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Known for his finicky, obsessive detail towards work. “Making movies is like loving a very dangerous woman. You have to serve her, make her happy and care for her,” he says with a wry chuckle.
“Or she’ll leave you,” he adds thoughtfully during a recent phone interview from his Hong Kong office.
His latest, tortured love affair is now revealed on screen, in the shape of the movie 2046.
Shooting, which began in 1999, was halted numerous times due to his capricious creative moods, conflicting cast schedules and the outbreak of SARS in Hong Kong in April last year.
The movie, which stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau and Gong Li opens in Malaysia in early November. It features Leung’s character from Wong’s last movie, In the Mood for Love, who has transformed from a sensitive writer into a flirtatious cad. Fans of Wong’s eight previous movies like Chungking Express and Ashes of Time will find the wistful, brooding yearning in 2046 familiar.
American film studies scholar David Bordwell calls Wong’s style “unashamed romanticism”, stained by ambient music and MTV-style visuals and embracing the mood of the 1960s, during which Wong grew up.
The director, who was born in Shanghai in 1958, moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was five years old.
He studied graphic design at Hong Kong Polytechnic and joined TVB as a screenwriter in 1980.
In 1988, he released his first feature film As Tears Go By, starring Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung.
The template, which Wong would go on to flesh out in later movies, is already set here. Ordinary characters are caught in situations beyond their control.
There is no clear plot in As Tears Go By and the atmosphere and “story” are driven by the interplay of the characters.
The movie perhaps was ahead of its time in a Hong Kong besotted by mass-market fodder.
As Tears Go By failed at the box office but as film studies scholar Stephen Teo put it: “Wong may be said to have brought the Hong Kong new wave into the 1990s by combining post-modern themes with new wave stylistics”.
Although Wong’s follow-up films have also never set the box office on fire, he has had better luck at prestigious film festivals.
He won Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and has become one of the most iconic Asian film-makers beloved by the West. But Wong seems blase about being a critic’s darling. “There are only good or bad movies and some arthouse movies are pretty bad, too. These labels are just a marketing strategy.”
But critics, and fans, will no doubt once again read too much in 2046 in their attempt to deconstruct Wong’s latest thinking.
“I got the idea for 2046 from the promise made by China that when Hong Kong was handed over in 1997, everything would remain the same for 50 years.
The work in making 2046, typically in a Wong movie, was not easy.
Asked what he thought of Leung comparing the experience to torture, Wong agrees: “It’s tough to work on my films, that’s true. There is a lot of pressure because no one wants to be the weakest link in the cast. All my actors are very strong.”
Asked why he always works with certain actors, Wong says he sees special qualities in them. “Maggie and Tony are two of the best actors in Hong Kong. They’ve a very special aura, an old-time feel.”
He feels especially proud of Leung’s maturation as an actor. “Tony has developed a lot of confidence in his own method,” he notes of Leung who won Best Actor at Cannes in 2000 for In the Mood for Love.
While he is only too happy to dissect the elusive nature of love on-screen, Wong is tight-lipped about his personal life.
Married for 17 years, he has a nine-year-old son who lives largely in New York with his wife.
He declines to say if he is a romantic in his marriage but the warm nostalgia for a lost past seems palpable when he talks about Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong changes very quickly. That’s why I like to shoot movies set in the 1960s. If we don’t capture it on film, this period will be lost. There’re not many buildings and shops left from that time.”
Now that 2046 is done, he confesses to a sense of loss.
“I guess it’s like going on a long journey, meeting someone on the way, and having to say goodbye.”
Coming up in the near future is an action film where Leung will play Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher. This will mark the seventh time Wong and Leung have teamed up.
You ask if there is room for cinematographer Christopher Doyle who reportedly quarrelled with Wong on the 2046 set.
Because the project took longer than expected, Doyle pulled out of it at some point to fulfil other commitments. “Of course, I would not rule out working with him again,” says Wong. “The friction between us is eternal but he is like my eyes,” he says of Doyle who has shot all of Wong’s movies except for As Tears Go By.
Wong also recently completed his contribution to Eros, a collection of three short films about love and sex. Wong’s segment, titled La Mano (The Hand), stars Gong Li and Chang Chen and made its debut at the Toronto Film Festival last month.
Wong is now working on a script for a project starring Nicole Kidman, tentatively titled The Lady from Shanghai, which begins shooting next year in that city and New York. He declines to give details, saying only that “Nicole reminds me of the dangerous women who always show up in Alfred Hitchcock’s films.”
So is Wong going West like John Woo?
The answer is uncharacteristically sunny: “I don’t know about that, but this feels like a new chapter of my career.”
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