2046's topics - tribe.net

Tony Leung Film Series

2005-12-03T00:11:31Z

If any of you guys happen to be in NY, the Brooklyn Art Museum is holding a film series on Tony Leung from December 1-18.

http://www.bam.org/film/series.aspx?id=52

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Chinese actress Zhang grows into international star

2005-08-14T22:09:17Z

Chinese actress Zhang grows into international star

Reuters
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=1028532&page=1

Aug. 11, 2005 - After dazzling audiences with her waifish beauty and graceful performances in a string of Chinese martial arts hits, Ziyi Zhang is coming of age as an actress on the brink of international stardom.

Zhang, 26, gives her most mature performance yet with a portrayal of a prostitute struggling with her feelings in Wong Kar Wai's "2046," which had its U.S. opening last weekend, and stars in the Hollywood version of the best-selling book "Memoirs of a Geisha" due in December.

Already hailed by Time magazine as "China's gift to Hollywood" and on People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" list among other U.S. pop accolades, the Beijing native has even Anglicized the order of her name, from the traditional Zhang Ziyi, ahead of the possible blockbuster impact of "Geisha."

Zhang's rise has coincided with a Western surge of interest in Asian films starting with her role in the big hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," (2000) directed by Ang Lee, and moving through "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," both shot by Zhang Yimou.

"I've been lucky to work with the great directors," said Zhang, who was directed in "Geisha," by Rob Marshall, who was nominated for the best-directing Oscar for "Chicago."

"It's fate, it's timing, destiny. I believe in that. There's really a lot of opportunity right now," she said in a recent interview.

While "2046," a dreamy, steamy reflection on lovers' longings, promises and betrayals that merges past, present and future, will play in movie art houses, "Geisha," with Stephen Spielberg as its executive producer, is intended for a mainstream, worldwide audience.

Zhang said both roles were challenging and had strikingly contrasting styles, both cinematically and in fashion. She wears elaborate kimono and customs in "Geisha" and slinky cheomsongs, the high-collared form-fitting silk dress, and high heels for her "2046" scenes set in hedonistic Hong Kong of the 1960s.

BOOT CAMP

As a Chinese actress cast to play a Japanese geisha with all the dialogue in English in a Hollywood production, the Beijing beauty had to endure what she laughingly called pre-production "boot camp" to prepare.

"For us, who can't speak English and must speak with an English accent and a Japanese accent, that was really hard, so much pressure," said Zhang, who studied English for the role and who used a translator sparingly during the interview.

"But this opportunity to work on this film that has a great cast, has a great script, a great director, I think anyone would take this seriously and do it well.

"We spent a lot of time learning. We called it boot camp. We got to learn how to walk, how to play the shamisen (musical instrument), how to dress, add to that the cast is entirely non-English speaking and you can imagine how hard it was," she said of the adaptation of Arthur Golden's novel.

"I will be proud of this movie. I know this will be a very beautiful, very emotional, very touching."

"2046," a follow-up to Kar Wai's acclaimed "In the Mood for Love" was also a stretch for Zhang, who plumbed her emotions for a performance The New York Times described as "shockingly intense."

"I think this character for me so far was my most difficult role I ever played," Zhang said about her role in "2046," which won her best actress honors at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Working with Kar Wai was a unique experience for Zhang.

"They didn't have script. Every day I got two pages of handwriting. You don't need to memorize lines. You just give your real feelings. I just enjoyed this lady, being her, showing her true feelings.

"As I understood her more, I gave more, building slowly. We shot a lot of different takes instead of rehearsing. It was a great training for me as a young actress."

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing "2046" and brought "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," to the United States among other Asian hits, said the crossover of a talented international artist such as Zhang was nothing new for Hollywood.

"Zhang Ziyi going from 'House of Daggers' and '2046' to 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' is no different than Catherine Deneuve going from her French hits to American success, or Sophia Loren going from Italian movies to big Hollywood star," he said. "It's happening with Asian actresses today."

Copyright 2005 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=1028532&page=1

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Official US Site

2005-07-03T01:21:25Z

Official US Site:
http://www.sonyclassics.com/2046/

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2046 US Trailer on Quicktime

2005-06-04T07:43:41Z

2046 US Trailer on Quicktime:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/2046.html

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2046 US Release Date is August 5, 2005

2005-05-22T22:15:17Z

2046 US Release Date is August 5, 2005 (Limited)

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2046 is Available on NetFlix.com

2005-03-24T04:18:23Z

Available on NetFlix:
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?trkid=73&movieid=70025409

maybe Blockbuster.com has it too. i don't know.

but hey check it out.

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2046 (2004) review by NixFlix.com

2005-03-23T01:03:57Z

2046 (2004)
review by NixFlix:
http://www.nixflix.com/reviews/2046.htm

It's always been one of my biggest regrets that I haven't cultured myself sufficiently to the point where I can rattle off the titles of the operatic scores and music that shows up in Wong Kar-wai's "2046". Education has given me insight into a lot of things, but I do wish I had spent some time soaking up culture that I might not otherwise encounter in my lifetime. At the end of the day, films like "2046", and most of Wong's film in general, makes me wish I had immersed myself more in things, situations, and places beyond my current scope. But that's the problem with life; once you realize you've missed out on something, it's usually too late to make amends. Time travel works in the movies, but it's a bitch in real life.

For fans of Wong's "In the Mood for Love", "2046's" main character will seem familiar, and that's because "2046" is a sequel to "Mood". Familiar Wong muse Tony Leung returns as Chow Mo Wan, a writer who has written a novel called "2046", about a futuristic world where people can travel to by train in order to relive old memories. In 1960's Hong Kong, Chow, fresh from his adventures with Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung's character in "Mood"), moves into a hotel where he pens his novel. At the hotel, Chow meets various women, including the hotel owner's daughter (Faye Wong), a beautiful next-door neighbor (Zhang Ziyi), a doomed ex-flame (Carina Lau), and a professional gambler also named Su Li Zhen (Gong Li).

It's Chow's interactions with these women that makes up the narrative of "2046", with current "It" girl Zhang Ziyi ("The House of Flying Daggers") filling up the bulk of the first hour and some of the second, and she could be considered the de facto lead except the movie is not so much about the women, but about Chow and his preoccupation with a certain woman from his past. In the second hour Faye Wong (also in the director's "Chungking Express") gets more screentime, playing a love struck young woman who pines for a Japanese beau that her father refuses to accept. As Faye's character develops a platonic relationship with Chow, the older man starts to feel something for her, but it's ultimately her inability to give up on her Japanese lover that makes him realize his greatest mistake in life.

Without a doubt, it's Su Li Zhen's memory that continues to haunt Chow, making ruins of his relationships even before they even have a chance. "2046" is, in so many ways, such a Wong Kar-Wai film that you could probably figured out the writer/director was behind it even if you didn't see the credits. With able assistance from famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who also lensed Fruit Chan's recent "Dumplings"), "2046" features garish neon colors, splendid 1960s wardrobe, and the themes of loneliness, isolation, unrequited love, and a past that refuses to stay in the past. Through Chow's novel, which purports to be about the future but is in fact about the past, Wong meditates on the events that transpired in "In the Mood for Love". In a lot of ways, "2046" represents the entire oeuvre of the director, and would stand very well as a culmination of everything he's done as a filmmaker up to now.

It's no coincidence that the film is isolated not just from its characters, but also from us, the viewer. When two characters are in the same frame, Wong elects to shoot the scene from the perspective of a voyeur, of someone who can't quite get the full view of what exactly is going on. As such, many of the scenes feature characters way off to one side, with the rest obscured. It's an interesting technique, used to keep the audience forever in the background. As a result, the audience remains an unobtrusive observer, unable to insert our presence into the action. In a movie where characters alienate themselves on purpose in the hopes of salvation, the alienation the audience feels is right at home.

Not surprisingly, no one does complex characters better than Tony Leung, who makes the switch from gritty, doomed gangster in the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy to "2046's" charmer, but equally doomed, ladies man without missing a beat. Externally Chow appears to have gotten over his past, showing up at swinging parties and taking part in one night stands with all the concern of a gigolo, but that's only outward appearances. Inside, the man is a tortured soul, unable to give his heart to anyone, even the beautiful Zhang Ziyi. No matter how much Chow may want to love again, he simply cannot, and in that way he's like the androids in his "2046" novel -- suffering from delayed reaction and unable to respond to a declaration of love even when he longs to do so.

