#The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai#

The list of Wong Kar Wai's virtues would not include patience. He is devoted to avoiding things that are "boring." It's a word he uses constantly. He finds interviews boring. He finds business meetings boring. He finds most movies boring, especially long ones. He even finds it boring to eat hairy crab, a Shanghai delicacy that requires winkling out the meat from the shell. "He's just too impatient," laughed his wife, Esther, as one night he sat at the table watching us greedily devour them and waiting for something less troublesome to eat. Perhaps Wong's attitude is infectious, for he is joined in his hatred of boredom by his longtime collaborator William Chang, who can barely stand to sit still for anything he thinks dull, and cinematographer Chris Doyle, a man so fidgety he would sometimes leave town during brief lulls in shooting—he always needs to be doing something. In their abject horror of being bored, Wong and his cohort often seem less like hard-charging Hong Kong filmmakers than Oxford toffs in some early novel by Evelyn Waugh.

“Dinner is a very intimate thing, he said over those lungs. " Anyone can go for coffee or a drink, but you agree to have dinner with someone, that's different. It has a meaning. You really see people when you watch them eat." As we talked, I grasped something I should have realized much earlier. Wong puts so much food in his films not because he's obsessed by food itself but because the down-to-earth reality of food—and eating—can be so charged with so much meaning, from Proustian nostalgia to seductive brio to lovesick binging. Just as he has little use for movie sex scenes and action scenes, which he finds "boring" and unrevealing, he feels not the remotest attraction to so-called food porn. He'd never show a dish just to make the audience's mouth water, Wong s characters may be constantly eating, but almost without exception, this is only because this helps him express what he actually does care about--emotion.

While "The Hand" bears clear resemblances to Fassbinder's Lola, even featuring music by Peer Raben who scored that earlier film, Wong says his immediate inspiration for "The Hand" came from the 2003 SARS epidemic that hit Hong Kong hard. It was considered risky to touch someone you didn't know--you could get infected. Zhang does get "infected" by Miss Hua's hand-the disease is love--but Wong's handling is almost chaste. The film's most sensual moments come when Zhang is doing his work as a tailor, measuring Miss Hua's body with his hands, testing the cut of the fabric, a process that Christopher Doyle shoots with an almost fetishistic gaze. Such displacement is typical of Wong who dislikes sexual explicitness on film, finding it not just crude but psychologically mistaken. The true source of eroticism, he says, lies not in the flesh but in our dream of the one we love and desire. No actress is better to dream on than Gong Li who, one might say, à la Godard, is an axiom of the cinema. In this, one of her best and most deeply-felt performances, she makes us feel Miss Hua's fall from imperious sexiness to tragic poignancy, yet she never becomes a whit less fascinating -we understand why Zhang is drawn to her. We are also reminded that, in an era when Hollywood has almost forgotten about women characters, Wong revels in showcasing them. He has no superior as a director of actresses. Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Faye Wong, Brigitte Lin, Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li-they are never lovelier or more artful than when working with him. He has, one might say, the touch.

Of course, you now have a family of your own- your wife and your son, Qing, who's studying engineering at Berkeley. You were still a student when you met Esther. Meeting her changed your whole life. Did it seem that way at the time?

- I met her when I was 19. I was a graphics student at the polytechnic and had a summer job selling jeans. That's where met Esther. We got along well, but it wasn't like love at first sight. She was a bit serious at the beginning, but that was not her real nature. It was her first job, so she wanted to be as professional as possible. But I felt she was special. Our shop was at the basement of a huge department store, and every day there were hundreds of people passing by, but she was always the person who stood out to me, the only person that I wanted to get close to. She was better than the world she lived in. Even today, I feel the same about her. She's the sunniest person I ever met and "sunny" is not something anyone would ever call me. So I think we're a good match.

Back to Esther. She told me that she thought you were special, too, but that you didn't ask for her phone number until your very last day working together.

- That's normal. I said, "We should stay in touch. " So she gave me her number. In those days, Hong Kong numbers were six digits, and she only gave me five. I had to guess the other one Which was actually quite easy. But I got the message--I had to make an effort.

She claims that this was the origin of the nifty romantic bit in As Tears Go By when Maggie Cheung hides one of Andy Lau's drinking glasses and says that if he ever needs it, he should give her a call.

- You can easily see the connection.

She also told me that you say all the women in your films are her.

