Wong Kar-wai made his breakthrough film while killing time on a delayed epic
Stuck on a troubled martial arts epic and waiting two months for sound equipment, a stressed Wong Kar-wai decided to shoot something small to enjoy filmmaking again. He treated it like a student project, writing by day and filming at night. Chungking Express was finished in six weeks and came out before the epic did.
That quick side project changed his career. Two loosely linked stories about lonely Hong Kong policemen falling for women, it took the top picture and directing prizes at Hong Kong's 1995 film awards, and after Miramax bought it for American release it carried Wong onto the international stage. The film he had been waiting on, Ashes of Time, took two years and 47 million Hong Kong dollars, puzzled audiences with its hazy plot and flopped, though critics admired its refusal to behave like a normal swordplay film. Chungking had originally been planned in three parts; the unused third became Fallen Angels, a darker, nocturnal companion piece that grew a cult following.
Wong was born in Shanghai in 1958. When he was five his parents moved to Hong Kong, intending his two older siblings to follow, but the border closed and he did not see them for ten years. Isolated in an unfamiliar city, he struggled with Cantonese and English, and his mother kept taking him to the cinema; watching films, he later said, was his only childhood hobby.
He dropped out of graphic design to train at the television network TVB, then spent the 1980s writing scripts, ten credited and, by his account, about 50 more uncredited. His debut, the gangster film As Tears Go By in 1988, was a hit. He then turned away from crime movies to make Days of Being Wild, a moody 1960s character study that did poorly at the box office but won five Hong Kong Film Awards and introduced cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who shot his next six films.
Recognition kept building. Happy Together earned him Best Director at Cannes in 1997, and In the Mood for Love, released in 2000, fixed the lush, colour-soaked style now tied to his name.
Source: Wong Kar-wai
