MC: Brigitte Lin and Tony Leung Chiu-wai also appear in Ashes of Time. Were you interested in further exploring their personalities?
WKW: First of all, I was fascinated by the other actor, [Faye] Wong, who plays the waitress in the second part of the film. In the scene in which she runs into Brigitte Lin, for me, they are the same woman, ten years apart. Tony Leung [Chiu-wai] was perfect for the role because he really looks like a police officer.
MC: In all your films, there is an elliptical manner in which you tell the story, a way of jumping quickly from one shot to the next.
WKW: It’s maybe the influence of Godard and Bresson. I decided to direct Chungking Express in a short time period. For me, it was like a road movie. I had come up with two short stories several years ago, without being able to make a film of them. So I then got the idea to bring the stories together in one single screenplay. When I started to film, I hadn’t yet written it completely. I filmed it chronologically. The first part took place at night. I then wrote the rest of the story during the day! Thanks to a brief interruption because of new year celebrations, I had a little more time to finish the rest of the script.
MC: Do the numbers that you attribute to the two police officers to identify them have a particular meaning?
WKW: Since I am rather lazy at coming up with names for my characters, I thought of using numbers, which gave a certain flavor. After all, Kafka called all of his protagonists K.! When I read the nineteenth century Russian novelists, I have such a hard time orienting myself with all the names and nicknames that I am happy to return to the simplicity of names in Kafka!
MC: What is your relationship with the Fifth Generation Chinese directors and with the ones of the Taiwan New Wave?8
WKW: In the People’s Republic of China, the directors come from a long tradition, but it’s a tradition very much shut down to the outside world. In Hong Kong, there is a lot more mixture, and we are influenced by the West. Since 1945, there are many Chinese people who have emigrated to Hong Kong. They used to speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, and participated in the development of the film industry, often dealing in their films with the past rather than the present. This was also the case in Taiwan. But for the past fifteen years, the new directors have become interested in today’s problems. They’ve broken away from the propaganda films that were numerous in the 1950s and 1960s, like the ones from the mainland, of course, even if their goals were different. In Hong Kong, we are more inclined toward entertainment, and I imagine that one day this will be the preoccupation of all three Chinese cinema traditions (Hong Kong, Chinese, Taiwanese) that will become one!
MC: From a cinematographic standpoint, which Chinese films—wherever they come from—left you with the greatest mark in the last ten years?
WKW: A City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao-hsien.
NOTES
1. Hong Kong Polytechnic, later became Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
2. Two major studios in the 1980s. They have ceased operating now.
3. The Hong Kong New Wave began in the late 1970s with a group of directors such as Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, and Patrick Tam. They are believed to have established a new style of Cantonese films that were very different from those prior to the late 1970s.
4. Before As Tears Go By, Andrew Lau Wai-keung had been the cinematographer of several films like Where’s Officer Tuba (1986), City On Fire (1987) and The Thirty Million Rush (1987).
5. Andrew Lau Wai-keung has been directing since 1990. His most notable films are the Young and Dangerous series (1996–1998) and the Infernal Affairs trilogy (codirected with Alan Mak Siu-fai, 2002–2003).
6. Yulin is a city in Shannxi Province bordering Inner Mongolia to the north.
7. As Tears Go By received ten nominations in total and won two awards in the Hong Kong Film Awards.
8. Taiwan New Wave, or Taiwan New Cinema, refers to the work produced by a group of new directors in 1980s. These films often address social issues with elements of realism. Prominent figures include Edward Yang (That Day, on the Beach, 1983) and Hou Hsiaohsien (A Time to Live, a Time to Die, 1985).
The Northern Beggar and Southern Emperor in a Pleasant Forest: Dialogue with Wong Kar-wai
Lin Yao-teh / 1994
From United Literature (Taiwan). No. 120 (pp. 130–37). Interview conducted in Mandarin Chinese on September 21, 1994. Reprinted by permission of Lucy Chen. Translated by Silver Wai-ming Lee and Maurice Leung from Chinese.