- That's true. I remember Wim Wenders once said most of his films were personal, but never private. For Esther, watching my films is private. She took her whole family to see As Tears Go By, but after ten minutes, she decided to sit somewhere else and watch the rest by herself. Over the years, she would watch my films in quiet concentration, then turn to me and say, "That's me, right? You stole that," when she recognized a moment, a motion, or a line that was familiar. Some say that you go through many women before you find the right one. In that sense, I'm lucky. I have one who can also be many. That doesn't mean all my female characters are based on Esther, but in them, I can see glimpses of her. She seldom comes to the set, but she's always been there with me. That's why her name has always been the first to appear on screen for the films that WKW produced. These are our films.

Not to get all Freudian on you, but is Esther like your mother?

- In a sense. Both are amazing women- great wives, and the best moms their kids could possibly have. But in my memory, my mother remains nostalgic and melancholic, while Esther is always positive and optimistic. If my mother was the moon, Esther would be the sun that always shines. Before we got married, she stayed over at my place one night and I remember watching her sleep. When Esther's asleep she always looks like she's having the happiest dream. I remember thinking, “I want to wake up with this person every day.”

The movie was a hit and won all sorts of prizes-all your stars got nominated. Do you like it after all these years?

- Yes. Although at first I thought, "It's not going to work," I soon began thinking, "I was born to do this job." The more l went on, the more I felt sure that I had something and I knew it was going to work. It was just natural to me and I had pleasure doing it. I knew I was going to be damned good. And I knew I was doing something different. After it came out, I didn't worry. It was proven. People still say to me, "You should make a film like As Tears Go By. It's so commercial, so romantic." They say that to me even today—can you imagine? Laughs. I haven't looked at it again over the years, but I've thought of it during some of the most difficult times in my career—the excitement and purity of making that film. For me, it was and is the definition of the innocence of filmmaking. But it's hard to make a film like that again when the innocence is gone and what's left of that excitement is an aftertaste.

One thing I strongly remember about that period was the 1966 riots. I was only 9 at the time. There were curfews and stoppages in school because of bomb threats. All this changed the course of many lives, but for me it was just an extra holiday. But outside things were changing. There was already a strong feeling of anti-colonialism, and the Cultural Revolution in China was just beginning. This separated the older generation, who saw themselves as transiting through Hong Kong, from the younger generation, who thought of Hong Kong as their home. When we made the movie, it was after the events of June 4th in Tiananmen, when HK wasn't sure what its future would be like after the handover. At first, the story I wanted to make was about the riots-about a policeman and a woman. Then when I started structuring the story, I kept thinking it should be more than that. It shouldn't be just a riot, because a riot is only an incident. It should be about people setting out to find their identities.

Making a period film like this would have been very expensive. So I tried to do it the way Coppola did and split it into two films, back to back. The first would be in 1960, before the riots. The second would be in 1966, right after. Like him, I gathered a dream cast, the most popular teen idols of that time. Then I divided them into two groups of people. One represented the Shanghainese community—Leslie [Cheung], Maggie, and Carina [Lau]. The other group was the local Cantonese—Andy, Tony [Leung Chiu Wail], and Jacky. The story would be about them setting out to find their identities. I was into Latin American literature by then and took inspiration from Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. To me, Leslie's character was like the cholera, the epidemic that changes the course of the two women's lives. The story would be told from their perspectives before and after encountering him. In the first film, one refuses to forget her past. In the second, the other refuses to remember it.

Sol said to Chris, "Can we use this lens as the standard lens of the film?" He said, "Yeah, but why?" I said, "Maybe the film is about distance. They're so close to each other but they seem so far away. Does that work with the film?" Laughs.

It does.

- Yes, it does. In my experience, a film works best when its theme goes hand in hand with its form like ham and eggs. Thanks to Michelle we found both on our first day of shooting, which is rare. And the 9.7millimeter lens became our standard. In Chungking Express, we opened the film with Takeshi walking by Brigitte and he says, "We were that close, and many hours later I fell in love with that person.” The characters in Chungking Express are strangers, but somehow, they finally connect. In Fallen Angels, it's the opposite. With the 9.7millimeter lens, the characters are always far away from each other even though physically they're very close. They never connect. Even Takeshi and his father, they only connect through the video screen. In fact, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are like two sides of a coin. Both address human distance, but in a very different way.

