He hides his eyes behind dark sunglasses.
He writes his scenes on the day of their filming,
which leads to multi-year shooting schedules.
His films tell romantic stories of unrequited love,
but look alternately like paintings by Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock.
He is Wong Kar-Wai, the mysterious genius of Hong Kong cinema.
Wong Kar-Wai was born in Shanghai on July 17, 1958 to a sailor father and housewife mother.
Wong and his parents moved to Hong Kong when he was only five.
Because of language differences, Wong was not able to speak with other children.
To combat her son's loneliness, Wong's cinephilic mother
would take him to the movies, thus endowing him with a lifelong passion.
So we had a chance to see all these American films, European films and local productions.
-Is that where the dream began? -Yes. It's like Graham Greene said–
-Graham Greene? -Yes. It's “Your darkness in the afternoon.”
After graduating as a graphic designer, Wong decided to go into show business.
He became a screenwriter and worked on dozens of films.
Most famous of the films was Patrick Tam’s Final Victory.
Wong’s directorial debut came in 1988 with As Tears Go By.
A story of two small time gangsters with a complicated friendship,
in a plot heavily indebted to Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets
The film was a hit with audiences and critics alike and marked Wong as a director to watch.
While As Tears Go By was a relatively conventional crime flick,
Wong’s next film, Days of Being Wild, was an outright art film.
The complicated plot follows the love lives of group of youths in the Hong Kong of 1960’s.
Everyone aches for someone, but never for the right person.
The actors, full of ennui, look stunning
and film’s cinematographer, the future Wong stalwart Christopher Doyle,
shoots Days of Being Wild through so many filters, that the film looks like a memory of itself.
Wong Kar-Wai began to develop his unique working method.
Eschewing writing screenplays for his films.
Instead he starts with an idea and then tries to find the plot of the film during the filming,
often writing the day’s scenes on the morning of the shoot.
When you say “You have so many different options” & “you have so many different endings”.
The story can be told in different ways. I have all this in my mind already.
But I don’t want to commit to a certain way to tell the story. I want to see how the story should go.
Days of Being Wild ends with a mysterious scene
of a previously unseen gambler getting ready for the night.
The gambler is played by Tony Leung,
who would go on to become Wong's best known collaborator
and to star in six of his following eight films.
It’s pretty hard to descripe our relationship. It’s very strange.
We’ve known each other for twenty years, but we seldom meet.
And on the set we seldom talk. We just connect to each other.
Leung also starred in Wong’s next film Chungking Express.
Shot on the quick, while the post-production on Wong’s next film dragged,
Chungking Express would once again tell the story of love and crime and youth.
The film is set in the present day Hong Kong and expresses the city’s propulsive rhythm
through its freewheeling handheld cinematography and hectic editing.
The film was a hit among cinephiles around the world
and made Wong one the most influential directors of the 90's
Wong followed Chungking Express with the wuxia epic Ashes of Time,
the crime film Fallen Angels, based on a rejected plot line from Chungking Express
and Happy Together, a romance that won Wong the best director award at Cannes Film Festival.
In the Mood for Love tells the story of two neighbours
who realise their spouses are in an adulterous relationship.
The two fall in love, but, unlike their significant others, never act on those feelings.
The film is shot with a restrained elegance
and is a veritable tour de force for the art director William Chang
The biggest challenge for Tony and Maggie is – I tell them “this film is not going to be verbal."
"You are not going to express yourselves through dialogue. "
"You have to express yourself through body, your small gestures, your glances.”
In the Mood for Love became Wong's most acclaimed film to date.
And was voted one the greatest movies of all time.
Wong followed In the Mood for Love with its quasi-sequel 2046
and his Hollywood debut My Blueberry Nights.
Wong's film, The Grandmaster, is about Ip Man, the martial arts master
who, among other things, was the teacher to Bruce Lee.
In true Wong fashion, the film makes even the fighting scenes
symbols for Ip Man's unrequited feelings.
Once again the film was adored by critics
and also became veritable box-office smash. A rarity for Wong.
Wong Kar-Wai is an auteur with distinct sensibilities and obsessions
as well as a way of making films that is a combination of wild improvisation
and methodical perfectionism.
Or as he says about his own way of working:
There is an old Chinese saying that you can't accomplish anything without sincerity.
I believe that this is reflected in my works.
Each film is an outcome of my own life experiences.
Looking back I find that each film has something to do
with what I was most interested in at that time.
I have no regrets.