Wong Kar-wai

  HKF: You have worked with William Chang for so many years. Is the stylistics in your films your or his ideas?

  WKW: Basically, he and I have the same ideas about most things. He knows how I see things well, and I know his ideas well too; therefore, many things don’t need to be explicated. Mainly you need to see how we can collaborate for a film. Simply speaking, there is no Christopher Doyle [as the cinematographer] in My Blueberry Nights. He was making other people’s film at that time; therefore, you would feel the cinematography of My Blueberry Nights was very different from my previous work.

  HKF: You seem to have largely used red and blue hues [in your films].

  WKW: Not necessarily. I did not have any “taboo” in My Blueberry Nights. When we saw a place and felt that the location was right, we added some simple things to the set and then we shot. There wasn’t any special arrangement. Also, there was only red or green inside a pub. (chuckle) Chungking Express is in blue hues though. The lighting in the fast food shop has a blue hue, and the home [of Tony Leung] is also blue. There is also a yellow hue, such as the mackintosh jacket of Brigitte Lin and Chungking Mansion.

  HKF: Because of your film Chungking Express, Chungking Mansion has become a landmark in Hong Kong, but everyone says actually it is very seedy and chaotic inside.

  WKW: It is because the audience’s understanding of it is not the same as mine. I grew up in the district [Tsim Sha Tsui]. Chungking Mansion used to be a very upscale residence in the 1950s; many Shaw Brothers Studio movie stars lived there.2 In the 1960s, the lowest floors were occupied by the largest, most luxurious night club in Hong Kong. Because of the night club, there were many foreigners, in particular Indians living there. Later it gradually became more chaotic; it was rumored to be a hotbed for drug dealing and such. Because of this reason, I have always been very curious about this place. My father would never let me go inside. Chungking Express gave me a reason to go inside to make a film, to investigate why [my father did not allow me to go inside]. (chuckle) Happy Together also gave me a reason to go to Argentina to make a film. It is like this to make a film! The only advantage of being a director is it gives you a reason to do something that you want to do. It is like how Ang Lee uses films as an experiment. (chuckle)

  HKF: There is criticism that your films are all alike; some even say Wong Kar-wai spends his entire life making one film. Do you agree with this thought?

  WKW: It is like taking pictures. Today I took three pictures of you. Ten days from now I take another picture. Your face probably has changed a bit, but they are still [like those] three pictures. They belong to you! Some directors could make a horror film today, a comedy tomorrow, but you can still see that something does not change.

  HKF: To many women, the image that they have of Wong Kar-wai’s films is the night. Why is that so?

  WKW: I think there are two reasons: first, it is a very objective thing. Many of my films were shot at night. Also I like to film at night because it is very complicated to film during the day—you have to lease a place and to clear the location. At night, as long as it is slightly quiet, it is fine. Second, I believe that in a city we make our living during the day. We only own the time at night, don’t we? We can sing karaoke with friends; we can have dinner or drinks with them. If we don’t have friends, it is rather hard to live in a city. That kind of feeling can inspire many writings.

  HKF: Your films have many dialogues that reflect a modern lifestyle. There is always some foretelling, or there are some deep philosophical thoughts [such as] using objects as metaphors … a key or a tree hole.

  WKW: In fact many dialogues are full of self-mocking. One theory is most people say much the same thing. Sometimes, when they are too blatant, they will be too corny, won’t they? In my daily life I never talk in this way. Because at that time, people talked like the characters in Chungking Express, so I made this way of talking into a phenomenon. I don’t talk like this; that’s why I put dialogues that I would not say in daily life in my films. I use my films to express all those ways of talking. But it is very hard to evaluate one thing in one single way, which is when the audience is watching your films they may not be in the same train of thought as you. For example, like the voice dubbing of Jude Law to me, things he says are half true, half false. He self-mocks what he says. But the audience may believe that he is always serious with what he says. Therefore I always say we have to see more clearly. Some people may appear to be very serious when they talk when, in fact, they are just joking.