Later, I realized the song was more than random because it provides an undertone to Faye's character. In those days, Hong Kong people talked a lot about immigration, but for Faye's character, California doesn't mean a passport or moving away. For her, it's something bigger than that—an experience or a possibility. But I knew at the end she'd come back to Hong Kong.

In the Mood for Love is shot very differently from your earlier work. In fact, you shift your style, at least a bit, in every single film. Maybe that's one reason why people think you only care about style.

- People usually mix up style with form. Every movie has to have a form. It's about the best way to tell a story visually.

People often say that 2046 is about memory or nostalgia. Do you agree?

- It's about letting go. In a way, memory is a curse to Hong Kong. After '97, people got afraid of change; instead of looking forward, they preferred to stay in the past. It is very unsettling.

So 2046 is about the fear of change?

- Once you say you want things to stay the same forever, that means you don't believe that things could be better. It's lack of confidence. It's fear of losing. That's the complex. In 2046, I'm not using the love story to be a metaphor for the future of the city, but the other way around. I'm using this political metaphor to tell a love story. In relationships, people always say, "We can't change. We have to be like this forever."

Was Tony afraid to lose?

- He was afraid to let go of his past with Maggie. His heart stayed in 2046. So he refused Zhang Ziyi, he refused Gong Li, he refused Faye Wong. That's why, at the end of the film, Faye told him, “Maybe you should start writing a novel called'2047’.”

And move on.

- Yes.

I felt we should make a film about this, a story about being rejected when you expected acceptance. A film about a “non-accepted" relationship, perhaps a gay one—especially because I wasn't sure that, after '97’, you'd even be able to make a gay film in Hong Kong. So I went to Leslie and said, "Let's make a gay film." And he said, "Why not?" I said, "Are you sure?" He said, "Yes, with you I am sure. And who will be my partner?" I said. "Tony" and he said, "Good."

Leslie obviously trusted you.

- Yes, of course. It was something he wanted to do for a long time, but never found the right opportunity. He also felt the same urgency as we did. This seemed like the right time. He trusted our team and believed that we wouldn't do anything exploitative.

It was your last film with Leslie who starred in three of your very best films.

- I wish I could have more time with him. Our collaboration had been a good run. Without him, this film wouldn't have been possible.

This seems like a good time to talk about your sense of Leslie in general. People I know have always been curious about him. What did you make of him?

- What impressed me most about Leslie was that since we first met, he always referred to himself as A Legend. "Kar Wai," he'd say, "do you think | am A Legend?" At first I thought it was a joke but then I knew he meant it. He'd say, "Don't call me Leslie, call me The Legend." Laughs. And he was really obsessed with the idea. "I’m going to be A Legend," he would say. "I have to be A Legend." I didn't know that he would go so far as to take his own life.

Why did he want to be a legend?

- He wanted to be remembered. He always told me that his biggest idol was a Japanese actress and singer, Momoe Yamaguchi. She started as a teen idol and was mostly in romantic love stories. She played the Juliet character in her films, and her husband [Tomokazu Miura] was the Romeo, But she was a much bigger star than he was. Then at her peak, she married, retired, and never came back-never made another public appearance. She remains as a housewife and just takes care of her family. For Leslie, that was what he meant by a legend. He'd say, "I have to quit and retire at my peak. I don't want to see the downside. I don't want to age."

He was already incredibly famous. Why would that matter to him?

- Leslie was not a very secure person. He needed to be loved, he needed attention, he enjoyed applause. He needed to be in the spotlight. He didn't have a hard childhood, but the early stage of his career was very tough. He was always being laughed at or being rejected. He was very unhappy then.

From the outside, he seems so obviously a star that it's hard to believe that people wouldn't see that.

- He was a bit ahead of his time. For the general public, it was, "You're too much.” He was over the top. I knew him when he wasn't that popular. He was mostly in TV shows then. Like Maggie, he could be both modern and classic. That's why his performance had a very wide range, from Ashes of Time to Farewell My Concubine.

And you cast him as the Westernized guy in Days of Being Wild.

- He was perfect for the role.

And great at playing amoral.

- He was a romantic. But he was very thoughtful and always caring about other people. That's why we were all so upset that night he committed suicide. At the lowest point of my career, after Days of Being Wild, he was there to support me. Working with him was one of the highlights of my career.

We called the film Happy Together because at that point none of us knew what was going to happen after the handover. The title was supposed to be a question instead of an answer. But one thing's for sure, the pre-97 Hong Kong was gone, and that's why we never saw Tony return to Hong Kong The film ends and we don’t know where he goes.

