Wong Kar-wai

[FigrinDan]

I picked up my tickets for Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love yesterday. Will anyone else be attending?
Anything in particular I should be listening for in the Q&A session?

[Calvin]

I was very pleased to see that they had the courtesy to schedule it for the day after I'm due to (coincidentally) arrive in Hawaii. Needless to say I've booked a ticket and will be attending.

[Persona]

Ever since I heard about Tong Wars I've been salivating at the idea of WKW doing a century-spanning crime saga epic over the course of 10 episodes. I mean, just the thought of ten new hours of WKW has me giddy, regardless of format or what it's about. But this was supposed to start shooting in July of this year and so far I've seen nothing about that or casting or anything. Really hope that it's still happening, or that WKW is working on Blossoms, or SOMETHING. One of my all-time favorite directors and it's been five years since The Grandmaster and I sincerely hope it's not going to be another five before we see something from him.

[Calvin]

At the Hawaii Q&A, he mentioned that Blossoms was his next project. Tong Wars wasn't mentioned.

[senseabove]

Dang. The casting call said it was supposed to film in San Francisco from July 2018 to Jan 2019: https://www.backstage.com/casting/tong-wars-198126/

Hope it hasn't fallen through...

[diamonds]

WKW says his newest film “would be the third part of In The Mood For Love and 2046.”

[solaris72]

WKW says his newest film “would be the third part of In The Mood For Love and 2046.”

Man he's really throwing Days of Being Wild under the bus there

[dda1996a]

He always said Mood only shares the time and feeling of Days, so I take to mean the characters will reappear. Don't know why he needs to return though...

[ex-cowboy]

I'm probably remembering this incorrectly, but isn't the final shot(s) of Days of Being Wild of the Tony Leung character from In the Mood & 2046? Or does he merely appear and after reading that the story that became In the Mood was originally a segment in Days I've simply projected that reading?

[feihong]

The Tony Leung character wasn't the same between Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. There are elements in 2046 that reference characters from Days of Being Wild. Chow Mo-wan is first seen in 2046 as a compulsive gambler. The Days of Being Wild character was meant to be a gambler in the sequel (some sequences of a sequel were filmed, but the project was scrapped). Carina Lau plays Mimi in 2046, who appears to be her Lulu character from Days several years on. Chow Mo-wan's narration mentions that Mimi is still looking for her "legless bird," a reference to Leslie Cheung's character "Yuddy" from Days.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Has Wong Kar-Wai changed his working method since In the Mood For Love? It seems crazy to me that he would spend four years on a script that will surely be thrown out the window.

[feihong]

The method for ITMFL and 2046, as far as everything I ever read, was that he wrote the scenes the night before they shot them. The deleted scenes from In the Mood for Love and the sci-fi scenes in 2046 support this a bit; the cut scenes from ITMFL especially seem like the same kind of scenes he shot for Chungking Express. The cut scenes have a goofiness that was clearly cut out of the movie as they edited and reshot. I remember reading that ITMFL was largely re-filmed in the last couple of months of production with that more somber direction in mind (Christopher Doyle had left by then, which explains how much of the film was clearly shot by Mark Lee). The 2046 sci-fi scenes, simple and gorgeous as they some of them are (though the earliest footage with Bird Thongchai McIntyre looks pretty rough), clearly weren't panning out, inspiring Wong to re-frame them in the context of another Chow Mo-Wan story.

What I read about My Blueberry Nights at the time it was released was that, conversely, Wong was required by the Weinstein Company to film the script he and Lawrence Block wrote. That movie is so awful I think partly because Wong couldn't re-film and refine what he had written. And The Grandmaster has several other screenwriting credits––conspicuously Xu Haofeng, whose The Final Master is a really exceptional movie that seems to have evolved from the bones of this movie––so I imagine the script was more set for this project. In this case it looks as if major sections of the narrative have been clipped out or heavily shortened (Chang Chen's character, The Razor, comes out the loser in all of this cutting). Nevertheless, it took forever for this movie to be finished, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn Wong worked on some parts of The Grandmaster in the way in which he was more accustomed to working––writing and filming rough-draft scenes spontaneously, and looking for the movie as he worked.

[Persona]

2046 is a good movie that happens to be a horrible sequel to a perfect movie that should never have had a sequel, so I am not exactly thrilled by whatever WKW thinks he means by this.

[R0lf]

Outside Leung the other thread between DAYS/MOOD/2046 is Maggie Cheung playing Su Li-zhen though it’s never confirmed if it’s the same character between movies and having Gong Li also play a Su Li-zhen in 2046 indicates it’s probably not supposed to be.

[Persona]

yeah, obviously 2046 is not a direct sequel to MOOD, but I guess I do see where WKW tries to tap into the same feelings and themes and I think he sort of covered that ground perfectly with MOOD. when 2046 engages the same threads it feels like awkward extrapolations--and, for my part, unwanted ones.