  HKF: About the concept of time, your films seem to use the concept of time to create tension in the films.

  WKW: Not true. In My Blueberry Nights, our focus is on distance, not on time. But 2046 is about time because my feeling was … when we were scouting for locations [for My Blueberry Nights], we did not check how much time we spent [on the road], but we counted how many days since we left New York. We only looked at the distance on the dashboard; that’s why I did mention the concept of time.

  HKF: In other people’s mind, Wong Kar-wai is someone who has to find actors to accommodate his stories. He has already decided how to film [before interacting with the actors]. Is it true?

  WKW: Never. I have never thought like this. I don’t have this habit. The other evening I had dinner with Gong Li, and we talked about this. She said she only discovered very recently that I don’t have a script. She used to believe that I already had a script, but I did not allow actors to read it. She discovered that it is not true. Because I don’t have any bad intention, I only think of what the actors should do when I work with them. My habit and feeling are not like: I have thoroughly thought out every role and try to find an actor to play that role. It is not like I need to find a model to wear a piece of already-made clothing; that is not true [for me]. Usually I see a person, then I think of what clothing this person should wear.

  HKF: But many people say Wong Kar-wai intentionally refuses to let the actors read the script. He lets them improvise during the filming so they give a fresh performance.

  WKW: Never. This has never happened. Of course I can’t say I take a piece of blank paper to the filming location, impossible. As I started as a scriptwriter, I will have a very rough script. I mostly know what the story is about. When we film, there may be changes of dialogue here and there. That change is possible. But because My Blueberry Nights was a script in English, I found a novelist, Lawrence Block [to write the script]. The story is constrained by the script, but I also told the actors that the dialogue could be changed—this dialogue could be cut, that could be included. It is like we have a scene in which Jude Law has a ten-minute monologue. At the beginning that monologue was very long, but at the end we felt it did not need to be that long. We changed it when we filmed. Lawrence wrote some, and I wrote some. The change gave people a feeling that the monologue comes from the heart [of the character], not from the pen of the scriptwriter.

  NOTES

  1. Goldfinch Restaurant is the location where Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung have coffee and dinner in In the Mood for Love.

  2. Shaw Brothers Studio was a major film production company in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1980s. Its films cover various genres such as wuxia, romance, and musicals.

  The American Way

  Tony Rayns / 2008

  From Sight and Sound (UK). No. 18 no. 3 (pp. 32–34). Interview conducted in English in 2008. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights may be the director’s first English-language film, but his trademark focus on characters and relationships remains. As the recut road movie goes on release, Wong talks to Tony Rayns about being an outsider looking in.

  Wong Kar-wai spent last year working on two main projects. One was Ashes of Time Redux, a freshened-up version of his legendary 1994 martial arts movie. The original won a prize in Venice but was distributed almost nowhere because of a rights dispute that has only recently been resolved. Its belated international release promises a lot, partly because Wong
and some of his stars (Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, the late Leslie Cheung) are much more widely recognized these days than they were fourteen years ago and partly because the genre itself is now much more familiar to non-Chinese audiences. Wong has faced the choice of either polishing the old cut by remixing the sound or revising the cut by adding some of the many deleted scenes he has warehoused in Hong Kong. Either way, Ashes of Time will resurface in 2008.

  The other project was My Blueberry Nights, his first English-language movie, which stars singer Norah Jones in her first acting role. This had its premiere on the opening night of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it didn’t go down all that well. Wong had a characteristic rethink last summer, and the film now being released around the world is a recut version. It’s some fifteen minutes shorter, its rhythms are changed, and it has fewer voiceovers, though the basic structure remains the same. The tweeness of the title gives fair notice that this is never going to be thought of as major Wong Kar-wai, but it’s now a tighter and in some ways more persuasive film.