Lin Yao-teh: You have always been good at writing about metropolises.
Wong Kar-wai: The Fifth Generation of Chinese directors1 and the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien have their eyes set on the countryside; I am more into metropolitan cultures.
LYT: Basically, reality means metropolitan cultures to our generation.
WKW: The Cantonese and Taiwanese movies that I watched when I was a kid were unrealistic. They unrealistically set the past in present contexts. At that time, Japanese and French movies were also introduced into the Hong Kong market, so cultures blended into a mixture. Under such an informational cosmopolitan context, I started paying attention to matters related to people in a metropolis.
LYT: You must have a clear self-consciousness about your experiences growing up and your life as a creator.
WKW: As I analyze my own work, I would consider As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, and Ashes of Time belonging to the same stage. Chungking Express marks another stage of my work.
LYT: From a business perspective, Ashes of Time should be screened prior to Chungking Express.2 Now the media have all fixed their eyes on Ashes of Time; Chungking Express is totally ignored. But according to your wish, the films were released sequentially; the open and imaginative ending of Chungking Express has become even more meaningful.
WKW: Days of Being Wild is often interpreted as a story about time and memories, but haven’t you noticed these are actually only a part of the movie? The main characters of the first three movies are all fearful of being rejected. This has been a major problem of modern metropolitans. The most common injury we face in our daily lives is being rejected. This has something to do with my background.
LYT: With your experience of immigration.
WKW: I moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong at the age of five. With the language barrier and the fact that I don’t have many relatives in Hong Kong, I was alienated during my school life. My mother was a movie enthusiast. She had fallen in love with movies imported from the West back when we were in Shanghai. After moving to Hong Kong, she always took me to the movies in the afternoon after school. We watched two or three films a day, mostly westerns and those set in ancient Rome, and fantasy films. It was later when we started watching Mandarin movies.
LYT: There must be some particular movies that left an impression. Like, I always remember the monsters in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
WKW: To me, The Mysterious Box of Lunar Palace3 stirred my imagination.
LYT: The relationship between you and your mother must have been very special.
WKW: My father and I had a distant relationship. He was seldom home, always abroad. I spent most of the time with my mother. Most of the female characters I have written were based on my mother and my wife.
LYT: I bet there are strong images in your memories with your mother.
WKW: It was winter in Shanghai. She was off duty. The children were sleeping on the same bed. My brother, sister, and I were all underneath a quilt. My mother had a good relationship with the unit comrade at a dairy company, so we had milk every morning. There was sunlight in the winter morning, giving me a warm and secure feeling. Like Albert Camus, who has also written a lot about mother and son, the son wanted to live his own life at the age of twenty. But since his mother was ill, he was stressed out every time he went out because he knew his mother needed him. As the sentiment rotted, the stress became hatred. In Camus’s The Stranger [L’Étranger], I feel like I have lived through many scenes. This work resonates with me a lot.
LYT: Talking about
Camus, I am also curious about your reading experience as an adolescent.
WKW: My father had a weird belief that one should read all the classic literature during childhood and adolescence.
LYT: I have been through similar hardship. I lost my reciting ability after I had to recite the whole book of Analects of Confucius.
WKW: My first book was Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber.4 [Because] my elder siblings were stranded in mainland China, the books they read at that time mostly came from the Soviet Union, except those old editions from French romanticism and realism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This contributes to another unusual reading background of mine—my father insisted that I write to my siblings, and, for the sake of common topics, I spent most of my time in the library of my secondary school reading world literature.
LYT: I suppose you hadn’t read them with another level of interpretation, all the between the lines?
WKW: There are more or less some impressions left when you really read a lot, especially [the work of] Honoré de Balzac.
LYT: La Comédie Humaine?
WKW: Yes. And I read a lot of American novels after that.
LYT: Who are your favorite American novelists?
WKW: John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. As I grew older I started to read some Japanese literature too. First came Yasunari Kawabata. I love his Snow Country and The House of the Sleeping Beauties.
