MC: What genres did you write?
WKW: All kinds: comedies, action movies, kung fu movies, and even porn movies. At first, I didn’t hang out with the directors I wrote for because I was very shy. I would meet them, pitch an idea, and when they agreed to it, I went back home to write alone. I was very slow, and I remember that one time, I took a year to finish a script, which drove everyone crazy. Later when I had gained more self-confidence, I would have daily meetings with the director and would write each scene with him.
MC: Among the ten films whose scripts are credited to you, which ones are your favorites?
WKW: They were all made by different filmmakers. I like Final Victory by Patrick Tam in particular. It’s about failed gangsters from a working class background, whose heroes were having affairs with the wives and mistresses of the protagonist—a senior member in a gang. I think that Patrick, who isn’t making films now, was an important filmmaker at the time—the most talented of the Hong Kong New Wave.3 He also introduced me to the films of Rohmer, Antonioni, and Godard. We became close friends, and later I asked him to work on the editing for my second film, Days of Being Wild, as well as Ashes of Time. We know each other so well!
MC: Did you become a filmmaker because you weren’t satisfied with what was made from your screenplays?
WKW: I don’t think so. I’m not on any kind of power trip and wasn’t jealous of the filmmakers for whom I wrote. Neither did I have much reason to complain. However, I remember some visits to a set when I wanted to say, “Action!,” because I had different ideas on the camera angle and I wanted something other than what I was seeing. When someone asked me if I was ready to direct, I said yes.
MC: How did that happen?
WKW: Alan Tang, a famous actor from the 1960s with almost two hundred roles to his credit became a producer. I had worked with him on two screenplays. He liked giving a chance to young directors. After many discussions together, he deemed that—with the full weight of his professional acting experience—my explanations on the characters and the plot were very convincing. He thought that I could become a good director. That’s how he gave me my break.
MC: That break was As Tears Go By in 1988.
WKW: The idea was that this first film would be part of a trilogy. The first part of the trilogy has not (yet) been made. The third part is Final Victory, directed by Patrick Tam, which is about a gangster in his thirties who comes to term with his failure. In As Tears Go By, the second part, he is twenty-something. In the first part, Hero for a Day, the gangster is an adolescent.
MC: Mean Streets inspired your films. How do you view the relationship between this Scorsese film and Hong Kong society?
WKW: I think Italians have much in common with the Chinese: their values, their sense of friendship, their mafia, their pasta, and their mothers. When I saw Mean Streets for the first time, it was a shock to me because I had the impression that the story could have happened in Hong Kong. In fact, I only borrowed the character played by Robert De Niro. The other characters come from my own experience. When I was a scriptwriter, I had a close friend who was a stuntman in films and who had been something of a gangster. We would spend the entire nights together until five o’clock in the morning in the seediest bars in Hong Kong. From there I gleaned loads of details that can be found in As Tears Go By. We knew a guy who didn’t know any English, but who had a British girlfriend, a bartender: she kept leaving him and going back to him. They were a strange couple who didn’t communicate at all. This inspired a character in the film. This is how I spent three or four years of my youth—drinking, fighting, and driving fast cars.
MC: How do you work with your chief cameraman?
WKW: In all, I had two cinematographers for my four films. Andrew Lau Wai-keung, who photographed As Tears Go By, was only on his second film.4 He also worked with the second team of Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time, and he had set the lights on the first part of Chungking Express. The second cinematographer is Christopher Doyle. Andrew Lau is very energetic, the best out there for handheld camera work. He knows everything, and we communicate well with each other. His only weakness is that he lacks the subtlety for very sensitive lighting. Today he is a director,5 but I think that he could become a talented visual artist. For Doyle, he’s a master of lighting, and we get along well. Though we don’t speak the same language, we share the same references from films and paintings. He has a great sense of aesthetics, but he is less technical in his use of the camera. At first, he was a sailor; then he did photography. This gave him his artistic talent that pleased Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, for whom Doyle had worked in Taiwan. I needed someone like him for Ashes of Time.
