WONG KAR WEI: NY TIMES Interview
Hong Kong's Master of Internal Pyrotechnics
By EDWARD A. GARGAN
HONG KONG -- In Kowloon, up from Boundary Street, the border of the bit of Hong Kong that the British once thought they had secured forever, a bamboo stalk of a man carrying a plastic bag full of comic books loped through the gate of a gray-tile, five-story pile of an apartment building.
"You looking for Wong Kar-wai?" he asked.
A visitor nodded."Thought so."
Up an elevator that clanked like bolts in a bucket, Mr. Wong worked the locks on a steel gate that protected apartment 3E. Dressed in blue jeans, a blue cotton shirt and blue sneakers, he was the very picture of his promotional photographs -- except for the clear lenses in his eyeglasses. He spied a camera. "Photographs? Now?" he asked. "I'll be right back."
A moment later, he returned, with dark sunglasses in place, completing the image that Hong Kong has of the man who is fast becoming its most internationally respected movie director.
At the Cannes Film Festival in May, "Happy Together," which is set primarily in Argentina and is equal parts love story and alienated road movie, won Mr. Wong the trophy for best director. And last week, "Happy Together" and "Fallen Angels" (1995), a sort of gangster romance, were shown as part of the New York Film Festival. ("Happy Together" opens today in New York. "Fallen Angels" will be released in the United States in January.)
Here, the 39-year-old Mr. Wong has been acclaimed as the territory's freshest, most appealingly iconoclastic film director, someone who is succeeding in showing the world that Hong Kong movies can be emotionally sophisticated ones and not just gun-chattering action flicks full of kung-fu and pyrotechnics. (This distinction carries with it a certain irony because Mr. Wong worked for TVB, the biggest producer of soap operas, comedies and action dramas for television here, before making his first film, "As Tears Go By," in 1989.)
"Wong Kar-wai is so mythical," said Oscar Ho, an well-known artist and the exhibitions director at the Hong Kong Art Center. "Everybody is fabricating their own world," he continued, referring to the characters in Mr. Wong's films, "and sometime you cannot tell if it's true or not, and you're not too sure about this reality. But what I like about it is that you know it's almost true but it's unreal at the same time."
While Hong Kong's artists and critics tend to approach the ecstatic in their praise of Mr. Wong, the dour cadres at one of Beijing's mouthpieces, the largely unread newspaper Wen Wei Pao, decline even to mention the director by name. Indeed, the Communist propaganda sheet recently demanded, "Why are so many of the films at festivals so full of violence, wickedness and evil?"
Although no one in Hong Kong, or almost no one, takes Wen Wei Pao seriously, the newspaper does reflect the official views of its Beijing masters, the same masters who now exercise sovereignty over this former British colony. And though the rigid Communist political correctness so shrilly promulgated by the newspaper has not yet seeped into the fabric of this territory, its hectoring tone occasionally tugs at collective strings of anxiety here, causing politicians, schoolteachers and filmmakers alike to be worried about the future under Chinese rule.
"We all know there are very small chances that we'll have very drastic or dramatic changes in Hong Kong within two weeks, or two months," said Mr. Wong, considering a topic he admits he is tired of discussing.
He was speaking in a room that he uses as an office. Around him were towers of videotapes, and on the walls were several movie posters, the most prominent of which was for his own "Ashes of Time." Leaning back in his chair and dragging on one of the Marlboros he smokes constantly, he added: "I don't think there will be great changes here because otherwise it will be very tragic. But as I've said before, changes have already begun in 84 -- when Britain agreed that it would relinquish sovereignty of Hong Kong to China -- and I think the changes will be very obvious 10 years from now when the next generation has grown up."
Still, China, with its official intolerance toward unorthodox filmmakers, remains the backdrop for anyone making movies here. And Mr. Wong, who was born in Shanghai and left with his family when he was 5, said that he and other Hong Kong directors would eventually need to widen their base of operations. "I think more and more production will happen in China because China will become a very big market for films," he said. "The market in Taiwan, or South Korea or some other traditional markets is not doing so well."
At this point, the market in China for commercial films like Mr. Wong's is largely an illicit one. His best-known work, the 1994 film "Chungking Express," a look at two quirky relationships in the din, jumble and steam of Hong Kong's dense urban streets, has been widely seen in some of China's cities, but those viewings haven't earned Mr. Wong a penny. "Yeah," he said, "'Chungking Express' was there, not officially screening, but some, you know, piracy. Everybody says, 'We know, we know your film.'"
