Wong Kar-wai

by Silver Wai-ming Lee

  MC&HN: Your way of filming with rapid movements of the camera, as if in a state of emergency, makes your relationship to Christopher Doyle particularly important.

  WKW: This assumes an intimate collaboration, of course, especially in this particular case when, because of Leslie Cheung’s other commitments, in ten days we had to film all the scenes he is in. We even worked three days straight, basically with no interruption, and everyone got a little crazy. But I always thought the style of filming came from the way of filming, and, in this case, it could not have been faster. Normally, I choreograph the actors’ movements and tell them where to move. Then I tell Christopher how the camera is going to move, and he works on setting up the lights. Of course, we had no problems communicating with each other because together we’ve made five of the six films I directed. We don’t talk about lighting or about the setting or the angle because starting with our first collaboration I was very clear about my instructions, and he knows what I want. For example, we don’t see eye to eye on close-ups. He wants them less close together, while my taste veers more toward the close-up. He knows this and gives me what I want. So our working relationship is very good, and when he moves the camera, I don’t even have to look at the video screen because in following his movement I know what his take will be like. In general, on the set, we talk about anything and everything, but very rarely about photography. I prefer to ask him, for instance, what the meaning of the Tropic of Capricorn is because for me the story of these two young men begins when they pass the line of the Tropics.

  MC&HN: Before beginning to film, did you have a particular relationship with tango music and with Astor Piazzolla’s work?

  WKW: Not at all. In fact, my first contact with Piazzola was at the Amsterdam airport where I bought his CDs on my way to Argentina! For me, it’s more than tango. It’s rhythm and passion. The music gave my film its rhythm, as well as giving rhythm to the city in which we filmed. Music is a part of sound, and the sounds of Buenos Aires are dominated by music, on one hand, yet the city is also about the sounds of radio and television, like the broadcasts of soccer games that you can hear wherever you are.

  MC&HN: What is surprising in your purchase of Piazzolla’s CD is that you stumbled upon a well-known melody of his arranged by Kip Hanrahan.

  WKW: I believe a great deal in chance. In fact, my films are made up of the addition of small parts. At the end, I discover the whole. It seems to me to be a very Chinese way of thinking. One day, I was filming in La Boca, and I didn’t know why I was doing such or such a shot. It was purely accidental. It’s when we were editing that I realized that it was going to play a very important role. In other words, it’s like a puzzle whose order I wouldn’t know, but whose pieces would assemble themselves little by little. In my view, every film has its own bit of luck. For example, when we were filming Days of Being Wild, one sequence was supposed to occur during a sunny day, but it was raining nonstop. We, therefore, changed the script, but when we were about to film, the sun came out again. That time, luck was not on the side of the film. For the waterfall scene in Happy Together, we were very worried because rain had been pouring for a week, and we had very little time. But on the day of filming, the sun returned, and we took advantage of the abundant waterfalls that made for a spectacular background. There, on the other hand, we were lucky!

  MC&HN: Do you film using a lot of film [negative] compared to what you will keep during the editing?

  WKW: I work in segments, which I number without really knowing ahead of time the connections between them, nor do I know their order in the narrative. At the point of editing, I try a number of combinations. For Happy Together, we used Avid, a system of virtual editing. But I originally did my first editing on the Steenbeck,1 and it lasted three hours because I like to work at the table. But the advantage of Avid was that it helped to tighten the film. It was, therefore, more of a process of elimination than of addition. I was still in the process of discarding what didn’t seem necessary two weeks before the Cannes Film Festival because it seemed to me that this story didn’t merit a long film. Obviously, by working this way, I use a lot of film. But there’s another reason for this. We don’t do any retakes, and I use my camera in a very mobile way to capture moments of truth, a little like in a documentary. For Happy Together, I was always in need of negatives, and we had to ask for help. I was able to get from Kodak a type of film that is usually not used in fictional films. It’s a very old model with very little in stock. At the end of filming, the film had not arrived, and I asked Christopher Doyle to bring his camera to photograph the scene, image by image. This didn’t bother me because in the end time stopped, and we were able to make the film with fixed images. But I also decided to shorten this scene as well. Like you see, all methods are good in the making of a film!

  MC&HN: What was the contribution of Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung in the making of a film in which improvisation plays an important part?

  WKW: I never ask my actors to play a character other than who they are. I borrow a great deal from their personality. During the first days, we work slowly since we have to find the right path. Little by little, when they feel confident, I let them improvise especially during the sex scenes! Tony and Leslie know each other well, in fact for a long time, so it’s fun to watch them improvise in this way in front of the camera. Tony would ask me questions about his affair with Chang [Chen], the other man. In fact, I presented the situation to them; then they improvised while the camera filmed. They didn’t stop, and it was really funny to see them participate in the movement of the scene without me saying, “Cut!,” at any moment. They were waiting for me to stop them, but they had to keep going!