The rest of "2046's" cast does fantastic work, complimenting Leung at every turn. Of the female cast, Zhang Ziyi is most prominent, as her character enters, leaves, and re-enters Chow's life at various intervals, offering the film its most stable female presence. Gong Li's Su Li Zhen is featured the shortest, but her scenes with Chow are possibly the film's most intriguing, especially a kiss against a wall that has all the force of a physical and mental assault. With Ziyi's Bai Ling gone, and Gong Li's Su Li Zhen still to appear in the timeline, Faye Wong takes up the slack. The pop singer doesn't do a terrible job by any means, but her character really doesn't impact the story as much as the other two women.

If "2046" sounds complicated, it's really not. Wong uses a fractured narrative to keep things interesting, taking the action back and forth between different points in the timeline. It's not really as hard to follow as it sounds, since when all is said and done, time is really not much of an issue. For instance, despite the passing of years, Chow never changes, as a character or in appearance. The same for the rest of the cast, who returns in various secondary roles like Carina Lau, whose character is murdered early in the film, but the actress returns later as an android version of herself on the train ferrying passengers back and forth between 2046.

Actually, one could easily ignore the title cards that alert us to the shift in the timeline, since the theme of the film seems to be, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." It's the universal truth of life that we long to fix what has become unfixable -- that is, our past. Just as it's also the universal truth of life that sometimes we don't get over the past because we refuse to, because although the past holds painful memories, it can also hold our greatest joys.

source:
http://www.nixflix.com/reviews/2046.htm

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Official 2046 UK Site Lauched

2005-02-17T00:40:36Z

http://www.2046.co.uk/

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2046 (2004)

2004-11-25T00:17:24Z

2046 (2004)

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

Synopsis: He was a writer, He thought he wrote about the future but it really was the past. In his novel, a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who went there had the same intention ... to recapture their lost memories. It was said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. Nobody knew for sure if it was true, because nobody who went there had ever come back - except for one. He was there. He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

Premiere: May 20, 2004 - Cannes, France

Starring:
Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Li Gong
Takuya Kimura
Faye Wong
Ziyi Zhang
Chen Chang

Crew:
Producer / Director / Screenplay
Wong Kar-Wai

Directors of Cinematography
Christopher Doyle, Lai Yiu Fai, Kwan Pun Leung

Composers
Peer Raben, Shigeru Umebayashi

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Days of Being Wild (1991)

2004-10-03T09:10:22Z

Days of Being Wild (1991)

Directed By Wong Kar-Wai

Cast:
Leslie Cheung....Yuddy
Maggie Cheung....Su Lizhen
Andy Lau....Tide
Carina Lau....Leung Fung-Ying
Rebecca Pan....Rebecca (as Tik-Wa Poon)
Jacky Cheung....Zeb
Danilo Antunes....Rebecca's Lover
Hung Mei-Mei....The Amah
Ling-Hung Ling....Nurse
Tita Munoz....Yuddy's Mother

Plot:
Set in 1960, the film center of the young, boyishly handsome Yuddy, who learns from the drunken ex-prostitute who raised him that she is not his real mother. Hoping to hold onto him, she refuses to divulge the name of his real birth mother. The revelation shakes Yuddy to his very core, unleashing a cascade of conflicting emotions. Two women have the bad luck to fall for Yuddy. One is a quiet lass who works at a sport arena named Su Lizhen, while the other is a glitzy showgirl named Mimi. Perhaps due to his unresolved Oedipal issues, he passively lets the two compete for him, unable or unwilling to make a choice. As Lizhen slowly confides her frustration to a cop named Tide, he falls for her. The same is true for Yuddy's friend Zeb, who falls for Mimi. Later, Yuddy learns of his birth mother's whereabouts and heads out to the Philippines.

trailer:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/daysofbeingwild.html

imdb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101258/

TIME: How do you relate your films to each other? What does 2046 have in common with the others?
Wong: I think Days of Being Wild, In the Mood and 2046 all fit in one continuous story. It would be a very interesting to put Days and Mood together with 2046 and let it become a complete story. If we think Days is a chapter of 2046, and Mood is a chapter of 2046, then 2046 is the complete story.
source:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501041004-702208,00.html

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Full Trailer (French)

2004-10-01T04:19:40Z

Full Trailer (French):
http://www.ocean-films.com/2046/FA_2046_320.mov

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Wong Kar-Wai Make A Biopic For Bruce Lee?

2004-10-01T03:27:52Z

Will Wong Kar-Wai Make A Biopic For Bruce Lee?

May 29, 2004
Bruce Lee,
The Biopic

Director Wong Kar-Wa said in Cannes that he would make a biopic for Bruce Lee and Leung Chiu-Wai would play Lee's master, Ye Wen. During an interview with China's CCTV, Leung Chiu-Wai also said their next project would be an martial-art film. The biopic will centers around the story of Lee and his master during the 1950's and 1960's, before Lee was an super star. Someone from Wong's Block 2 Pictures told Shanghai Youth Daily that the biopic was only one of many projects they were working on. Soft Coffee (literal title), a low budget film starring Chang Chen and Dong Jie will be Wong's next project and he will only produce it. Director Tsui Hark and the municipal government of Shunde, Guangdong Province, Lee's hometown, are also pursuing their own Bruce Lee biopics.

source:
http://www.monkeypeaches.com/0405M.html#040526A

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Wong Kar-wai talks to TIME about his new movie, 2046

2004-09-30T21:29:19Z

Director Wong Kar-wai talks to TIME about his new movie, 2046

October 4, 2004 / Vol. 164, No. 14
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501041004-702208,00.html

"We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love"

Director Wong Kar-wai talks to TIME about his new movie, 2046
BY BRYAN WALSH

Wong Kar-wai is Hong Kong's finest film auteur, the director of eight movies including the long-awaited 2046. He met with Time Asia's Bryan Walsh at the Moon Garden Tea House near his production company's offices in Hong Kong:

TIME: 2046 debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but I've heard that you've made changes since then. How much has the film been altered?
Wong: It hasn't changed much. We just switched the sequence of certain scenes, and took out a few other scenes to compensate, because we are in a rush to catch the deadline of Cannes, so that version the sound and also the music is not perfect. We improved it, and also the special effects of the film. All this CG works hadn't been complete during Cannes. We put all the things that were supposed to be in the film back in their right place. Part of the delay is because I am working with CGI for the first time in my career. This is something beyond my control, and there are a lot of factors which are unpredictable.

TIME: What was it like watching the film for the first time at Cannes?
Wong: It is really a trip. We just finished the first reel of the film, one hour before we got on the plane. I didn't get any chance to watch the film as a whole in the cinema before that. We got to Paris the next morning. That night, I get to the cinema, and actually this is my first time to watch the film on a big screen, in front of the public. It's exciting because every moment you don't know what mistake will happen.

TIME: Why did the editing go down to the wire?
Wong: The structure was constantly changing. We can't be sure. Some of the scenes are supposed to be there, but at the last moment we look at the material we have, and it's not done yet. It's not perfect yet. So we have to take that scene out, and then we have to change the structure again, because you have to then delete not only one scene, but many scenes. We started this film at the same time as In the Mood for Love. And at first, these two films were two separate projects. But at the time it was extremely difficult for me [to keep them separate] because it was like falling in love with two women at the same time. So I tried to find a kind of connection between these two projects. So one day while shooting In the Mood, we were shooting in a hotel room, and the memories triggered something, so I thought why don't we call it 2046?

TIME: Is 2046 a continuation of In the Mood for Love?
Wong: A lot of people think that 2046 is like a sequel of In the Mood, but I don't think so. For me it's more like Mood is a chapter in 2046. It's like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements.

