By the time Wong Kar Wai was five years old, the seeds of the Cultural Revolution were beginning to take effect in China and his parents decided to relocate to British-ruled Hong Kong. The two older children were meant to join them later, but the borders closed before they had a chance and Wong did not see his brother or sister again for ten years. In Hong Kong, the family settled in Tsim Sha Tsui, and his father got work managing a nightclub. Being an only child in a new city, Wong has said he felt isolated during his childhood. He struggled to learn Cantonese and English, only becoming fluent in these new languages when he was just a teenager.
As a youth, Wong was frequently taken to the cinema by his mother and exposed to a variety of films. He later shared, “The only hobby I had as a child was watching movies”. At school, he was interested in graphic design and earned a diploma in the subject from Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1980. After graduating, Wong was accepted onto a training course with the TVB television network, where he learned the processes of media production.
Hong Kong was in the 1960s the center of entertainment for all the Chinese regions, including Mandarin-language films for the lucrative export market and Cantonese opera films for the local audience, with Kung Fu movies coming later.
In an interview at Lumiere Awards, Wong commented on that by saying “Hong Kong was good at producing genre because they needed the market. The local market didn’t support the productions. Most of the revenue came from the overseas market. The starting point for young filmmakers was always a genre film. That never bothered me. The genre is basically a means. That is how I started working.”
Later on, Wong expressed his admiration and thoughts about Bruce Lee while explaining the early ages for Hong Kong to move forwards. The massive success of John Woo’s “A Better Tomorrow” in 1986 triggered a huge demand for gangster films, leading to Wong’s big break, 1988’s “As Tears Go By.”
Wong said, “Instead of telling a story of two heroes, we are telling the story of losers who are trying to be heroes.” Also added, “I’ve been very, very lucky because at the time the industry was beginning its so-called golden age of Hong Kong filmmaking. There was a lot of money around, there were a lot of opportunities, and people were encouraged to do something different, something interesting,” He also mentioned, “Even Chris Doyle came to Hong Kong.”
Wong’s most direct influence was his colleague Patrick Tam, who was an important mentor and likely inspired his use of color. Perhaps the best way to describe Wong Kar-Wai is as a fetishist of romance. Throughout his entire career, the director has manifested his obsessive preoccupation with details and minutiae time and again the little fleeting moments and impressions that add up to a mood.
Wong was worried about sharing his favorite director but has stated that he watched a range of films growing up – from Hong Kong genre films to European art films. They were never labeled as such, and so he approached them equally and was broadly influenced. The energy of the Hong Kong films had a tremendous impact according to Brunette, while some of the international names associated with Wong include Martin Scorsese, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alfred Hitchcock, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Some of his favorite contemporary filmmakers include Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino. He is often compared with French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard.
“I have never worked with someone who puts so much emphasis on a single moment”, In words of Jude Law who worked with Wong taken from a New York Times interview in 2008, describing an entire night of shooting devoted to different angles and set-ups on a kiss within “My Blueberry Nights.” But many other film critics criticized Wong for his works that emphasize on emotions and style rather than content. But that seems a fallacy because for Wong, emotion, and not necessarily story, is the content; style exists to flourish that and the emotion he deals in is romantic love, in all its forms but especially those tending to be on the melancholy end of the spectrum: love stolen, lost, unrequited, doomed, remembered but inaccessible.
Outside of cinema, Wong has been heavily influenced by literature. He has a particular connection to Latin American writers, and the fragmentary nature of his films came primarily from the “scrapbook structures” of novels by Manuel Puig and Julio Cortázar, which he attempted to emulate. [ Haruki Murakami, particularly his novel Norwegian Wood, also inspired, as did the writing of Liu Yichang].
Wong has an unusual approach to filmmaking, starting production without a script and generally relying on instinct and improvisation rather than pre-prepared ideas. He has said he dislikes writing and finds filming from a finished script “boring”. As such, he writes as he shoots, drawing inspiration from the music, the setting, working conditions, and actors. In advance, the cast is given a minimal plot outline and expected to develop their characters as the film.
To capture simplicity and spontaneity he does not allow for rehearsal, and forbids his actors from using “techniques”, but improvisation and collaboration are always encouraged. Wong similarly does not use storyboards or plan camera placement, preferring to experiment as he goes. His shooting ratio is therefore very high, sometimes forty takes per scene, and typically, productions run significantly over budget and over time.
Wong’s films are known for their gorgeous visual flair, with rich, vivid colors and swooning camerawork, culminating in what Brunette refers to as his “signature visual pyrotechnics”. One of his trademarks is the use of step-printing, which alters film rates to ” hard blocks of primary color into iridescent streaks of light.” Other features of the Wong aesthetic include slow motion, off-center framing, the obscuring of faces, rack focus, filming in the dark or rain, and elliptical editing. Stephen Schneider writes of Wong’s fondness for playing with film stock, exposure, and speed the way others might fiddle with a script and results are always unexpected, invigorating, and interesting.”
Another trademark of Wong’s cinema is his use of music and pop songs. He places great importance on this element, and Biancorosso describes it as the essence of his films; a key part of the “narrative machinery” that can guide the rhythm of the editing. He selects international songs, rarely cantopop, and uses them to enhance the sense of history or place. According to Julian Stringer, music has “proved crucial to the emotional and cognitive appeal” of Wong’s films.
The dependence on music, heavily visual and disjointed style of Wong’s films have been compared to music videos, and critics claim that they are all surface-level work and no depth. Curtis K Tsui argues that style is the substance in Wong’s film, while Brunette believes that his form remains resolutely in the service of character, theme, and emotion rather than indulged in for its own sake.
Wong created a signature while putting a clear influence on many other directors, even in the West. Directors like Barry Jenkins, Sofia Coppola are heavily influenced by Wong’s work of which we all are witnesses till now. To critic his works we just cannot follow the traditional idea of story or climax but just have to redefine cinema as he went in his works. Wong’s ability to convey so much emotion without resorting to another melodramatic sequence in which you can only contemplate and admire is what sets him apart from other filmmakers.
All the images have been collected from different sources available on internet.