LYT: What about Kobo Abe? He has his unique expression of metropolitan timespace perspectives.
WKW: Yes, The Woman in the Dunes is exactly what you mean. But Abe isn’t the one who has influenced me the most. Let me elaborate. I don’t care much for Yukio Mishima either. But after reading work of Buraiha [the Decadent School] and neo-sensualism, I became a big fan of Osamu Dazai.
LYT: Dazai’s work is full of hopes and nothingness. His last novel before his suicide was No Longer Human. What about Riichi Yokomitsu? In his Head and Belly, he wrote about an express train skipping minor stations en route like a stone. It was really movie-like.
WKW: Oh, Yokomitsu is my second favorite Japanese writer after Dazai. And it was in the year of 1989 when I came to read Haruki Murakami’s work.
LYT: Murakami’s work has gone downhill recently.
WKW: I was interested in Murakami from the beginning, but his novels have not varied that much these years. My then favorite was Pinball, 1973. As a whole, Kawabata, Dazai, and Yokomitsu have influenced me more.
LYT: What about Latin American literature? Jorge Luis Borges is at the top of my list.
WKW: I started reading South American novels after the Márquez mania, like those by Borges as you’ve just mentioned. Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a significant novel; another is Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I had begun screen-writing when I was reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold, yet I had never thought of telling stories with events in a reverse chronology. [Márquez] made me to think about that. Among South American writers, it is the author of Kiss of the Spider Woman who has influenced me the most.
LYT: Manuel Puig.
WKW: By far it is he who has influenced me the most in making films.
LYT: Which do you like better, the movie or the novel?
WKW: The original novel is the best. But Kiss of the Spider Woman isn’t his best piece. His best novel is Heartbreak Tango, a real significant piece. I haven’t read anything great after that. I’m recently looking for books to read, and I’m reading Zizhi Tongjian5 at the moment.
LYT: I suggest that you read Book of Jin. The poignant history of the uprising of the five barbarians is full of magic. More worth noticing is the beautifully written Tang-styled texts. Book of Jin, written during the Tang dynasty, is actually a brand new revisit to the history of the Jin dynasty from the perspectives of Tang civilization.
The most interesting vengeful character in Book of Jin is Fu Deng, the distant grandnephew of Fu Jian. His great uncle’s empire was scattered after the Battle of Fei River, himself [Fu Jian] killed by Yao Chang, a renegade subordinate. Fu Deng gathered his troops and chased Yao from east to west, eating the corpses of their enemies on the way. The ancestral tablet of Fu Jian was carried all along. And “revenge till death” was carved on every armor …
WKW: When I was filming Ashes of Time, I was reading a book about ancient revenge. Not until then did I know there were many rules when it comes to revenge in ancient China. Revenge planning took a lot of time, five years, ten years, even decades. My original idea was Ouyang Feng [Western Venom, played by Leslie Cheung] seeking revenge on Huang Yaoshi [Eastern Heretic, played by Tony Leung Kar-fai] but with Feng gradually losing his ability to speak since there were all uninhabited areas on his way. Because of this he has lived in his imagination and is unclear about his vengeful motive. The Searchers (1956) by the American director John Ford is also a story about searching for someone. It expresses the idea that it is no longer important whether that someone is found. The valuable thing is the discovery of the meaning of time and life during the search.
LYT: Yes, we haven’t talked about modern Chinese literature yet.
WKW: I’ve read a lot of Lu Xun’s work.
LYT: Lu’s Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk is a gem, but it is often neglected.
WKW: Yes, it’s wonderfully written.
LYT: Any contemporary work worth mentioning?
WKW: I haven’t found any work worth reading. There has not emerged any school [of writing]. I still prefer modern literature by Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren. I also enjoy Lao She. Recently I’ve also become interested in “Hai Pai” [Shanghai style] novels.
LYT: You mean the work of neo-sensualism by writers in Shanghai like Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Liu Na’ou?