TIME: How did the many changes in 2046 evolve? At first we were hearing the movie was going to have a futuristic feel, to be set in the year 2046, with robots and everything else, but that seems to have been dropped from the original version. What happened?
Wong: The whole thing, the reason we want the idea to make the film, comes from the promise the Chinese government gave to the Hong Kong people, of 50 years of no change. I think that would be very interesting, because 2046 is the last year of that promise. And I think, this is interesting, is there anything similar that is so unchanged in life? It has different layers —this number can apply to a lot of things in life. In terms of a love story, normally when we fall in love with someone we're concerned with our promise. Will they change? Will I change? How can we make this moment last forever? I think this is a very interesting idea, to create a film based on that number, on that promise. So we start with that. Because of that number, I thought we could set the film in 2046, 50 years in the future, so naturally we start thinking about a futuristic story, sci-fi stuff. But I didn't want a realistic version of the future. What we are trying to achieve is like a manga, something like the imagination of a person in 1966 thinking about the future.

TIME: You had a much larger cast than usual, with a very large crew as well. How do you keep them all together and working for such a long, five-year production period?
Wong: To keep people working for a long time is very hard, to keep the spirit and the focus is extremely hard. We know that we were trying to do something that is very ambitious because we have a big cast, and so everyone is trying to deliver their best. To work together for five years is extremely hard, so you need the belief that we're really doing something. Even the cast needs to believe in something. Of course during the five years, some people will lose their faith and they have to leave, and some people will join in. We were supposed to be shooting the Eros project in Shanghai during the SARS period. At that time because we can't leave Hong Kong, we have to shoot in Eros in the city, and some of our crew members were coming from Taiwan. Their wives just went crazy, because they couldn't accept their husbands working on such a dangerous film, in such a dangerous city. But they still came.

TIME: Given your fairly iconoclastic working methods and long shoots, how do you convince people to sign onto your projects, especially newcomers? How do you get them to believe in you?
Wong: There's always a myth thing that we don't have a script or that everything is improvised. But that's not true. Most of the actors, when they join the production, they know their story. They don't know their whole story, but they know their chapter. Like Zhang Ziyi, because she knows she's going to play a ballroom dancer in the 60s, and she doesn't have any idea what that is. She's coming from a totally different background. I have to give her a lot of homework. I have to give her all of these films from the period, so she can understand the gestures, the actions. And also I give her all the costumes, because she has to get those manners down. So she simply took all the costumes back to the hotel, and wore them everyday until she was comfortable in them.

TIME: Were you happy with Zhang's performance?
Wong: Very much. Before 2046, everyone thinks about Zhang mostly through Crouching Tiger or Hero, because she's very good with action work. But I think she's more than that. She's a very very good actress, very sensitive. Very hard working.

TIME: What about Gong Li? How did she prepare for her role?
Wong: She played a gambler, so she went to Macau by herself to watch and prepare. She wouldn't take a production assistant with her. It was Macau undercover. She is very serious. She is very smart. She needs to have a lot of preparation.

TIME: Do all your actors need that level of preparation?
Wong: No. Like Faye Wong, she doesn't need to do that because we've worked before, and she always tries to make herself very relaxed.

TIME: 2046 features a lot of actors who are new to you, like Li and Zhang. Is it difficult to accustom them to your working methods?
Wong: The script actually develops with the characters. If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit it, the quality that they might not even be aware of themselves. Normally, I don't ask people to act certain persons. It's just be you. Like Gong Li when I'm making Eros with her, I have kind of a picture what if she's a gambler, or a hustler, it would be very interesting. It's something inside her that you find.

TIME: So the character and the actor co-exist in your mind?
Wong: Yes. There is no acting in it. It's like seamless, because they have that quality, at least according to my observation.

TIME: Your job is to bring that out?
Wong: Yes.

TIME: How do you relate your films to each other? What does 2046 have in common with the others?
Wong: I think Days of Being Wild, In the Mood and 2046 all fit in one continuous story. It would be a very interesting to put Days and Mood together with 2046 and let it become a complete story. If we think Days is a chapter of 2046, and Mood is a chapter of 2046, then 2046 is the complete story.

TIME: Does that help explain why 2046 took so long to complete, if it really is the final section of the a story you've been working on for almost 15 years? If Cannes hadn't been last May, would you still be working on it?
Wong: The thing is, when you say stop, and it's the end of the film, it doesn't mean it's the end really. Sometimes it means you are running out of money or running out of time. Like Days was supposed to be two parts. And Mood, the story should be a little longer, they [Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung] should have more encounters, though they never come together. There was an epilogue in my original idea. But you have to stop at that moment. But that doesn't mean you can't put these things back into another film. In a broader sense it's like a transection of different characters. Days, Mood and 2046 are like a trilogy, and this is the last chapter. At a certain point, it might take me years, I might come back to this period again. Now it's almost done. Maybe 10 years later, or much later, I think, well, we can have another chapter, or it can belong to someone else.

TIME: Does the act of dealing with those limitations, of time or money, help shape what the film ends up looking like?
Wong: Absolutely. To be a director is always to deal with the limitations, restrictions. Productions, creative, financial, there's so many restrictions and limitations. And sometimes the way you make the film is to cope with these problems. So a lot of people think your film is very stylized, you have a different way to make this film, you have your signatures, but much of it is due to your response to these limitations. The way we make films is to solve all of the problems. The thing is it's very hard to find a balance, because you find a way to solve the problem, and at the same time you want to keep as much of your original intention as possible.

TIME: If you had your preference, would you ever stop making this film?
Wong: For me to make films should be like a circus, we should just go from one town to the other, always on the road, and you stop when you think you should stop. To me, if there's no Cannes, no other reasons, you can make 2046 for another year. So that's why I think we have to present the film now. I agreed to send the film to France even though it was not completed yet. But I think it is a good thing to do because it means we have a deadline. I need a deadline. But I have my hesitation too. I have questions about these things [whether he should really keep working on the film]. Am I doing too much? Is it worth it? You are putting yourself in a prison. You are imprisoned by this situation. Actors can have a break, you can do another film, and come back. It's very hard. At the end you just want to get away from it as soon as possible. A few weeks ago, we finished the final mix, we spent a lot of time doing the sound, and at the end, the film is done. And I looked at the film and I realized that you have to say goodbye to this project, and you feel very very... You know it's not easy, and you know it's not a normal practice to make a film for five years. And I'm not sure we'll be able or willing to do that again in the future. This is a very special film. It is the hardest to let go. But you have to let go. And that's it. And move onto something else.

TIME: Were you disappointed to miss out on the Palme d'Or at Cannes?
Wong: No. For me, the reason to appear in Cannes is to have a deadline. That's the purpose. And to win an award in a festival is purely something that you can't control. It's up to timing, and the makeup of the jury.

TIME: Do you consider your films romantic?
Wong: For me, romanticism means you follow your heart more than your mind. If that's the case, the films are 75% romantic. The other 25% is the realities, the problem solving, and luck. I cannot describe in detail in the films which moment is like that [the nonromantic proportion], but overall it's 25%.

TIME: What about you? Are you romantic?
Wong: [Laughing] I'm 60% romantic.

TIME: Where do you see yourself in regards to other directors, Western and Asian? What can you take away from them?
Wong: I'm always curious about how directors make their films, because I didn't go to film school and I don't have any technical training. The way that I make films is the only way I know. So I'm curious sometimes how the other directors make their films. When I was very young, we watched a lot of films from different directors, and each of them give you a window, showing you how a film can be made in this way. So by the time you face all of these problems, you know you can solve by this alternative, or the other alternative.

TIME: Why do you make your films the way you do?
Wong: I'm not that self-analytical. I just do it by instinct, simply by instinct.

TIME: You started off your career as a screenwriter. Is it odd for someone who began their career as a writer to seemingly turn away from scripts altogether?
Wong: I worked as a writer for almost 10 years, and I realized the purpose of the script is as a prescription to make everyone seem to know what they're doing. And the role of the writer is like a psychiatrist to the director. During the productions, the director has a lot of queries. sometimes he has second thought on this idea and he want to make sure this line is perfect. And he needs a psychiatrist to tell him that what he's doing is right. And in my case, I'm my own psychiatrist, which kind of just makes things even worse.