MC: It’s surprising that the cinematography is uniform in Chungking Express despite the presence of two different cinematographers.
WKW: I’m the one who assured the continuity, and I told them that we were going to work like we were in a jam session. Neither knew the story. I contacted Doyle in Japan where he was working on the postproduction of a film. Three days later, he joined me in Hong Kong to finish the film in two weeks. We filmed like madmen. I told him that this time we wouldn’t have to adjust the lighting so much (other than those in the apartment) because it was being made like a road movie, without a fixed setting. We didn’t have the time to set up a tripod or to use a camera dolly: I wanted us to make it as if we were doing a documentary, with a hand-held camera. And Doyle accepted this challenge, taking photographs of everything very quickly while making an image of high quality. But for Ashes of Time, he took a really long time refining the shots. Every day he would tell me, “It’s death in Yulin,” from the name of the place in the north of China6 where we were making the film!
MC: Is it your success with As Tears Go By that allowed you to get all these famous actors for Days of Being Wild?
WKW: The film had not been successful in Hong Kong, but it did extremely well in Korea and Taiwan. It nevertheless received nine nominations for the Hong Kong Oscars,7 which is unusual for a first film. My producer then proposed to direct the second film with actors I chose. I directed As Tears Go By at twenty-nine, and I was thirty-one years old when I made Days of Being Wild. Thirty is a big deal; we feel like we’re getting old! I wanted to evoke in the second film things I was afraid of forgetting later. As a child, shortly after my arrival in Hong Kong, I felt very lonely since I did not speak Cantonese. My mother and I were in this little apartment during the day, and we listened to the radio that I did not understand. The only theme tune I still remember is the BBC news bulletin. One night, my parents went out dancing. In the middle of the night, I woke up and got scared. I turned on the radio, and I heard the latest BBC news bulletin, which reassured me. This is the period I evoked in Days of Being Wild that begins in 1960 and ends in 1966. I love its story, which took me two years to structure. In it, I evoke two families through the first postwar generation. One family is Cantonese and originally from Hong Kong, and the other one—Leslie Cheung’s family—is from Shanghai. They are separated by language; and in the second part, they end up getting to know each other. Unfortunately, I never made the second half of the script. The film came out at Christmas and had set up great expectations because of its stars. The public was convinced that they were going to see a new As Tears Go By with a lot of action scenes. Yet Days of Being Wild didn’t have much of that, neither did it have much of a plot, technically speaking. It was a total failure; in Korea, the viewers even threw things at the screen. So the producer refused to finance the second part. The aesthetic of the two films differed greatly. The first one had a fast editing and a lot of music. The second had a rather slow tempo that corresponded to my idea of the 1960s. I attempted to divide the film into four movements. The first one was very Bresson-like, with many close-up shots. The second one looked like a B-movie with complicated movements of the camera and sequence-shots. The third one was filmed with a depth of field. The fourth one resembled the second one more with quite a bit of movement. The story went equall
y from one character to another, which made the division into several movements even more obvious.
MC: Have you evolved in your manner of directing comedies?
WKW: Since I am constantly changing the screenplays, I don’t let the actors read them, and I don’t rehearse them. I always have a general idea of each scene, and I arrive on the set three or four hours before filming. That’s when I imagine the situations and the movements of the camera. Then I tell my actors the lines from the dialogue that they must say. Of course, I’ve already talked with them a great deal about their characters. What matters for me is to communicate the reasons for their gestures and actions: Why is he sitting there? Why is he smoking a cigarette? Why is she sleeping there? Why is she crying so loudly? When one knows a character well, everything goes without saying, and one can easily understand his motivation. At the beginning of filming, I made a lot of takes, enough so that my actors and I found a common rhythm. Then I am much more efficient with the number of takes.
