62 Facts About Wong Kar-Wai

Wong Kar-Wai's films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography involving bold, saturated colours.

Wong Kar-Wai began a career as a screenwriter for soap operas before transitioning to directing with his debut, the crime drama As Tears Go By .

Production of Ashes of Time was time-consuming and left Wong Kar-Wai exhausted; he subsequently directed Chungking Express with hopes of reconciling with filmmaking.

Wong Kar-Wai continued his film success in the neo-noir crime thriller Fallen Angels, which, while initially met by critics with disappointment due to its stylistic influence and intertextuality with its predecessor Chungking Express, has since amassed a major cult following and is often considered to be a cult classic of the “Golden Age” of Hong Kong cinema, being especially representative of Wong Kar-Wai's film-making style.

Wong Kar-Wai would go on to consolidate his worldwide reputation with the 1997 drama Happy Together, for which he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Wong Kar-Wai's father was a sailor and his mother was a housewife.

Wong Kar-Wai later said: "The only hobby I had as a child was watching movies".

Wong Kar-Wai soon began a screenwriting career, firstly with TV series and soap operas, such as Don't Look Now, before progressing to film scripts.

Wong Kar-Wai worked as part of a team, contributing to a variety of genres including romance, comedy, thriller, and crime.

Wong Kar-Wai had little enthusiasm for these early projects, described by the film scholar Gary Bettinson as "occasionally diverting and mostly disposable", but continued to write throughout the 1980s on films including Just for Fun, Rosa, and The Haunted Cop Shop of Horrors .

Wong Kar-Wai is credited with ten screenplays between 1982 and 1987, but claims to have worked on about fifty more without official credit.

Wong Kar-Wai spent two years writing the screenplay for Patrick Tam's action film Final Victory, for which he was nominated at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards.

New directors were needed to maintain this success, and – through his links in the industry – Wong Kar-Wai was invited to become a partner on a new independent company, In-Gear, and given the opportunity to direct his own picture.

Wong Kar-Wai was well acquainted with the producer, Alan Tang, Wong was given considerable freedom in the making of As Tears Go By.

Wong Kar-Wai's cast included what he considered some of "the hottest young idols in Hong Kong": singer Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, and Jacky Cheung.

Wong Kar-Wai was eager to make something unique, and the financial success of As Tears Go By made this possible.

In need of further backing, Wong Kar-Wai accepted a studio's offer that he make a film based on the popular novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong.

Wong Kar-Wai was enthusiastic about the idea, claiming he had long wanted to make a costume drama.

Wong Kar-Wai eventually took little from the book other than three characters, and in 1992 began experimenting with several different narrative structures to weave what he called "a very complex tapestry".

In 2008, Wong Kar-Wai reworked the film and re-released it as Ashes of Time Redux.

Wong Kar-Wai was keen to experiment with "two crisscrossing stories in one movie" and worked spontaneously, filming at night what he had written that day.

Wong Kar-Wai continued to work without break, expanding his ideas from Chungking Express into another film about alienated young adults in contemporary Hong Kong.

Chungking Express had originally been conceived as three stories, but when time ran out, Wong Kar-Wai developed the third as a new project, Fallen Angels, with new characters.

The film mostly occurs at night and explores the dark side of Hong Kong, which Wong Kar-Wai planned intentionally to balance the sweetness of Chungking: "It's fair to show both sides of a coin".

Wong Kar-Wai was widely expected to address the event in his next film; instead, he avoided the pressure by choosing to shoot in Argentina.

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The issues of the handover were nevertheless important: knowing that homosexuals in Hong Kong faced uncertainty after 1997, Wong Kar-Wai decided to focus on a relationship between two men.

Wong Kar-Wai was keen to present the relationship as ordinary and universal, as he felt Hong Kong's previous LGBT films had not.

Wong Kar-Wai decided to change the structure and style from his previous films, as he felt he had become predictable.

Wong Kar-Wai decided to return to the era that fascinated him, and reflected his own background by focusing on Shanghainese emigres.

Wong Kar-Wai shot more than 30 times the footage he eventually used, and only finished editing the film the morning before its Cannes premiere.