TIME: For a filmmaker whose work is so consumed with desire and its frustration, you seem remarkably hands-off about actually showing sex. Why is that?
Wong: I think to describe a so-called love scene, or intercourse is very boring. There must be a point to your focus. Like in Eros, it's always about this person's perspective. It's about the hand, instead of the actual act. In 2046, the only physical relationship between Tony and the women is the story between him and Zhang Ziyi. The reason we want to have three parts of that story is because the character of Tony is always thinking about his past. And sometimes he has a fantasy about the future, but he's always missing the present. And that's why he wants to change, he wants to have physical contact, very solid relationships with someone else, and that woman is the woman next door, Zhang Ziyi. He wants to change, he wants to have direct contact with someone, another person. So his story with Zhang Ziyi is entirely straightforward, there are no second thoughts. He just wants to believe by instinct. And afterwards, when things don't work out well with Zhang Ziyi, he goes back to talking to himself, and writing. Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can't have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It's very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love.

TIME: I heard that your cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, once claimed that all of your films were about the impossibility of love. Do you agree?
Wong: No, I don't think so, because if you have it [love] in your memory, it's already possible to me. He [Doyle] thinks that because he's very physical. [Laughs]

TIME: What's your working relationship like with Doyle and with your art director, William Chang?
Wong: It's a very long working relationship, and it makes a lot of things much easier. And actually we don't have to discuss much about the film. We don't need meetings. Sometimes I ever prefer that way because we need some suspense between each other. I have to guess what William is doing. By the time I get to the set, I have to respond to that. So that may be a very good way to inspire each other. Otherwise it would become very boring, like a very long relationship, a marriage, everything becomes very predictable, and you'd know that we are talking about the same thing all the time. We prefer to stay away form each other and have some mystery. Sometimes it's like a competition. They create something hard, and you have to solve it. And I create something hard. I will ask Chris if he can do something better. It's like a challenge. It works very well in our case.

TIME: Can you give an example from the making of 2046?
Wong: We're shooting in a small hotel, everything is very narrow, tight, and I decided to shoot in Cinemascope, which created a huge problem for the lighting and camera man because they don't have a stage or anything to put their light. So Chris has to create something on his feet, and for him, this is the first time he has used this format. Actually he's quite lost, and he has to find a new way to deal with this problem. Of course he complains, and we have mistakes and problems, but this is the way, the challenge, otherwise it will be the same thing. Everyone will sleep, it will be very boring. Especially if it takes five years to make a film.

TIME: How do you communicate with each other?
Wong: I think we speak almost the same language. We know that. And I think we respect each other very well. And I know that, this is the best way to deal with the films.

TIME: Can you ever imagine working with anyone else?
Wong: Sure, possibly. At some point for Chris, he needs some inspiration. He's a sailor, and he has to travel, and for me also, if I have a chance to work with another director of photography, it would be another challenge.

TIME: Now that 2046 is done, and that continuous story has been completed, what will your next project be? How do you start a new project? Do you start with an image?
Wong: Yes, you need to have the image. Sometimes you can start with the look of an actress, or a certain space, or even with a hand. Like Eros, I started the whole image with the single hand.

TIME: Your vision of Hong Kong is so individual, so different from the place we live in. What it's like to be an elegiac artist in a city that is constantly eating its own past?
Wong: It's like you try to keep something. That's why you have a story like 2046. You want to create a place in the world where what we think is nice, we can keep it that way. It's like the Hong Kong that we picture in our films is something from our impressions, from our memories, a certain wonderful moment of our city. And we want to keep that on film.

source:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501041004-702208,00.html

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2046: A Film Odyssey BY RICHARD CORLISS

2004-09-30T16:55:13Z

October 4, 2004 / Vol. 164, No. 14
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501041004-702196,00.html?promoid=rss_world

2046: A Film Odyssey

For four years, Wong Kar-wai fought to bring his vision to life. What's the result? A romantic masterpiece

BY RICHARD CORLISS

Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is a ladies' man. He knows how to attract them and keep them at a distance. Having been burned in an earlier affair, he is loath to reveal to them the ache of lost love at his core. Yet he needs a woman; he seems happy only when he can nod off, in a taxi, on a kind lady's shoulder. He sounds like a weary cynic, but underneath he is like every Wong Kar-wai character: a melancholy romantic. And he has the bruises to prove it.

Chow is the hero of 2046, Wong's first feature since In the Mood for Love four years ago. Like that film and most of the others that have made him the most respected and imitated writer-director in Hong Kong, perhaps in all Asia, it is a stethoscope monitoring the troubled hearts of people who have the attitude but not always the aptitude for love. At $15 million and more than two hours in length (20 minutes longer than any of his earlier pictures), 2046 is the grandest project of a man who, in an age of coarse and facetious movies, has the mission to reestablish the romantic tone of the grandest old films —where two beautiful people would gaze into each other's eyes and go about breaking each other's hearts.

That makes Wong, 46, the cinema's reigning romantic. But in his dark shades and friendly hipness, he is too cool to plead totally guilty to that charge. "Romanticism means you follow your heart more than your mind," he said last week as he alighted in Hong Kong during a hectic promotion tour that took him to Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Beijing. "If that's the case, my films are 75% romantic; the other 25% is the realities, the problem solving and luck." As for himself, he laughs and says he's "60% romantic." Which sounds like the other 40% is talking.

The release of 2046 was delayed by realities, problem solving and luck, most of it bad. The SARS epidemic disrupted filming last year. The futuristic computer imagery, which opens the film in dazzling fashion, took more time than expected. Mostly, though, Wong is a notorious perfectionist in an industry that believes fast is good. (Johnnie To, Hong Kong's top auteur of commercial films, has directed 13 features in the four years since In the Mood came out.) Wong promised that 2046 would open at the Cannes Film Festival this May, yet he kept shooting until days before the premiere. The film missed a scheduled screening and had to be shown later that night. For his trouble, Wong and 2046 went home without a prize.

Wong's work habits may exasperate those around him. But a question remains: is the movie good? And the answer is no. It's wonderful —a rich, glamorous and acutely human work with superb performances by Leung and the four gorgeous actresses.

It's clever, too. "The idea for the film," says Wong, "comes from the promise the Chinese government gave to the Hong Kong people: 50 years of no change" in its political and economic systems after the 1997 handover by Great Britain. "So 2046 is the last year of that promise. And I think, is there anything that is so unchanged in people's lives? When we fall in love we wonder: Will they change? Will I change? How can we make this moment last forever? So we start with that."

When last seen, at the end of in the Mood for Love, Chow was mourning a failed affair with Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and making a pilgrimage to the ruins of Angkor Wat. He was told that to bury a sad secret, one should find an ancient hole, whisper the secret into it, then cover it up. That was 1967. It's a few years later, and Chow has taken residence in room 2046 of the Oriental Hotel, where several bewitching women cross his path. One is Lulu (Carina Lau), who traps herself in a series of volcanic affairs. "She didn't mind sad endings," Chow notes in the film's narration. "The male lead could change, as long as she was the leading lady." Chow's cast of sexual co-stars changes almost nightly. His hotel-room bedsprings squeal like a medieval torture device in the unwilling ears of his next-door neighbor.

The neighbor is Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a dance-hall hostess and prostitute. Her arguments with Chow over his lady guests veer into flirtation, and soon she too is making his bedsprings squeak. Bai Ling makes one rash transaction: she gives her heart to Chow, who wants her only as a playmate. The one sedate lady in the hotel is its owner's older daughter Jingwen (Faye Wong), pining over a broken affair with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura). She encourages Chow, a journalist who writes erotic books on the side, to switch to science fiction. Soon she is helping him write a novel called 2046, in which Chow creates an android version of Jingwen. The novel is set in a futureworld where people go to recapture lost memories. Chow can't escape his memories: of Su Lizhen and another woman with the same name, a casino gambler (Gong Li) who once did him the favor of allowing him to fall in love with her.