Hong Kong filmmakers hope to work more in China because the country is considerably larger and much more varied in landscape than Hong Kong's minuscule 424 square miles, and costs are lower. But working there is even more problematic now than it was at the beginning of the 1990's. The Chinese Government demands to see a script before it will issue a production permit, then it monitors adherence to the script. These requirements are especially difficult for Mr. Wong, who prefers to begin a film without a script and improvise as he goes along.
"After 1994, the rules changed because of some Hong Kong productions," he said. "Some of the Hong Kong productions made in China, they gave a script and then the story was totally different, a lot of violence and sex. So they don't want that to happen again."
Not surprisingly, these conditions are affecting the film he is working on now, "Summer in Beijing.". "We tried to have our script approved," Mr. Wong said. "But the thing is, that's not the real problem. I'm the problem -- because I never wrote a script. I have to write the script this time, and it takes time."
Mr. Wong is not a patient person, though. Last year, without any permits, he shot two scenes in Beijing, which will make up about 10 minutes of the final movie, he guesses. By now, he said, the Chinese are aware that fidelity to a written script is not one of his virtues. "They know, they know that," he said with a laugh. "So they say, 'O.K., just do something close to what you imagined.'"
"Happy Together," which is loosely, almost diaphanously based on Manuel Puig's novel "The Buenos Aires Affair," was made firmly in the spirit of Mr. Wong's serendipitous approach to his art. His original idea was to have the movie center on a young man who is told that his father has been killed in Buenos Aires and then finds out that the father's lover is gay. But that idea was scrapped almost as soon as the director's plane touched down in Argentina. Eventually, logistics helped shape the story, which is about two gay men from Hong Kong -- played by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai -- who arrive in Argentina as lovers, squabble and separate, then try to get back together and sort things out.
"After we went to Buenos Aires we had a problem with the production house, and we also had to stop working because of a union strike," Mr. Wong recalled. "And we intended, at first, to stay in Buenos Aires for only six weeks, but it turned out to be four months. And one of the actors, Leslie Cheung, had to come back to Hong Kong after the second month because he was committed to making a world concert tour."
Mr. Cheung is probably best known to Western audiences for his performance in Chen Kaige's 1993 film "Farewell, My Concubine," but he is also a spectacularly successful pop star. Mr. Leung has appeared in other Wong films, with Mr. Cheung, and in John Woo's "Hard Boiled."
Defiant, Mr. Wong insists that he has not made a gay movie, nor a movie about Argentina or one specifically about Hong Kong's new relationship with China, although "Happy Together" carries the subtitle "A Story About Reunion."
"Actually I didn't have any specific story or idea in my mind because I think this is one of the tragedies of a professional filmmaker," he said. "I started the film basically just with the idea of making a film outside Hong Kong. In the process of making it -- somehow it's a kind of a process of destruction, taking off things that I don't want. After three or four months, you realize what you have in your hand and this is the material that you want."
"Because I've made films about men and women for so long," he continued, "I thought, well this time why don't we change it to make a story about two men. These two actors have been working with me for two or three films together, and we know each other well. And I thought it would be fun to see these two guys playing lovers in a film. You can say this is a film about a gay couple, but it is not a gay story in the normal sense because this is a love story. It can happen to a man and a woman, and I don't want to say the film is specially for gays because I don't think we should label all these things."
In a similarly paradoxical way, Mr. Wong explained his thinking about the film's bleak locations, which are rendered in a surreal mix of garish color and black and white. "One of the location managers was so mad at me," said the director. "He said: 'We have so many beautiful buildings and streets in Buenos Aires. Why do you always pick those back alleys, those poor buildings?' I said, 'Well I don't know why, but maybe this is a kind of projection, that I can only project my Hong Kong experience in Argentina, and I'm trying to create my own space in that city which I can work in and I can understand."
Despite the intense focus on relationships between people in his films, Mr. Wong contends that a sense of place is always his first consideration. "From the place," he said, "I can tell what kind of person will be in that place and what they will do and what is their relationship, and the film takes shape. Normally I won't start from a story.
"In fact, all my films are not stories. I think they are more about characters. The story line is not strong."
Shaking his head like A metronome, Mr. Wong said that it is because of his resistance to a traditional notion of story that he holds no particular affection for any one of his films.
"I would say that in fact I'm making a very long film," he said. "And each of my individual films is like one of the scenes of that long film. And I'm not sure how that film will be, how long that film will be. Maybe if I quit being a director and I look back and I realize the film is about that long, and about this..." His voice trailed off.
"So I would not say I like this film or that film," he concluded with a shrug. "It is a part of me. It is a part of a film that I'm going to make."
Copyright 1997 The New York Times
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愿上帝赐予我平静，能接纳我无法改变的事。愿上帝赐予我勇气，能改变我可以改变的事。并赐予我智慧，让我能分辨这两者的不同。