MC: For Ashes of Time, you were inspired by a contemporary martial arts novel, The Legend of Eagle-shooting Heroes, by Jin Yong (Louis Cha).
WKW: First, I was attracted to two characters, Eastern Heretic and Western Venom; the first name means “the eccentric East” and the second “the bad West.” At the beginning of the 1990s, martial arts films became very popular again and a producer invited me to make one. I agreed because I have always loved this genre. I had never made a film with period costumes and that appealed to me. I was then very broadly inspired by the original novel, a very long novel with two appealing characters in their sixties. I had to invent their past. The stories of chivalry—wuxia in Chinese—belong to Chinese literature like Luo Guanzhong’s classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But the contemporary stories by Jin Yong—who is very prolific (he has written a dozen of them)—in fact belong to pulp fiction. They are extremely popular and everyone was waiting to trap me! They didn’t know that I was going to do something different. My approach differed from the films that I was used to seeing.
MC: Your martial arts choreographer for the fight scenes, Sammo Hung, collaborated with King Hu on The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant Ones (1976). Have you seen the films of this great director?
WKW: I discovered them when I was a child, but I didn’t really understand them because of their philosophical content and their association with Zen Buddhism. Sammo Hung, apart from his skills in adjusting fight scenes, is also the best Hong Kong director of action sequences for twenty years. He was trained at the Peking Opera School. He is the one who choreographs that kind of scene.
MC: You tend to stylize these sequences, to use ellipses to the point of making the action itself becomes secondary to the structure of the film.
WKW: The traditional martial arts film has the goal of stimulating the viewer’s senses. I wanted the senses to also be a means for expressing the characters’ feelings. For example, when Brigitte Lin is playing with the sword, it’s a dance. When I filmed Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the blind warrior, in slow motion, I showed his fatigue as he faces his life, which is symbolized by the weight of the sword. Jacky Cheung, on the other hand, is filmed in ten images per second to suggest that he is emerging, that he is rising in contrast to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who is heading towards death. Certain sequences were made [on the set], others like those with Jacky Cheung were basically made in the lab.
Tsui Hark took up the tradition of martial arts on screen, so well-illustrated beforehand by King Hu with extraordinary ballets in the air, since the actors were suspended from wires. But he was imitated by others so much that this style became sterile, which led to an impasse. When I decided to make Ashes of Time, I was resolved to not follow this trend because it seemed dead to me. With the exception of Brigitte Lin, whose actions are exaggerated, I wanted the other actors to fight on the ground so that their duels gave an impression of an actual duel, not artificial ones.
MC: The structure of the screenplay, with their labyrinthine flashbacks and the voice-over narration, make one think more of the American film noirs than period films.
WKW: During the period I was writing screenplays for other directors, they always asked me for simple and direct stories and that is what I wrote. My first film, As Tears Go By, was part of this tendency. After having finished it, I read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez; I was very impressed by his way of telling a story. I began to read many Latin American novelists, and the one who most influenced me is Manuel Puig—the author of Kiss of the Spider Woman—with his narrative divided into a series of fragments that shunned chronology. In the end, the feelings transmitted to us are so much stronger for having come through in this fragmented form. This technique influenced Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time.
MC: The theme of betrayal dominates Ashes of Time.
WKW: For me, the theme is more about being rejected, of not belonging. This is what Leslie Cheung says in his narration when he speaks of himself as an orphan. In order not to be rejected, he rejects others first. Because of Brigitte Lin’s rejection by Tony Leung Kar-fai, she invents an older brother. Betrayal is, therefore, merely a consequence. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays the role of a man who is rejected by his spouse, who cheated on him with his best friend. Since he still loves her, the only solution for him is self-destruction. In Tony Leung Kar-fai’s case, he plays a character who loves Maggie Cheung, while she is taken with Leslie Cheung. Since he doesn’t want to be rejected, he never admits to his feelings, and as a sort of compensation, he makes himself loved by others in order to experience the feeling. It’s another way to experience rejection to which he is a victim and is different from Tony Leung-Chiu-wai’s way. There are two characters that stand out: Jacky Cheung and Charlie Young. The former isn’t afraid of rejection. As for Charlie, since she is sure that someone will come to her aid, she waits patiently. Both will have a happy ending, and they influence Leslie Cheung in his decision to leave the desert, [as shown] in the last scenes of the film.