Confused? The plot is complex in print but pellucid on the screen. With the dexterity of a cardsharp, Wong shuffles the present, the recent past and the distant future, mixing reality, memory and fantasy. The main action of the movie takes place on consecutive Christmas Eves in the late '60s, but each scene has reverberations of others from Chow's past and from the novel. What anchors each of the stories for the viewer are the faces of the actresses. No explanations are needed when Zhang is lasering a stare as bold as a shout or Lau is sobbing herself to sleep or Gong Li is flashing an imperious gaze. Or when Faye Wong, in our last glimpse of her, is captured in a slow-motion, slowly encroaching close-up that fades just as she is about to smile. It is an image —a kiss from the camera —of desirability that can be fully appreciated only when it slips away.

"Love is a matter of timing," Chow observes. "It's no good meeting the right person too soon or too late." Chow intersected with all these women too soon or too late. Wong Kar-wai got all of them at the apogee of their craft and allure. That's part of his filmmaking process: to sculpt the role to the performer. "If you want to make a film with an actor or actress, there must be something that attracts you. I'm trying to exploit that quality, which they might not even be aware of. So I normally don't ask actresses to play other people. It's just: 'Be you.'"

Before actors join a Wong Kar-wai film, the director says, "They don't know the whole story, but they know their story. Zhang Ziyi, because she knows she's going to play a ballroom dancer in the '60s, has to be given a lot of homework. I have to give her all of these films from the period, so she can understand the gestures, the actions. And also I give her all the costumes, because she has to get those manners down. Gong Li's character is a gambler, so Li headed down to Macau incognito to watch gamblers at work. She's very serious. She needs to have a lot of preparation. Faye Wong, she doesn't need to do that because we've worked [together] before, and she always tries to make herself very relaxed."

It makes one wonder how he will direct Nicole Kidman on a film project that may materialize next year. Wong is teasingly oracular on the plot and setting: "The only thing I want to say is I always conceive of Nicole Kidman as the woman in a Hitchcock film. I think the woman in Hitchcock is always very dangerous, or in danger. And Nicole is both."

Directing one of the world's most famous and adventurous actresses might be intimidating for someone who, as he notes, "didn't go to film school. I don't have any technical training. The way I make films is the only way I know." But he knows his mad method works, in large measure because of two men who have been his closest collaborators on most of his films. William Chang, the editor, production designer and costume designer, is both the architect and the first critic of Wong's vision. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle matches the director's artistry and energy with a luscious camera style that sees beyond surfaces into essences. He takes ravishing pictures of troubled souls.

Wong, of course, is their inspirer. And to begin a project, all the inspiration he requires is one strong, suggestive image. "You need to have the image," he says. "Sometimes you can start with the look of an actress or a certain space. In Eros, I started with the image of a single hand."

In an age when many serious directors, especially in Europe, are making films with graphic sex, Wong remains a gentleman in matters of the groin. 2046 does have one vigorous bedroom encounter, with the nude Leung and Zhang Ziyi attractively entangled. But the erotic knockout punch is a kiss —sudden, brutal, passionate and 35 seconds long —between Leung and Gong Li. They go at each other like two drowning strangers giving each other CPR. Now that's sexy.

"To describe a so-called love scene, or intercourse, is very boring," Wong says, reluctant even to use the word sex. "There must be a point to your focus. In Eros, it's about the hand, not the actual act."

The Hand, his contribution to the three-part Eros (the other parts are by Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh), has no nudity; all sex is suggestive. But the film is called Eros, not Sex; and his episode is throbbingly erotic, as well as a fable about love, lust, loyalty and the ravages of ego in a beautiful young woman who will not always be young or beautiful.

In 1963, a tailor's apprentice named Zhang (Chang Chen) is called to the apartment of a notorious courtesan, Miss Hua (Gong Li, again). As he waits for his audience the sounds of lovemaking trouble and arouse him. Miss Hua, when she greets him, notices his excitement, orders him to remove his trousers and caresses him with her expert hand. It could be said that Hua is merely extending Zhang a professional courtesy. But she is also humiliating the young man —and, she must know, earning a new devotee with a sexual gesture that means little to her, everything to him.

Over the years, Hua's web of erotic and financial alliances unravels. Wealthy lovers tire of her imperiousness; the gigolo she supported (and whose exertions Zhang overheard that first day) has found younger flesh to exploit. She can't pay the tailor bills, yet Zhang remains her faithful couturier and courtier, flattering Hua on her waist size, whispering compliments to a woman in need of them and, finally, secretly, paying for the dingy hotel room she's forced to move into. Gratitude, or desperation, leads her to ask, "Do you have a wife yet?" "No." "How about me?" It is an eloquent three words with at least three meanings: an expression of noblesse oblige, an admission of defeat and an acknowledgment of how much this tradesman has meant to her.

Their last meeting reprises, as in a symphony, the motifs of the first movement but with a new gravity and tenderness. A touch of the hand, a kiss on the face, a few tears and their time is over. In this cinematic short story —as delicate as Guy de Maupassant's, as terse and acute as Raymond Carver's —Wong touches on his old themes of romance and remorse. Chang Chen, looking like a younger Tony Leung in mustache and '60s clothing, gives a mature performance; but Gong Li is the eye magnet. As Hua the regal manipulator, she ages and diminishes, allowing the viewer to escort her on her appointment with tragedy. Give the lady a big hand.

Wong is not perpetually stuck in the 1960s, though his past three films reside there. He had planned to set The Hand in 1930s Shanghai, and shoot it in that city, but the SARS outbreak restricted travel around Asia, forcing him to film in Hong Kong. As fears of an epidemic intensified, the entire production was disrupted, with some Taiwan crew members having difficulty getting to Hong Kong. "Their wives just went crazy," Wong says. "They couldn't accept their husbands working on such a dangerous film, in such a dangerous city. But the men still came."

In the end, nothing could prevent Wong finishing 2046.

A four-year shoot might seem torture to some directors. Not this one. "For me," he says, "to make films is like a circus. We should just go from one town to another, always on the road, stopping when we think we should stop. To me, if there's no Cannes, you can make 2046 for another year." Is it a circus or a love affair, whose ending he both dreads and prays for? As Chow says in the movie, "You can't leave 2046. You can only hope it leaves you." Filmmaking for Wong Kar-wai is like an addiction, benign but incurable.

"It's very hard," he acknowledges. "At the end you just want to get away from it. A few weeks ago, we finished the final mix. And I realized that you have to say goodbye to this project, and you feel very, very ..." His voice trails off. "I know it's not easy. I know it's not a normal practice to make a film for four years. And I'm not sure we'll be able or willing to do that again in the future. This is a very special film. It is the hardest to let go. But you have to let go. And that's it."

Which is stronger: his love for the challenge and camaraderie of making a film or the heartache he feels when it's over? Maybe the two emotions are equally potent, since Wong makes movies that blend those two subjects: the coming together, the drifting apart. The maker of a film as splendid as 2046 should be eager to let it go, to share his treasure with the world. Instead there's an emptiness worse than postcoital or postpartum depression. That's the secret, whispered into a hole, by a man who is 60% romantic, 40% showman and 100% movie artist. He's like Chow in 2046, watching the most amazing woman walk out of his life.

In 2046 Jingwen reads a story Chow has written about her and finds the ending too sad. Could he please change it? We are happy to do that for Wong Kar-wai. He should realize that his unhappy ending is, for others, a beguiling beginning. His vanished beloved can now find a new suitor —millions of moviegoers, who will embrace the beautiful creature, who are ready to be put in the mood for love.

source:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501041004-702196,00.html?promoid=rss_world

posted in 2046 - 0 replies

Wong Kar-Wai and Nicole Kidman Project

2004-09-29T02:13:55Z

According to Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily, the title or at least the working title of the upcoming Wong Kar-Wai / Nicole Kidman project is The Lady From Shanghai. The story will be set in the 1930's Shanghai, the birth place of Wong Kar-Wai. According to an earlier tidbits, Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano (Zatoichi) has also been mentioned as the candidate for playing the "bad guy". Chang Suk-Ping, the art director and costume designer for most of Wong's films, has arrived in the States to work on the character of Nicole Kidman. Shooting will start in February, most like in Shanghai.

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Director keeps Edinburgh waiting for 2046

2004-09-28T02:06:13Z

Director keeps Edinburgh waiting for 2046

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Monday August 16, 2004
http://film.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh2004/story/0,14809,1284118,00.html

In a blow to the Edinburgh international film festival, its closing movie, Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, has been pulled because it is not finished.