  Many earlier Wong Kar-wai movies have been through a similar process of revision, including his last feature 2046, which changed quite a bit in the six months between its Cannes premiere and its release. That was very much a film about a writer’s relationship with the fictional world he creates (symbolized by 2046 itself, both a far-off time and a space in which lost memories are recaptured and fixed) and was anchored in the writer’s voiceovers, some spoken by himself and some by the Japanese character [played by Takuya Kimura] he invents. The voiceovers were the element most extensively rethought in the revision process, and the final version of the film finesses a rather moving coup by reassigning one of them from the fictional character (who spoke it in Japanese) to the writer himself ([Tony Leung] who speaks it in Cantonese). The effect, sadly, was lost on most western audiences, who couldn’t tell the two languages apart.

  One recurrent voiceover heard in the Cannes version of 2046 had disappeared by the time the film reached release. That version opened and closed with the writer’s reflections on his own relationship with 2046, and the same words also popped up in the middle of the film. They went something like this: “Those who go to 2046 never come back. But I’m the exception. I went to 2046, and I have come back. Because I want to change …”

  I once asked Wong Kar-wai why he had rewritten that voiceover, and he told me he did so because he thought the original was too obvious. What he meant, I think, was that his own relationship with his writer character too closely mirrored the writer’s relationship with his Japanese surrogate. He feared that audiences would take the voiceover as an autobiographical mission statement. 2046 felt like some kind of summation of Wong’s themes and motifs. This voiceover gave the whole thing an air of valediction; it suggested a director who was feeling an urgent need to move into entirely new areas. I was reminded of an earlier conversation with Wong in which he wryly commented, “Too many people are ‘doing’ Wong Kar-wai these days, so I have to do something else.”

  So, is My Blueberry Nights something entirely different? Yes and no. Yes, in that it’s in English and offers episodic, linear storytelling of a kind not seen in Wong’s earlier films. No, in that the focus is still on characters who are working their way through relationship problems—and in that the story itself is one that Wong dug out from his files. Still, as the film’s opening voiceover observes, “The stories have all been told …”

  Tony Rayns: What was the primary impulse behind the film?

  Wong Kar-wai: I was in New York, doing some research for Lady from Shanghai, a project I have with Nicole Kidman,1 and I somehow got the chance to meet Norah Jones. We sat and talked in a café in SoHo. I found her character very straightforward and confident, so I asked her if she’d ever thought about acting. She didn’t ask why I was asking; she just said, “You think I can act?” So I said, “Why not?” I suggested that we should work together and told her I had a story I’d come up with a few years ago that might be the idea we could start from.

  The story was one I used in a short film called In the Mood for Love 2001, which was screened in Cannes that year but hasn’t really been seen since. It’s about a chance encounter in a convenience store in Hong Kong between two people, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who may or may not have a relationship. I showed Norah Jones the short film, and we started thinking about moving it to the United States and expanding it. So the main reason to make the film in English was that Norah obviously couldn’t do it in Chinese. And I guess some of her attitude rubbed off on me—that “Why shouldn’t I give it a try?”

  TR: Was it very intimidating to work in the US?

  WKW: I know I’m not the first foreign director to make a film that looks at America. I think the way I work is quite well known: I don’t build stories; I build characters. I always have to know all about the people in the film, so even if we see this woman only in a café, I have to know where she came from, what she was doing yesterday. I need all that background. If I shoot with Tony and Maggie in Hong Kong, I can easily imagine what’s around them and what’s behind their characters. But I needed to be able to do that with my American characters too. When I look at an Edward Hopper painting, I can feel the existence of the people he shows. The question I need to ask is always, “What impression do I get from this face, this gesture?”

  TR: How did you settle on the novelist Lawrence Block as your script collaborator?

  WKW: Since the film was going to be in English, I knew I’d need help to write the script. I can’t be the one telling the story myself. I have to be behind someone else, outside looking in. I knew Larry’s novels and short stories from long ago, but I hadn’t met him. I especially liked his character Matt Scudder, a private eye in New York who has a drink[ing] problem. He used to be a cop but he accidentally killed someone, so he had to quit the force and become a private detective. Knowing those stories made me think I should try to get Larry to help me.

