly enraptured. Like the recent I Heart Huckabees, there’s a touch of Alain Resnais’ tricksy, wacky sci-fi d’amour, and fans of Kylie and Angelina Jolie should note that one of the film’s riffs takes us inside the pages of a pulpy space novel for some robot erotica.
Of course, this being a Wong movie, even the automatons are stunning, causing Manohla Dargis in The New York Times to recently lament ‘(Hollywood’s) interchangeable blondes with hungry mouths and empty eyes’ when compared with the ‘heart-skipping beauty and charm’ of Chinese cinema’s glamour-pusses. Few would contest that having assembled the luminous collective talents of Gong Li, Faye Wong and Ziyi Zhang, the director has put together the most gorgeous cast since, well, the last Wong Kar-Wai movie.
“It was a real pleasure working with Gong Li especially,” gushes Kar-Wai. “She’s always reminded me of a Fassbinder heroine. It’s not so much a physical thing, more the way she uses expressions. There’s just something about her face.”
Having always played a pivotal role in his films, be it Astor Piazzola’s dirty tangos in Happy Together or Faye Wong’s Cranberries’ cover in Chungking, Mr. Wong sought out the perfect score for the great Ms. Li, hiring Fassbinder’s musical accomplice Peer Gant for the occasion. That’s not to suggest that the Hong Kong director is unduly fixated with Germans from the ‘70s. Indeed, it becomes clear over the course of our meeting that he is equally schooled in everything from Alphaville to John Ford to Manuel Puig to Z.

Unfortunately, just like with one of his plots, the interview couldn’t last forever. As I bid my movie hero an impressed farewell – or was I dragged away? – I remember the moment in Chungking Express when Takeshi Kaneshiro runs into Brigitte Lin in a bar and says ‘People who wear sunglasses at night are either blind, broken-hearted or pretentious. Which one are you?’
This must be something that Wong Kar-Wai – always behind shades – must have pondered down the years?
“You know what it is?” he smiles. “I don’t like people being able to see my eyes. I think they can see too much about me, about what I get up to.”
As it happens, I know what he’ll be getting up to next: directing Nicole Kidman. The ersatz screen legend, as Lauren Bacall would have it, had better not blotch Mr. Wong’s otherwise shimmering CV.

2046 is released January 14th. The IFI’s Wong Kar-Wai retrospective begins January 15th.