As soon as the festival's programme was announced earlier this summer, there were rumours in the film world that the Hong Kong director had not given his permission for the screening or finished the work to his satisfaction.

But these rumours were denied at the time by the festival and by Tartan Films, 2046's distributor.

Wong is famous for re-editing and 2046 has become notorious as the never-finished film. It was eagerly awaited at the 2003 Cannes and Venice film festivals but audiences were disappointed at both events.

A version of the movie was shown at this year's Cannes festival in May but even then the arrival of the film was so last-minute that its morning press screening had to be scratched, with the reels coming from a laboratory in Paris just in time for the evening's gala showing.

Shane Danielson, the festival's artistic director, said: "Obviously it's disappointing, but it's not entirely unforeseen. Ultimately, this is just one of the pitfalls of working with eccentric artistic geniuses. But we wish him well with the film which, when it's finally finished, will probably be even more amazing than it already is."

Hamish McAlpine, managing director of Tartan Films, said: "I am devastated that the film will now not be shown at Edinburgh ... Shane was visionary in his choice of the movie as the closing film, but I guess artists will be artists. Having seen a recent edit of the film in Hong Kong, the film is getting better day by day. I can't wait to see Wong Kar-Wai's final version of the film."

Two weeks ago, Takuya Kimura, the Japanese star and one of the film's cast, was seen in Hong Kong, apparently working for 20 hours on the film.

According to the Straits Times, a Singapore daily, Wong was also seen there with the film's production designer, William Chang.

The talk in Hong Kong is that 2046 will not be completed before its scheduled general release there in the autumn.

2046 is set in 60s Hong Kong. Tony Leung plays a sacked newspaper editor who seduces prostitutes, one of whom lives in room 2046 of a hotel. He moves in next door and begins writing sci-fi novels about a futuristic city called 2046. The number is also a reference to the year that Hong Kong will be assimilated into China.

In the version shown at Cannes, it was described by the New York Times as teasing "the boundary of incomprehensibility. It is a series of moods, nuances and gorgeous moments - seductions, couplings, tearful partings - with the usual connective tissue left out or implied in title cards and voice-overs".

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, described it as "an absorbingly mysterious, richly sensuous film".

It was tipped for the Palme D'Or, eventually losing out to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

The replacement film for the festival, Untold Scandal, a remake of Dangerous Liaisons by Korean director E J-Yong, is a much lower-profile work, which will bring the festival less kudos than if Wong had completed 2046 in time for the screening.

Mr Danielson said: "We're extremely proud to feature Untold Scandal as our closing night film. The great thing is that this gives us an opportunity to give a more prominent showcase to it - a film that's every bit as poetic, sexy and visually ravishing as 2046, and as such, fully deserving of the closing night slot."

source:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/edinburgh2004/story/0,14809,1284118,00.html

posted in 2046 - 0 replies

The Director's Director (NY Times Article on Wong Kar-Wai)

2004-09-26T20:35:57Z

The Director's Director

September 26, 2004
NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26KARWAI.html

The Director's Director
By JAIME WOLF

Late one night in March of last year, in a crumbling area on the island of Macao off Hong Kong, a film crew milled around in the street, awaiting the arrival of Wong Kar-wai. In life as in art, Wong tends to make you acutely aware of time. His films are filled with clocks and calendars. He is also notorious for keeping people waiting: waiting for his films to go into production, waiting for the shooting day to begin and waiting for a recognizable story and structure to emerge from his long, uncertain process. This particular night, the crew was setting up to shoot scenes from Wong's eighth film, ''2046,'' an ambitious, star-studded, futuristic drama. (Its title refers to the 49th year after the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong.) There was nothing futuristic about the location: a dilapidated block bathed in a latticework of shadows and artificial golden light, it resembled the 1960's Hong Kong the director conjured for his previous film, the acclaimed ''In the Mood for Love.''

Shortly after midnight, a minivan pulled up, and Wong stepped out, clutching a sheaf of pages on which he had written out in longhand the next scenes to be shot. Copies were quickly distributed by an assistant director. If it appeared that Wong had arrived straight from a session of coffee-shop scribbling with a quick stop at Kinko's, the truth was not far off. Although shooting in Macao had required giving his company a few days' notice, Wong's standard M.O. is to tell actors a starting time and location as close to the last minute as possible. Nor does he tend to give them any dialogue or the specifics of a scene until it's time to shoot; instead, he rolls the camera, thrusting them into situations with which they have only just been presented.

A boarded-up shop off the street served as a dressing room. Wong's production designer and costumer, William Chang Suk-ping, adjusted the hair and clothing of the film's leading man, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, as Leung skimmed the pages. ''I'm the only one that can read Kar-wai's handwriting,'' Leung told me. ''So I always have to explain the dialogue to everyone else.'' His character hadn't been given a name yet, so his lines were simply slugged ''Wai,'' a diminutive of his Chinese name. In ''Mood for Love,'' Leung had played Chow Mo-wan, a lovesick writer. In ''2046'' he was also playing a writer, but this time, Wong had instructed him to behave like a ''Bukowski character,'' a heartless, careless, down-at-the heels gambler and Lothario. He read aloud the description of a scene coming up -- ''Interior, motel, making love'' -- then happily exclaimed, ''So many sex scenes in this movie!'' Chang chuckled.

When the camera and lighting were set, Wong walked Leung through the shot with his costar Zhang Ziyi, the actress best known for her portrayal of an alluringly feisty young swordswoman in ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' and who portrays a fashionable dance-hall hostess in ''2046.'' Then the camera rolled, Leung and Zhang walked slowly along the deserted sidewalk, talking and laughing. An assistant director translated the dialogue for me: Leung was telling Zhang that he has enjoyed the time he's spent with her, but that it was time for him to go. A heaviness suddenly settled upon Zhang, and when they embraced she broke into sobs.

''Where is he going?'' I asked the assistant director.

''Oh, we don't know,'' she said.

''No one knows where he's going or why?''

She shrugged: ''That's the ambiguity of the script.''

The kind of person who might once have proclaimed ''Jules and Jim'' or ''Wings of Desire'' his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list. Flirting with the conventions of genre (melodrama in ''Days of Being Wild''; Chinese swordsman adventures in ''Ashes of Time''; Hong Kong action movies in ''Chungking Express'' and ''Fallen Angels''), his meditative, pop-savvy films home in on emotional tipping points in the lives of young city-dwellers -- the moments that forever mark them and from which they cannot escape. Their witty invention, color-drenched visuals and romantic longing offer the kind of bittersweet satisfaction found in the fiction of Haruki Murakami or the photographs of William Gedney, about whose subjects John Cage once said, ''They seem to be doing happy things sadly, or maybe they're doing sad things happily.''

Among living directors, Martin Scorsese is the filmmaker Wong Kar-wai most admires. And just as the artistic innovations of Scorsese, and before him Godard and Fellini, were systematically plundered by other makers of films, TV commercials and music videos, Wong's signature moves have rapidly been assimilated over the past decade. Even if you have never seen a Wong Kar-wai film, you would recognize his style. For attentive fans, going to the movies has become a game of ''spot the Wong Kar-wai tribute'' (or rip-off), with a diverse list of directors explicitly recreating shots, scenes or musical cues from his work, including Spike Jonze in ''Adaptation,'' Cameron Crowe in ''Vanilla Sky'' and Jean-Pierre Jeunet in ''Amelie.'' Scorsese himself modeled the battle scenes in ''Gangs of New York'' after those in Wong's hallucinatory ''Ashes of Time,'' and even Sam Raimi in ''Spider-Man 2'' sends Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst for a quick stroll through a Chinatown that manages to look more like Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong than New York.

The melancholy of loss and separation that pervades Wong's work would seem to come naturally. Born in Shanghai in 1958, he emigrated to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of 5, leaving behind an older brother and sister. The circumstances of the Cultural Revolution kept Wong from seeing them again for more than a decade. A lonely child, he didn't speak the local Cantonese dialect until the age of 13. He spent afternoons accompanying his mother to the movies, and he sometimes followed his father, a nightclub manager, on his nocturnal rounds, developing an ongoing fascination for scruffy urban lowlife, jukeboxes and polyglot pop culture.