  MC&HN: You have made four films with Tony Leung and three films with Leslie Cheung. How do you define their personality since you’ve admitted to borrowing some of their traits to construct their characters?

  WKW: For me, Leslie Cheung’s behavior in the film is very close to the Leslie I know in real life. He was, therefore, very at ease with his role. Tony, on the other hand, is very different. He is not so sure of himself and doesn’t take the risk of doing crazy things in front of the camera. He is a very subtle and focused actor. This is why I wanted to make a change in him—to destabilize him—because I wanted to pull from him different accents. At first, he thought that my idea of making him Leslie’s lover a joke. The first day of filming, he had to perform in the love scene. He was so shocked that he refused right away, and, at any rate, he wanted to keep his underwear on. During the next three days, he was so shaken that he sat in a corner doing nothing by himself; he was completely speechless. He wondered how he could explain it all to his mother. He was very tense last night [at Cannes] during the screening of the film in the large room of the palace because it was the first time he was seeing it, and he was dreading the film’s release in Hong Kong in a month’s time. I told him that I would bring his mother, but he refused. It would be him or no one! Leslie’s reaction was very different. He said to me, “You want to tell a love story between two men, and I’m going to see just how far you will go.” From this standpoint, I believe he helped Tony a great deal, and he kept telling him that it was only a film! Leslie can give the impression of being more fragile, but, in fact, he is someone with great determination. His status as a star singer and his acting profession are equally important for him, and he considers them one and the same.

  MC&HN: How did you choose Chang Chen?

  WKW: I had seen him in A Brighter Summer Day (1991) by Edward Yang, while he was still a child [actor]. Last year, when I saw him in Mahjong (1996) by Edward Yang at the Berlin Film Festival, I realized that it was the same actor, and he had changed very much. I think he’s a remarkable actor. Up until then he had only done films with Edward Yang, whose methods are very different from mine. They have a kind of teacher-apprentice relationship, and Edward spends a lot of time discussing his role with him and practicing, which is not my way of doing things. This disturbed him a lot at the beginning,
especially since I had asked my assistant to take Chang Chen to a gym and to have him take boxing lessons. I found him too fragile, too tender, too slow, and I wanted him to be more active, stronger, with better coordination of his physical movements. Even at the end of the film, I think he still had not understood it all, after believing that he was going to act in an action film!

  MC&HN: With Fallen Angels, you went all the way with a kind of formalism. Isn’t Happy Together a kind of return to a cinema in which the characters have more consistency?

  WKW: For me, Fallen Angels was treated like a comic book in which the four protagonists were one-dimensional. The only character, in the strongest sense of the word, was the father of one of the young people [note: the mute played by Takeshi Kaneshiro]. In this way, the film reflected the enormous influence of comics on Hong Kong cinema. The viewing public is led to contrast real characters with heroes from comics. The experience with Happy Together is very different, of course. At the beginning of filming, I told Christopher Doyle and William Chang that it would be a simple and straightforward film about normal people who speak in slang. Why they came to Buenos Aires remains a mystery. I remember one of my friends, a member of the crew, had arrived in Buenos Aires a week before the rest of us. He told me that he wanted to go to the Canadian Embassy to try to get a passport because the quotas in Buenos Aires were more flexible than in Hong Kong and that it would cost only a few thousand American dollars. Basically, it’s possibly one of the reasons why Leslie and Tony left Hong Kong for Argentina!

  MC&HN: You like non-realistic cinematographic tricks, like an accelerated frame rate.

  WKW: It’s undoubtedly because of my impatience and that I wanted to do a film as fast as possible in order to return to Hong Kong! But seriously, I believe that it’s like the Chinese expression which states that “time goes by like a fast current of water.” In fact, in this film and in life, there is no progression. There is a routine aspect to their lives, while on the outside, the world is in constant movement. That’s the contrast.

  MC&HN: Did you always want this mixture of color with black and white?

  WKW: I like its texture. I also wanted to separate the film in three parts. The past, for the viewers, is often associated with black and white. The second part is when the two men decide to start to live together again. And the third part is when Leslie leaves Tony. The story then becomes more intimate. They no longer see each other; they no longer speak to other people and only speak to themselves. I often remember the first sentence in Godard’s Little Soldier: “For me, the time of action has passed. I’ve aged. The time for reflection has just begun.” And this is somewhat what happens in the third part of Happy Together. Another reason why I filmed the first part in black and white (in fact, it was made in color but treated in black and white) is that it occurs during the summer in Argentina, which is very cold. The black and white seemed to restore this ambience.

  MC&HN: It’s rare for the editor and the set designer [William Chang] to be the same person in a film.

  WKW: He wouldn’t hesitate to cut a frame if it seems necessary to him, even if the décor had taken a lot of effort and time! In fact, William Chang is very rigorous with the film, himself, and me. We have been working together since my first film, and he understands my work well. But it is also his work. I don’t give him orders, and he can be brutal in his decisions. His judgement is very good, and he knows my rhythm—so much so that the result is very close to what I think and what I feel. With him, the set designer and the editor are one. He thinks about dramaturgy. We don’t talk about colors or texture, but he always asks questions on the way in which I’m going to begin a sequence, and depending on my answer, he is going to think about the costume and the settings. I think he himself could be a very good filmmaker because he knows cinema thoroughly.