  Actually my first thought was to get a different writer for each chapter of the film: one for the first and last chapters in New York; one for the chapter in Memphis, Tennessee; and one for the chapter set in a small town in Nevada. But Larry is very fast and understood immediately what I was trying to do, so I asked him if he could write it all. It was only about two months from the time we had the idea to the start of shooting.

  TR: How did you decide where the chapters would be set?

  WKW: Once we’d decided on the first and last chapters in New York, we had to figure out what would happen in between. So I got into a car with my cinematographer Darius Khondji and my production manager and started driving. We made several trips, each ten to twelve days, driving for fourteen to sixteen hours each day. Mostly we started in the evening, drove through the night, and reached a place in the early morning. Sometimes it was the other way around. The basic idea was that Elizabeth, Norah’s character, should move across the country from east to west.

  I felt from the start that one chapter should be set in the south. A lot of the Americana I like originates there, including much of the music. Norah herself is from Texas, so I asked her if she could recommend any place for us to check out. She told us there was a town called Love, which sounded interesting, but it turned out to be very ordinary. We finally settled on Memphis.

  We also headed for Las Vegas, which is in every way the opposite of the south. But somehow we got lost in the Nevada desert and ended up in a small town outside Vegas. Basically it’s just one main street, but it has a very old hotel with a casino in the basement. We reached this place one morning after driving through the night. It was totally empty, hardly anyone in the casino, but we realized it had once been an important town. The hotel had Nevada’s first elevator. It had been a staging post for Hollywood stars on their way to Vegas, and so the rooms were named after them. I thought this would be a good place for Elizabeth to get lost.

  TR: And Elizabeth’s emotional trajectory? How did you determine that?

  WKW
: I always have books with me when I travel, and I had three on these trips, all of which influenced my thinking. One was Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain, which is a kind of photo album with texts that chronicles the most unhappy days of her life from a vantage point of fifteen years later. She has been stood up by a man. She keeps repeating her story to different people, and each time she tells it, it becomes less detailed until by the end it’s very vague. The book is full of things I like. At one point she wanders around an unfamiliar city, goes into a diner, and orders sausage—a dish she hates!—and she doesn’t know why.

  Another book (I’ve forgotten the title) was a guide to quitting addictions—smoking, drinking, bad relationships, everything. It’s very schematic: the writer says that when you reach this stage, you can expect to have this symptom and so on. I found myself using this book like a menu, with the chapters in the film becoming like the stages in the writer’s analysis of withdrawal from addiction,

  And the third book was a collection of Lawrence Block’s stories. All his recurrent characters appear in it, and I came to see that many of them are variations on Larry himself. That got me thinking that one of our characters should be a cop. Since we were going to shoot in Memphis, I found myself also thinking about Tennessee Williams and that we should maybe do a tribute to him. So I proposed that to Larry: “I want to have a story about a cop and his problems with his wife.” Larry didn’t travel with us, but I drew a lot of inspiration from him. For instance, he’s an active marathon runner and that ended up becoming part of the background of Jeremy, the Jude Law character.

  TR: I know the actual shoot was fairly tight, so I wonder if you found any time for the “trying out ideas” approach you bring to your Chinese films?

  WKW: In some ways there was even more of that than in the Chinese films. I had to involve all the cast and crew. At the start of the shoot I told everybody, “We’ve seen so many films about Chinese people—made by foreigners—that look very weird to us, and I don’t want to repeat that mistake! Even if I spent three years here working on this film, I’d never see things as an American does. So I need all of you to be involved in commenting and giving advice.” They were a bit shocked at first because of course they’re used to having directors tell them exactly what they want. But they got into it, and we ended up having a lot of fun together. They were surprised when I gave them a script; they thought I didn’t work with one at all. We did make changes as we went along, often in response to their suggestions, though all of the changes were to bring us closer to the characters.