Wong enrolled in art school but dropped out to join a screenwriters' training program in 1980. Supported in part by his wife, Wong then struggled in the lower echelons of Hong Kong's film industry for nearly a decade before directing his own work. A chain-smoking design junkie and bookworm, Wong cultivates a certain elusiveness in public: the mysterious dreamer, always in sunglasses, given to laconic or cryptic pronouncements. One on one, however, he is personable and direct, with a ready streak of goofball humor and disarming personal charm. That quality is especially important when he needs to persuade people to finance films without scripts, or modest Chinese actresses to overcome their inhibitions before a sex scene.

The international success of ''In the Mood for Love'' has given Wong the chance to put his imprimatur on some high-profile commercial pursuits. He supervised a worldwide advertising campaign for Lacoste and directed a short film for the BMW series ''The Hire.'' But making his own films remains a continuing struggle -- in part because of his quixotic insistence on working the way he does.

Originally, Wong wanted to try to put his stamp on the science-fiction genre, so ''2046'' was conceived as a futuristic thriller. Filming began in 1999 in Bangkok during a break in the lengthy production of ''In the Mood for Love,'' but ''2046'' was then put aside. In the intervening years its imminent completion was announced and postponed so many times that it became a running joke in the Asian press that the film wouldn't be finished until the year of its title. Wong completed the film in time for this year's Cannes Film Festival but then continued to work on it, declining an invitation to show ''2046'' next week at the New York Film Festival, where he has long been a favorite. After presenting the American premiere of each of his films for the past decade, this year's festival will be marked as much by the absence of ''2046'' as it would have been by its presence.

Closer to Wong's home, however, on Sept. 28, just before China's National Day holiday, ''2046'' will finally have its premiere across mainland China and in Hong Kong; Japanese and European releases will follow throughout the fall, and when the companies currently vying for North American rights finish duking it out, audiences in the United States should get to see it sometime next year.

When they do, it will no longer be a futuristic thriller, but something more complicated and personal -- a story set only partly in the future and primarily in 1960's Hong Kong, the milieu of Wong's childhood. The title ''2046'' originated as shorthand for the Chinese government's assurances to the people of Hong Kong that the territory would remain autonomous and unchanged for 50 years. Wong hoped that the film would be a fresh way for him to approach his favorite subjects: the passing of time, the possibility of change and, as he put it, ''broken promises.''

When he returned to the project after completing ''Mood,'' Wong felt the idea of projecting Hong Kong 50 years into the future seemed too literal and one-note. He spent 2000 and 2001 reconceiving the film, signing new cast members and announcing restart dates in locations as disparate as Bangkok, Shanghai and Pusan, South Korea. But each time he had to postpone as financing fell out, actors became unavailable and shooting permits became entangled in red tape. ''I already forget how many versions of the film have existed,'' Wong said recently. ''Each time if we are able to shoot the film, we would 'finish' the film -- but it would be a different film.''

At the same time, ''In the Mood for Love'' proved to be Wong's breakout movie. He had always seen ''Mood'' and ''2046'' as companion pieces, past and future. Now he began to think that ''2046'' might be a continuation of the first film. Rather than playing a futuristic postman as originally planned, Leung would once again play a writer in 60's Hong Kong -- but this time his subject would be science fiction rather than martial arts. The film would therefore intercut scenes from the many affairs of Leung's womanizing character with episodes from his stories (using material from the 1999 shoot and other scenes that would be shot on massive sets built in Shanghai); the same actors would be used to portray characters in both the 60's and 2046. Even then, Wong wasn't sure whether to have Leung reprise the role of Chow Mo-wan. To preserve the possibility, he began shooting the film without having anyone refer to the character by name. This sort of extreme indeterminacy is always in play.

Other directors have employed similar strategies: D.W. Griffith directed the three-hour historical spectacle ''Intolerance'' without a script in evidence; since then, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman and Mike Leigh have used various improvisational methods. Wong Kar-wai, however, approaches filmmaking the way a writer composes a novel, trying out new things on a daily basis, which he feels free to scrap or redo later; he shoots contradictory scenes that require his actors not to hold to any particularly fixed idea of character or plot; he experiments with different visual approaches. In short, he keeps his options open, almost insanely so, in order to discover the movie as it progresses.

When I joined him, nearly a month into the new production last year, the film was taking place in 1967; Tony Leung, who might or might not be Chow Mo-wan, was living in Room 2047 of a dingy hot-sheets motel and serially getting it on with a handful of women passing through Room 2046 next door. Concentrating first on Leung's character's relationship with Zhang Ziyi, Wong wanted to see where it would take him.

Wong and company had taken an abandoned warren of rooms and transformed them into the decrepit Oriental Hotel, its interiors decorated in fading layers of deep green, brown and black, with walls that looked pockmarked and scuffed like a Jackson Pollock painting. One night, I squeezed into Tony Leung's crowded quarters. The camera, mounted on a set of ceiling tracks, pointed down at Leung's cluttered, cigarette-strewn writing desk. The shot would be from overhead, one of Wong's classically atmospheric moments, with Leung, bathed in a small pool of light, scribbling in a late-night frenzy, then pausing, staring at the ceiling and exhaling a cloud of smoke.

Wong sat at the video monitor, his own ashtray overflowing, considering the composition: should the desk be balanced in the frame or off-axis? Should he start close and pull back, or zoom in? It was a single shot that would comprise less than a minute of screen time, but it was precisely what Wong's films are known for, the perfect distillation of an ineffable emotional moment.

Leung came in and the camera rolled: Wong's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, a wiry 50-year-old with bright blue eyes and a shock of mad-scientist hair, simultaneously zoomed out and moved the camera for a kind of reverse corkscrew effect, from closer in to a stopping-point near the ceiling. Leung exhaled and Wong called ''Cut,'' critiquing the shot in a stream of Mandarin that concluded with a pronouncement in English: ''Not. Creative. Enough.''

''I know. . . . '' Doyle shot back. ''It's my first day on the job.'' Doyle and Wong often trade barbs like a couple. Frequently, after Doyle has set up and lighted something stunning or laid out a complicated but efficient move, Wong's deadpan comment will be, ''Is that the best you can do, Chris?''

The mercurial Doyle, hot to Wong's cool, is one of the world's foremost cameramen, in large part owing to his complicated and fruitful relationship with Wong that dates back to 1989, when they were shooting ''Days of Being Wild.'' Australian by birth, Doyle has lived in China for nearly 25 years, devoting most of his career to photographing Asian films. He is constantly in motion, spouting a running, Heineken-fueled stream-of-consciousness monologue. The visual hallmarks of Wong Kar-wai's films owe much to the extraordinary sensitivity of his eye. An exceptional writer, Doyle has also published books about his collaborations with Wong and others. ''The way the film looks is its reality,'' he writes. '''Based on a true story' is such a lie. 'Based on a true color' or 'based on a strange dream' is what films cry out to be.''

Equally crucial to the development and evolution of Wong's work is Chang, the soft-spoken, 49-year-old production designer and costumer on all of his films. The mesmerizing wallpaper, spectacular dresses and artful ambient erosion are all his doing. Wong Kar-wai will say no more than ''Zhang Ziyi is a dance-hall hostess'' and leave the rest to Chang, whose approach is as intuitive and improvisational as the director's and carries just as much weight. After shooting for several days in one of the Oriental Hotel's hallways, Chang decided it should have a red curtain hanging from the ceiling, effectively forcing everything that had been shot there to be redone. The result of Chang's exactitude, especially for actresses, is the attainment of a near iconic level of numinous beauty.

Chang is also the editor of Wong's films, providing much of the construction and tempo of the final product. On most films, editing begins in earnest once shooting has stopped; with Wong Kar-wai's films, shooting, cutting and writing all continue at once -- sometimes overlapping, other times in stop-start alternation. One afternoon last year, I sat with Chang as he reviewed selected takes from a high-spirited bed scene between Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi. Chang leaned forward on the sofa, elbows on knees, holding his chin, staring at the screen as an assistant ran the assemblage. He usually begins working with the footage as soon as it's shot, looking for a scene that resonates. After identifying it, he builds out, letting other material follow its lead.