  MC&HN: Do you think the group you’ve formed with your collaborators for so many years is of a particular kind?

  WKW: I often think of us as a jazz ensemble. Christopher and William are in high demand in Hong Kong, but when I put them together, I’m a little bit like a team leader. I suggest we have jam sessions on a new project. So we discuss the film intensively among the three of us. Christopher will ask me what kind of music I’m going to use because that will inspire his movements of the camera and his style of photography. Tango was not his kind of music, but he had to admit that Piazzolla is amazing!

  NOTE

  1. Steenbeck is an editing suite that only deals with analogue film. Editing on this system requires manual cutting.

  Interview with Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love

  Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 2000

  From Positif (France). No. 477 (pp. 76–80). Interview conducted in English. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. [Editors’ note: Wong’s answers in English were transcribed from the interview included in In the Mood for Love DVD (Criterion edition). The questions were translated from French by Micky Lee.]

  Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret: You seem to have blended the preproduction and filming of the films 2046 and In the Mood for Love.

  Wong Kar-wai: We tried to finish the production of this film [In the Mood for Love] in August last year (1999), but obviously we were too slow. Because we also had the economic crisis [due to SARS] in Asia, all the investors of this film In the Mood for Love withdrew. We had to stop production and find other investors. By that time we had already started to make the film 2046 so that meant we had two films mixed together to schedule, and the whole process was very painful because it’s like loving two persons at the same time! When we were scouting locations for 2046, we thought this probably should go to In Mood for Love and vice versa. So in the end we decided the two films should be one film. So maybe in the future when you see In the Mood for Love and 2046, you will see something of 2046 in In the Mood for Love; and in In the Mood for Love you have some things from 2046.

  MC&HN: Why did you decide to situate In the Mood for Love in 1962 and 1966? The story of Days of Being Wild took place in the same era, and you did not see In the Mood of Love as the second part of Days of Being Wild?

  WKW: I’m very fond of that period in Hong Kong because it was a special period. The people whom we describe in the film: the landlady and all these Shanghainese communities were actually very special. They were people coming from China to Hong Kong after ’49 when the Communists took over China. They were living by themselves; they didn’t have any contact with the local Cantonese. They had their own language. They had their own food. They had their own cinema. In Hong Kong there was Mandarin cinema which was mainly for those people, and they had their own rituals. That’s why I wanted to put the film in this environment because I came from this background. As a kid, I heard the gossips, and I knew our neighbors. I want to re-create this part of Hong Kong in the film. Only five at the time, [I] had an overall impression of that time, so some of the details in the film are more beautiful or nicer than they actually were. But in memories everything is fine.

  MC&HN: Is the story between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung the second part of Days of Being Wild?

  WKW: Over the years people kept asking me, “Are you going to make a part two?” I thought to myself, “If I have a chance to make this film, will it be the same story or not?” I know I’ve changed. The way I see things has changed too, so for me I think the biggest difference is that in this film, we are describing people who are married. It’s not like Days of Being Wild where they are single.

  MC&HN: Your last film, Happy Together, is about a homosexual couple with explicit sexual expression. In In the Mood for Love, there is no sex scene.

  WKW: The time is different in the ’60s. One thing I am trying is to create a mood in which everything is covered, hidden.

  MC&HN: In In the Mood for Love, is the story about the deteriorating relationship of a couple because of external pressure? You never see the interference, the little pressure exerted indirectly by distant elements. But this is the consequence: they are no longer
together.

  WKW: The point of this story is: I’m not trying to tell a story about an affair. I’m trying to tell a certain attitude in a certain period of time in the history of Hong Kong—how people treated these things. I think to make a story about affairs would be very boring because there are so many films about affairs. And there will be no winner in an affair, so I try to find another angle. The whole thing is about the time, the period, and also how people treated this affair over the years by keeping it a secret. Secret will be the main point of the story.

  MC&HN: You chose not to show the other couple [the respective spouses of Tony Leung and Maggie Chueng] but imply them through Tony Leung the husband, and Maggie Cheung the wife. At the end, the two couples are the same.

  WKW: At the very beginning I hated the idea to show the husband and the wife because that would be boring. You have to make comments about who’s right and who’s wrong. That is not the point of the story. I’d rather have these two actors going through both sides of an affair. There was a big argument between me, Maggie, and Tony: how did they portray the other half? Because they have an excuse saying, “How did this affair happen?” So they wanted to pretend to be the husband and wife. They tried to act like different people. But I said I want you to play yourselves because this will give another layer to the film, because maybe there’s a dark side in Maggie or a dark side in Tony. They need an excuse to release it. So actually, they are not only portraying the husband and the wife, they are trying to show themselves.