[dda1996a]

Isn't it though? I think that's why it pales to Mood (and why Days is much better imo, since it came before and doesn't share almost anything with it's offshoots) and why Tsai's Wayward Cloud works so much better as a sequel than 2046, in that Mood ended so perfectly there was hardly a need to return. That it work is a sign of WKW's talent (though I haven't loved anything he made after Mood)

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

What I read about My Blueberry Nights at the time it was released was that, conversely, Wong was required by the Weinstein Company to film the script he and Lawrence Block wrote.

The Weinsteins didn't come on board until shooting was mostly complete. Canal was the main partner on that film and they may have laid down a similar requirement, but from what I recall reading, part of Wong's intention was to demonstrate that he could shoot an English-language movie with Hollywood stars and get it done in a reasonable amount of time, as he was still trying to land Nicole Kidman for The Lady from Shanghai and she was wavering out of concern that she'd be stuck in Asia for years working on a drawn-out Wong Kar-wai shoot. (At this point Wong had done three features in a row that all far exceeded their intended shooting schedules, and then there was also "The Hand" which was apparently such a trial for Gong Li that she publicly declared, in only slightly more polite terms, that Wong didn't know what he was doing.) In such a situation I would expect Wong to stick closely to the script, but there was a production blog written by a crew member (which I haven't been able to find for years) that described Wong doing some of his usual stuff, like rewriting right up to the moment the camera rolled or going most of a day without shooting because the inspiration wasn't there. But the biggest thing I remember is that Wong discarded a fair chunk of the script's last act, in which the Norah Jones character actually makes it to the Pacific as she originally planned. Instead Wong cut the trip (and the filming) short in Las Vegas, which may well have been an extreme measure to bring the film in on schedule.

And The Grandmaster has several other screenwriting credits––conspicuously Xu Haofeng, whose The Final Master is a really exceptional movie that seems to have evolved from the bones of this movie––so I imagine the script was more set for this project. In this case it looks as if major sections of the narrative have been clipped out or heavily shortened (Chang Chen's character, The Razor, comes out the loser in all of this cutting). Nevertheless, it took forever for this movie to be finished, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn Wong worked on some parts of The Grandmaster in the way in which he was more accustomed to working––writing and filming rough-draft scenes spontaneously, and looking for the movie as he worked.

There was a complete screenplay that Wong commissioned from Zou Jingzhi. Xu Haofeng had been on the project for three years as a historical/martial arts consultant before Wong asked him to work on the script as well. Wong kept them both on call during shooting but also had them work siloed off from one another, so that Wong would give them scenes to rewrite and neither one of them would have any idea where they came from. This process went on right down to the wire (Xu wrote his last contributions ten days before the film's release, during the final stages of dubbing) and naturally lots of stuff changed or got dropped along the way—Chang Chen got the short shrift because the Zhang Ziyi storyline gradually assumed more prominence, Song Hye-kyo publicly complained that almost everything she shot was left out of the final cut(s), Zhao Benshan (a major star in mainland China) was cast fairly late in production for what ended up being a glorified cameo, and Xiao Shenyang actually seems to be playing two different characters depending on whether you watch the Chinese/international versions or the U.S./3D versions!

[jguitar]

I'm puzzling over that remark in the last paragraph of the article where Wong says he was 19 in 1963. Am I misreading that? Is this an Earth 2 Wong Kar-wai?

[Kirkinson]

The article is quoting from this Indiewire article which is reporting from a festival event where a bunch of journalists were interviewing him at the same time. It seems likely that the IW reporter misheard what he said, or there was a mistranslation if he wasn't answering in English. Of course someone should have caught it, but I see typos in Indiewire all the time so I don't think they do a lot of editing or proofreading. This Variety article from the exact same event says in its second paragraph that Wong talked about moving to Hong Kong as a child in 1962.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The news about Blossoms seems to have obscured the new details on the Chinese-language webseries first announced in 2016, which now has the working title Paradise Guesthouse and will "revolve around the female proprietor of a guesthouse in a coastal town in mainland China." It's set to consist of twelve 45-minute episodes and production is expected to start in the first half of this year. The linked article also confirms that Tong Wars is dead.

[yoloswegmaster]

Wong Kar-wai Confirms 4K Restorations of All His Films Will Arrive in 2020

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

This was very under the radar, but the Hong Kong Blu-ray of The Grandmaster, which was originally pressed in a surprisingly small quantity and was quickly unavailable through normal retail channels, was reissued early this year. Unfortunately this is by all accounts identical to the first pressing with its frankly abominable transfer, but it's the only way to get the original 130-minute cut, which I personally prefer to the later versions.

[Orlac]

What was wrong with the transfer?

[tenia]

IIRC, the DCP itself is plagued with issues.

[htom]

Wong Kar-wai on Screenwriting, Patience and His Next Feature, Blossoms

From this article, research for Tong Wars is still ongoing but Blossoms takes priority...