In the Mood for Love by Tony Rayns

Author:Tony Rayns [Rayns, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844578740
Publisher: British Film Institute
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2 Secret Origins

People say my films are about time and space, but actually they’re not. Most likely they have nothing to do with anything but me myself. That’s why my characters have such closed-off lives and can’t reveal themselves; they’re afraid to get hurt.

Wong Kar Wai, from an interview by Esther Yeung and Lau Chi-Wan, published in City Entertainment no. 402, 8 September 1994 (translated from the Chinese by Tony Rayns)

Wong Kar Wai has not always been as candid about his own social inhibitions as he was in this interview in 1994, but he has always spoken freely about his aleatory methods, his habit of allowing his films to determine their own tone, shape and direction while they are being made. Ironically for a man who entered the film industry as a scriptwriter (he started by contributing ideas in the writing team at an ultra-commercial film company, then wrote scripts alone for a couple of years), Wong turned away from pre-scripted film-making during the production of Days of Being Wild, his second feature. His practice these days is to seclude himself in coffee shops to think through possible new storylines and scenes, and then to return to the waiting cast and crew with his ideas; it’s this method which stretches his productions out over months or even years. His chronic indecision of course tests the loyalty and commitment of his collaborators to the limit. We’ll come back to the case of Days of Being Wild in more detail, because that film has a direct bearing on In the Mood for Love, but first we should establish how Wong’s abandonment of scripts affected his films.

Days of Being Wild and its successor, Ashes of Time, have many things in common, despite the first being set in the early 1960s in Hong Kong and the second in the jianghu, the mythic martial world of ancient China. Both centre on Leslie Cheung playing alpha males with troubled backstories, and both feature ‘packages’ of other top stars playing characters who drift in and out of his orbit. More crucially, to the frustration of the actors and crew, both films had extremely protracted shoots, because Wong was continually trying out – and then rejecting – ideas for ways that his story might move forward. And so both films were eventually constructed in the editing room, because their structures had not been planned on the page. Inevitably, this caused major grief for Wong’s financiers. Days of Being Wild was made for In-Gear Film Productions, which ended Wong’s contract after the film’s release. Wong founded his own company Jet Tone soon after, and secured finance from Taiwan to make Ashes of Time, filmed intermittently on remote locations in western China in 1992–3 but not completed and released until 1994.

If Wong’s trial-and-error approach to film-making is tough for financiers to deal with, then it’s many times tougher for a director who works as his own producer. Jet Tone’s survival has often seemed precarious over the years. Wong explored many

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