The film was actually conceived first, when Wong Kar-Wai picked the title as a reference to the final year of China's "One country, two systems" promise to Hong Kong.

Wong Kar-Wai immediately continued with the project once In the Mood for Love was complete, reportedly becoming obsessed with it.

Wong Kar-Wai found that he did not want to leave the character, and commenced where he left off in 1966; nevertheless, he claimed: "It's another story, about how a man faces his future due to a certain past".

Wong Kar-Wai's plans were vague and according to Teo, he set "a new record in his own method of free-thinking, time-extensive and improvisatory filmmaking" with the production.

The film premiered at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, but Wong Kar-Wai delivered the print 24 hours late and still was not happy: he continued editing until the film's October release.

Wong Kar-Wai's segment, titled "The Hand", starred Gong Li as a 1960s call girl and Chang Chen as her potential client.

Wong Kar-Wai produced it in the same manner as he would in Hong Kong, and the themes and visual style – despite Doyle being replaced by cinematographer Darius Khondji – remained the same.

Ip Man is a legendary figure in Hong Kong, known for training actor Bruce Lee in the art of Wing Chun, but Wong Kar-Wai decided to focus on an earlier period of Ip's life that covered the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

Three different versions of the film exist, as Wong Kar-Wai shorted it from its domestic release for the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, and again for its US distribution by the Weinstein Company.

In May 2019, Wong Kar-Wai announced the 4K restoration of his entire filmography, which was released in 2021 in celebration of the 20th anniversary of In the Mood for Love.

Criterion Collection released Wong Kar-Wai's restored filmography as a box set in the United States in March 2021.

Wong Kar-Wai is wary of sharing his favourite directors, but has stated that he watched a range of films growing up, from Hong Kong genre films to European art films.

Wong Kar-Wai is often compared with French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard.

Wong Kar-Wai's most direct influence was his colleague Patrick Tam, who was an important mentor and likely inspired his use of colour.

Wong Kar-Wai has a particular affinity for Latin American writers, and the fragmentary nature of his films came primarily from the "scrapbook structures" of novels by Manuel Puig and Julio Cortazar, which he attempted to emulate.

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Wong Kar-Wai has an unusual approach to film making, starting production without a script and generally relying on instinct and improvisation rather than pre-prepared ideas.

Wong Kar-Wai has said he dislikes writing and finds filming from a finished script "boring".

Wong Kar-Wai's shooting ratio is therefore very high, sometimes forty takes per scene, and production typically goes well over schedule and over budget.

Chang has worked on every Wong Kar-Wai film and is a trusted confidant, responsible for all set design and costuming.

Wong Kar-Wai is strongly associated with Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who has appeared in seven of Wong's feature length films.

Wong Kar-Wai is known for producing art films focussed on mood and atmosphere, rather than following convention.

Structurally, Wong Kar-Wai's films are typically fragmented and disjointed, with little concern for linear narrative, and often with interconnected stories.

Key to Wong Kar-Wai's films is the visual style, which is often described as beautiful and unique.

Wong Kar-Wai selects international songs, rarely cantopop, and uses them to enhance the sense of history or place.

Wong Kar-Wai is an important figure in contemporary cinema, regarded as one of the best filmmakers of his generation.

Together with Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-Wai is seen by the historian Philip Kemp as representing the "internationalisation" of East Asian cinema.

Wong Kar-Wai is known for confounding audiences, as he adopts established genres and subverts them with experimental techniques.

Nochimson writes that Wong Kar-Wai's films are entirely personal, making him an auteur, and states, "Wong Kar-Wai has developed his own cinematic vocabulary, with an array of shot patterns connected with him".

Wong Kar-Wai's influence has impacted contemporary directors including Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Lee Myung-se, Tom Tykwer, Zhang Yuan, Tsui Hark, and Barry Jenkins.

Wong Kar-Wai has directed commercials, short films, and music videos, and contributed to two anthology films.

Wong Kar-Wai has received awards and nominations from organisations in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

In 2006, Wong Kar-Wai accepted the National Order of the Legion of Honour: Knight from the French Government.