As I talk about it, I realize that it’s a thread that runs through all of my films, this idea of rejection. All the characters from Days of Being Wild experience this feeling. I suppose there is an evolution in Chungking Express because in the end, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and the woman [Faye Wong’s character] are not afraid of being rejected by others.
MC: How did you find the different action locations for Ashes of Time?
WKW: Due to budgetary limitations, China was the only place we could film. I scouted the country in search of landscape close to the ones in the book that had inspired my film. After trips from the north to the south without any success, someone showed me a photograph of the place where Leslie Cheung[’s character] retired to. I sent William Chang, my art director, so that he could scope out places, and he returned to tell me that it was likely a suitable background for the film.
MC: How was the decision about the actors made?
WKW: I had already worked with all of the actors except for Brigitte Lin and Tony Leung Kar-fai. I like to know the people whom I am going to direct. For me the biggest challenge the film posed was Brigitte because the public was used to seeing her cross-dressed in [Tsui Hark’s] martial arts films. She intrigued me a great deal, and I thought she could interpret a schizophrenic personality. As for Tony Leung Kar-fai, he is short. Yet our imaginations push us to see these ancient warriors as very virile, with a tall bearing. Tony Leung [Kar-fai] was able to make it conceivable.
MC: Is the time of the action imaginary, or are you referring to a time specific to Chinese history?
WKW: The original novel occurs during the Song Dynasty, more than eight centuries ago. Jin Yong’s talent is clear in his ability to create legendary fictions and to know how to integrate them in the official Chinese history. When I first looked at the material, I decided not to do research like King Hu in order to get to a historically authentic image. My only criterion was not to integrate elements that appeared later than the time period of the story. But objects, clot
hing, and architectural features that preceded the Song period could be used. I also didn’t want the language to be too slangy or modern in the dialogue, without consciously searching for an ancient, stylized language.
MC: Why did you stop working on Ashes of Times to work on Chungking Express?
WKW: We had a break of two months while we waited for some film equipment to arrive to redo the sound; it had been taped in the desert and was of poor quality. Since I had nothing to do, I followed my instincts and decided to direct Chungking Express.
MC: The two police officers in Chungking Express, with parallel destinies, mirror the characters of Ouyang [played by Leslie Cheung] and Huang [played by Tony Leung Kar-fai] in Ashes of Time. They are presented like reflections of each other, the two sides of a coin. Both are abandoned by their girlfriends.
WKW: I chose two cops for Chungking Express, but I wanted the first cop not to be in uniform. Brigitte Lin, with her cold appearance and her blond wig is also, in my view, in a kind of uniform. In the beginning, I wanted to do a film in parts. One would take place in Hong Kong Island, the other in Kowloon; the action in one film would happen during the day, the other at night. And despite the difference, it would be the same story. After the more serious and intentional approach in Ashes of Time, I wanted to do a lighter, more contemporary film, but one in which the characters dealt with the same problems.
MC: What interested you the most about this Hong Kong neighborhood near Chungking Mansion?
WKW: It’s a very famous building in Hong Kong. Research shows that about five thousand tourists visit it every day. With two hundred inns, it’s a mixture of very different cultures. Even for the people in the surrounding neighborhood, it’s a legendary place where the relationships between people are very complex. It’s also a place of concern for the Hong Kong police with all the illicit trafficking going on there. This overpopulated and hyperactive place is a good metaphor for the city itself.
Wong Kar-wai Page 9