Rode a wave begun by the likes of Tsui Hark, Yim Ho, Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan and Patrick Tam
Similar: Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien
Admire: Haruki Murakami
Feel close to Federico Fellini, childhood streets sort of similar, Amarcord
Writers identified with: Osamu Dazai, Raymond Carver
the Latin Americans(Manuel Puig(Heartbreak Tango), Garcia Marquez): like the way of telling a story by HOW things happen
Playwriter liked
Directors liked
His Mom likes: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Robert Tayler in Waterloo Bridge, Christopher Lee
“How do we structure this whole dame thing”, I say, “so it will reveal the mind of Wong Kar Wai?” “That’s the wrong question,” he says. “What you need to ask yourself is this. Should the book be like a menu, a GPS, or a jukebox?”
Robert Musil: Most of us spend the greatest part of our lives in the shadow of an event that hasn’t yet taken place.
Christopher Doyle collaboration with Wong is like Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro
Looking into your past, you keep lingering between fact and fiction.
– She also told me that you say all women in your films are her. – That’s true. 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. #Love
Anyway, to read and write are completely different things. Writing is about ideas, techniques and most of all, discipline the pressure of putting the first word on a blank sheet of paper agonizing. It’s almost like being caught in a corner. It’s embarrassing.
Like Wong, Chang put enormous faith in auspicious coincidence and magical thinking. “Things will come to you if you think really hard,” he insists.
What makes Wong’s case special is that his filmmaking process isn’t an attempt to render a finished idea on the screen - the way Hitchcock shot the whole film in his head before the cameras ever started rolling. Nor is he obsessed with creating a cinematic version of the piece bien faite, as the French once termed the perfectly-tooled drama. Instead, he places enormous faith in serendipity. Closer in spirit to an explorer than to an architect, he sets out to discover a film, a long journey that can begin with something as ephemeral as a concept(gay Hong Kongers in Buenos Aires) or the call of an actress’s face(Nicole Kidman’s led Wong to dream up his never-made film about a White Russian spy, Lady from Shanghai).
Most of my films are already musicals, in a way. Just that the actors don’t sing.
According to William Chang, you can count on three things turning up in a Wong Kar Wai film: rain, jukeboxes, and clocks. Of these three, the last are the most inescapable. You find them tick-tocking away from the very beginning of his first personal film, Days of Being wild when Yuddy tells Su Li-zhen she will always remember a single minute in April of 1960, to the climactic railway station fight in his latest film, The Grandmaster, where the platform clock counts the minutes until the showdown. The omnipresent clocks are appropriate because Wong’s work is obsessed with time’s many permutations-in itself, as a psychological perception, and as a cinematic device. He speeds time up and slows it down; he makes it repeat itself and come back in tiny echoes like a cry bouncing down a canyon; he hopscotches between the past, the present, and the future.
I need the inspiration of a face. … After all these years, my experience has been that a script works best when you know who is going to play it while writing it. It’s a tailor-made process.
I don’t enjoy films where I’m looking up at a person. I enjoy watching films where we are all equal and we have sympathy with the characters.
And as said before, a screenplay is a map. Whether it’s from one room to another, or from one street to another, or one city to another, or even from one period to another, the difference is only the scale. It is also a map of the emotional ups and downs of the characters. To make a film is like doing a Road Movie on these “maps”. It’s also a spirit. It doesn’t matter where you start, what matters is where you land. Along the way, there are hundreds of options and you can easily lose track of your orientation. Like a bird, you fly as far as you can until you drop. I’ve made all my films in that spirit.