Once you know that something isn't working, you have to ask why. Like Bruce Lee once said about his technique: accepting rejection as it comes is part of the process of gaining acceptance. I don't have the habit of punching people. just punch myself.

I think that English language critics were especially harsh on it.

- Most of them normally meet my films through subtitles, and as good as those might be, they'd give me the benefit of the doubt. But once it's in their language, it became a different game. When I went to Russia to support The Grandmaster, they kept asking me about Blueberry Nights. I wondered, "Why are you so interested in this film?" and they said, "It's your most successful film here." Laughs. So that's the magic of distance. I told them, "Maybe if I made a film in Russian, you would like it less.”

And then there was the problem of the title. Almost everyone I've met thinks that blueberry pie thing was cloyingly cute.

- The funny thing is that I actually hate blueberry pie; I find it too sweet. On our first night of shooting, I asked Norah to choose, from all the pies that we'd prepared, which was her least favorite? She pointed at the blueberry pie: The reason we called the film My Blueberry Nights was not for the purpose of being sweet, It was about something the girl wanted to forget.

When I think of an epic, I think of Kurosawa getting thousands of extras in color-coded costumes and making them wait around for the perfect cloud formation in order to shoot. Yours isn't that even if you sometimes echo Seven Samurai.

- Your definition of an epic is more about scale, and mine is more about depth. The film begins with the Buddhist Canon, "The flag is still. The wind is calm. It is the heart of man that is in turmoil.” The Canon comes from The Sixth Patriarch's Dharma Jewel Platform Sutra. The story of the scripture is about a high monk asking his pupil what he sees on the road. The pupil replies that he sees a flag flying because it is windy that day. The monk answers with this Canon. It means people believe what they want to believe, not what actually is, and this he calls obsession. In the film, each of the characters is trapped by something that obsesses him—lost love, betrayal, combat. The film is about obsession which is a matter of the heart. To me, there is nothing more epic that an odyssey of hearts.

You tell his story in a way that many in the West found puzzling. It's very oblique and arcane.

- How so?

You leave out so much of what would be in a conventional biopic: Ip Man's relationship to his family, his feelings about what's happening, how he survives historical crises. There are huge historical leaps and no real dramatic arc. Zhang Ziyi's character, Gong Erh, has one but your hero doesn't.

- I couldn't find those incidents in his life and I didn't want to invent them. All the other films about him are basically dramas invented for a movie. And I didn't want to create a superhero and make him do some heroic act. That wasn't the point. I wanted to show Ip Man as he was. His heroism is not about accomplishing an amazing feat. It is about the strength of the spirit, which is at the root of all martial arts.

But you wouldn't have to make him a hero. You could simply show his ordinary life or capture a few years of his life.

- I know what you mean, but then it would be a different approach. Here is this grandmaster. You're thinking, "Ok, he's good. Show us how good. " But my angle is, “He's good, but what qualifies him to be a grandmaster?" That's why, in the film, we define the three different stages of being a grandmaster through the life of Ip Man: becoming yourself, understanding the challenge of others; and finally, sharing with the world. And that's the stage about legacy. Ip Man opens the film with, "Kund fu: two words. Horizontal. Vertical. Make a mistake, horizontal. Stay standing and you win.” At the end of the film, Ziyi’s character is horizontal. She cannot share, even though she wants to. Ip Man can and did.

I never thought this book was going to be easy.

- It's like what Wim Wenders said about his book. Our challenge is "an attempted description of an indescribable career.” Personally, I don't like to talk about my films because there was never a good reason to. As they say about jazz, "If you have to ask, you'll never get it." I don't like talking about myself, either. There is even less point in that. Taking almost 30 years of filmmaking and turning it into 300 pages is a scary thought. I took up this book for only one reason. My son turns 21 this year, leaving his boyhood behind to become a man. For him and for his youth, WKW has meant absence. At first, it was because I wanted to protect him from the spectacle my career has created, but later, he wanted to avoid the attention. Out of all my films, he has only seen The Grandmaster and In the Mood for Love. When he sees the rest, I hope he can greet them as siblings because, in a way, they all grew up together. And like all siblings, some did well, some did poorly, while a few found glory later on. Perhaps this book will tell him what all these siblings have in common. They were all born of the words one must say in order to do anything bold in life: Yes, let's try.