Chang admitted that he had yet to find his way in. ''It's strange because they're so many actors, actresses,'' he said, referring to the various relationships in which Leung's character becomes entangled. ''Usually after two weeks I have a feeling of mastering the story. But right now I don't have that feeling.'' Confident that an answer would eventually emerge, Wong didn't pressure him.

Like Miles Davis, whose best groups gathered distinctive soloists who were also composers in their own right, Wong extends his collaborators a tremendous amount of freedom and then selects what suits him. Spontaneity is prized: Doyle would rather have an unmediated response to the space in which he's filming than know too much about the story; Chang waits until the last possible minute before presenting color schemes or costumes to Wong. The payoff of their interplay is a palpable immediacy -- a sense that you're seeing things onscreen as they unfold.

Wong also knows the value of withholding. He refrains from giving his opinion or approval as a way of getting actors and collaborators to offer more in an attempt to please him. When he finally responds, it has the effect of redoubling their efforts. On set, he often assumes a kind of experimental detachment, looking to try every kind of tonal or technical variation. This can be time-consuming and maddening; it can also be fun. Frequently, he'll give no explicit direction to an actor beyond playing him a piece of music and asking him to enact its mood. Wong simply believes the right thing isn't something that can be imagined beforehand, but only discovered.

Actors, however, can lose confidence in the process. Five years ago, Takuya Kimura , a Japanese superstar musician and actor, was tapped by Wong to play a leading role as a hit man in the original Bangkok production of ''2046.'' He was a fan of Wong's films but had only experienced the regimented Japanese system of film production. Kimura was flummoxed during his weeks on the set. He had expected to act opposite the Chinese pop diva Faye Wong, but Wong instead asked him to improvise scenes with a cow, a pig and an elephant. On his radio show in Japan, Kimura mocked the chaotic production and said he wasn't sure if he was interested in coming back.

Even stalwarts like Maggie Cheung, whose reputation as a serious actress was established in Wong's early films, find their patience tested. After being told on three separate occasions that her part in ''Mood'' had wrapped, she was summoned back from her home in Paris for additional reshoots and vowed never to work with Wong again. She recanted when she saw the film.

''Mood'' also caused a serious rift between Wong and Doyle when the cinematographer's commitment to a Hollywood film forced him to leave after more than a year in production. After devoting months to experimentation before settling on a visual approach, both men were unhappy when Doyle's work had to be completed by Mark Li Ping-bin. Because Wong had taken so long to find what he wanted, the majority of the finished film was shot in a frenzied six-week run-up to its premiere. Although its look owes nearly everything to Doyle, more than half of it was photographed by Li. (The two share credit.) Doyle and Wong barely spoke for a year.

To critics and detractors, Wong is undisciplined, wasteful and disingenuous. Asked about the tension his habitual brinksmanship creates, he answers philosophically: ''I can understand why that happens. But . . . everyone knows: this is how I work.'' It's his version of the old Popeye creed: I yam what I yam. But from an artistic standpoint, the question Wong poses is whether his results can be achieved in any other way. Last year, when Nicole Kidman sought Wong out to discuss working together, he warned her about how much time and uncertainty would be involved, and she came away even more eager to act for him.

In mid-March of last year, the SARS epidemic, which shut down Hong Kong for several months, interrupted ''2046'' yet another time. After some days of additional shooting in early summer, Wong could not begin again until last fall, when the company moved to Shanghai for the scenes set in the future. Returning to Hong Kong at Christmas, they wound up shooting through April of this year.

As a result, ''2046'' was the first film in Cannes history to arrive so late that the schedule of competition films had to be rearranged. The print, fresh from a lab in Paris, was escorted from the Nice airport by police motorcade, arriving less than three hours before its delayed premiere.

The version screened at Cannes was lush and strange, contrasting the scuffed-up, dark colors of the 60's with the baroque, pulsating, green and orange interiors of Tony Leung's imaginary future: Room 2046 of the ramshackle Oriental Hotel functions as the portal to a speeding bullet train called 2046 and a gleaming metropolis of the same name. Not long after shooting the scenes I'd witnessed, Wong decided that Tony Leung's character would be Chow Mo-wan, making his ill-fated affair with Maggie Cheung of ''In the Mood for Love'' part of his transformation into a cad.

Besides Zhang Ziyi, Leung takes up with a string of other women: Faye Wong, who plays both the daughter of the Oriental Hotel's proprietor and a robot in his science-fiction stories; a doomed lounge singer played by Carina Lau; and Gong Li, as a mysterious gambler dressed in black. Unable to form lasting connections in the mid-60's episodes, he writes obsessively; transposing scenes from his unhappy life into his stories, Tony Leung's character tries to inscribe himself into a future where things might be different, making a plaintive declaration: ''I need to change.''

Last fall, Kimura, the Japanese superstar, now four years older, returned to the film. Assuaged by Wong, he now appears as Tony Leung's avatar. At the Cannes premiere, Kimura remained puzzled about how it would all work, but he emerged a typical convert. ''The film is beautiful,'' he marveled. ''There's a beautiful sadness.''

A different kind of sadness comes with the news that once again Wong and Doyle have parted ways. Neither man will discuss the split, but Doyle left the production in January, and the film credits two additional cinematographers: Doyle's former assistant Lai Yiu-fai and Kwan Pun-leung. While it's by no means impossible that the two might reconcile, this may very well mark the end of their partnership.

After Cannes, Wong declined further festival invitations, completing special-effects shots, shooting additional scenes and revising the film's beginning and end. In mid-August, he emerged to announce its final completion. The new version has not been screened yet, but where the Cannes version ended with Leung's character surveying his past and once again declaring, ''I need to change,'' Wong hints that he has since found a way to bring his protagonist's impasse to some resolution.

It may be a lazy deconstructivist's cliche to read every text as an allegory of its own making, but on some level, ''2046'' invites it: one passage from Leung's novel ''2046'' reads: ''2046 is a hard train to get off. How long have I been on this train?'' Wong himself allows that the film, like Fellini's ''8 1/2,'' has turned into a midcareer retrospective. Depicting Leung as a man unable to let go of his past, Wong has filled ''2046'' with deliberate allusions to his previous films. Setting out to make a science-fiction film, looking into the future, Wong discovered that he needed to face backward as well.

Why does Wong Kar-wai keep circling back to Hong Kong in the 1960's, first in ''In the Mood for Love'' (which began filming as a contemporary story), and now in his latest film? If there is a ''Rosebud'' at the heart of his career, it is his second film, ''Days of Being Wild,'' a melodramatic memory play featuring a large ensemble, set in Hong Kong in 1960. Ambitiously conceived in two parts, its high cost and resounding commercial failure kept the second half, which was to take place in 1966, from ever being made. In an ingenious stroke, ''2046'' winds up completing the story begun in ''Days of Being Wild.'' Like the inhabitants of Garcia Marquez's Macondo or Balzac's Paris, Wong's characters turn out to inhabit a dense overlapping universe in a fantastic chain of desire, rejection and loss. ''In the process of making this film,'' Wong e-mailed me not long ago from the editing room, ''I never thought I wouldn't complete it. Sometimes I was tempted to look for an easy way out.'' Now, the burden of the past -- not just Chow Mo-wan's, but Wong Kar-wai's as well -- has been lifted, and Wong himself can perhaps move on.

What form that will take remains uncertain. However, in a bold departure, Wong recently agreed to develop and produce three English-language films for Fox Searchlight. He's not sure that he'll direct any of them, but selecting and working with other screenwriters and directors will be a new experiment. He is not likely to abandon his improvisational method, but he says he would like to find ways to be more productive. Perhaps working from a script, (one of the Searchlight projects) or making a film based on real events (he has been developing a project for Leung about the Hong Kong man who trained Bruce Lee) might provide a stronger tether to keep the director from losing himself amid the infinite possibilities. As ever, Wong Kar-wai is willing to explore his options.

source NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26KARWAI.html

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