WKW: Mu is the best among them. I would like to make a film about him. Some of his work is about fallen things such as nightlife, rogues, and prostitutes, yet other work talks about the lives of the lower class. I think his personal history is also quite legendary. Also, I proposed a visit to Shi Zhecun last time I went to Shanghai.
LYT: I visit him every time I’m in Shanghai.
WKW: Once a Japanese producer invited me to make a short film. I proposed to make an adaptation of a Shi novel.
LYT: The General’s Head would be a nice pick.
WKW: But I prefer Spring Sun. It is very suitable for a movie adaptation. “Hai Pai” writers position their viewpoint in the city. They all love watching films; therefore, you may sense movies in their work.
LYT: Mu’s A Platinum Statue of the Female Body and Major Kuga should provide plenty of imagination if you are to turn them into film art.
WKW: There is so much wonderful stuff in Mu’s books. I would take the chance to make a film on Mu’s novels.
LYT: You could connect several of Mu’s short stories, making a collage—just like how you did for the stories of the four characters in Days of Being Wild.
WKW: Basically, Mu’s stories can be easily put together.
LYT: In fact, writers like Mu are associated with the Japanese writer Yokomitsu, whom you like. Shanghai-style neo-sensualism was founded only four years after the Japanese neo-sensualism (1924). The “Hai Pai” writers were largely influenced by Japanese literature at that time. You could still find many settings for location shooting in Shanghai, which allow you to reconstruct the 1920s and 1930s.
WKW: I passed by Kaifeng [in Henan province] when filming Ashes of Time. People said the city was well preserved. I didn’t think so; there were too many modern things. I would rather shoot in Taiyuan and Datong in Shanxi Province, where you can still sometimes find original ancient temples and shrines.
LYT: Chinese architecture depends largely on wood structures. You cannot expect them to be as well preserved as stone structures in Greece and Rome.
WKW: What really matters is the Chinese people’s lacking sense to preserve heritage sites.
LYT: Márquez of Colombia and Graham Greene of England were so different in their personalities
, genres, and behaviors, yet they became close friends. They also had a common friend, the Panamanian military leader Omar Torrijos. So, who are your good friends throughout these years?
WKW: I don’t have many friends. I am not good at socializing. Talking about my friends … I have Jeff Lau, who is very different from me. Another is William Chang, my art director.
LYT: We’ve talked about Puig. His novels, such as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango, were not only published as serials in the traditional way but were also widely distributed via radio, television dramas, and booklets. And, of course, Kiss of the Spider Woman became a film in 1976. I think you could write novels too. Take the scene played by Tony Leung and Faye Wong in Chungking Express as an example: the narration [monologue], the whole structure, and tempo—except the film language expressed by the camera—are already a delicate short story. Perhaps you should try expressing your ideas using texts, comics, or other means. Like, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was fun.
WKW: I am thinking about this.
LYT: Narrations from Chungking Express and Ashes of Time are both literary.
WKW: I first came across wuxia novels as radio dramas. There were times in Hong Kong when it was popular to broadcast novels as radio dramas. I read the novels only after that and finally watched the films adapted from them. That was why I wanted to try mixing the characteristics of these media into a single piece of work when I made Ashes of Time.
LYT: You mean imitating a radio drama using a narration, increasing the literary interest between the monologue and the dialogue, and combining them with the movie?
WKW: Yes. In addition, the first wuxia novels I read were by Louis Cha [Jin Yong]. After that, I started reading Gu Long.6
LYT: You have hidden Gu Long–style delights underneath the skin of Jin Yong’s characters—even though the characters’ nicknames are Jin’s.
WKW: True, true. And let’s talk about the fight scenes. Every fight scene in Ashes of Time is designed to represent an era of wuxia films. Tony Leung’s scene represents the style with a solemn and tragic hero like Chang Cheh’s characters.7 Jacky Cheung’s scene is more like a Japanese jidaigeki [period films]; winning or losing is on a single slash. Brigitte Lin’s scene is obviously the Tsui Hark–style flying stuff [wire work]. I tried to put everything in this movie.
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