Film-maker Wong Kar-Wai tells Rob Yates about his gay road movie, Happy Together, and about his other life
It can get to be a bind, being the “most fashionable film director on the planet” (The Face magazine). Seriousness intrudes. People demand explanations, want to talk art. Why can’t they see that this movie- making lark is just a bit of fun? Such is the state of mind of Wong Kar-Wai when we meet. It’s late Saturday morning, and the celebrated Hong Kong film-maker is going stir crazy, having to spend his short stay in London locked in meetings, or fielding questions.
“What are you doing after this?” he asks. Meeting friends, lunch, drink … “Can I come?” Of course, you can. Lunch with Wong at least offers the possibility that he might remove his shades, a constant prop and generally considered part of his armoury of cool.
Nothing of the sort, he deadpans: “It means that I can sleep when I’m on a shoot. Wear dark glasses and people assume you’re in control.” In the end, lunch does not work out – he is told he has further promotional commitments. “But London is out there waiting for me,” he complains.
That Wong should want to get out into the capital makes perfect sense. His films feed on big-city life, and move to its rhythms. Chung King Express, his best-known, released in 1994, is a breathless tracking of two jilted policemen, set in a sleazy, enticing Hong Kong of flophouses and all- night dives. It is shot through with Wong’s unconventional humour. One of the policemen is given to talking intimately to his dish cloth. As Wong says: “It’s very difficult for people to connect in busy cities.”
This, it is tempting to assume, is the Hong Kong in him. Though born in Shanghai 40 years ago, Wong’s family moved to the island when he was a child, his father finding work as a nightclub manager – in precisely the sort of place his son prefers to visit with a camera. Wong’s films excel in suggesting the lure of city nightlife – the drifting, intoxication, chance couplings – and, as a complement, also catch the loneliness within the crowd.
“Cities are great places to film, to be. All those people together, and yet you’re not sure whether you want to spend any time with any one of them,” he quips. (Though he himself has a settled domestic life, complete with wife and three-year-old child.)
Wong – like his films – has a nice, deflating humour. His new film, Happy Together – which earned him a Best Director award at last year’s Cannes festival – is, naturally, about a couple who are not happy together, and probably never will be. It is also a gay road movie, a category of film which does not come around every week.
The sexuality of the couple is an incidental – “It’s just a love story,” says Wong – though not, it appears, for its leading players. Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are big Hong Kong stars, with large audiences to please. (Remember that in Hong Kong the action movie is king; men are meant to slay – not seduce – each other.) An American reporter, reaching for some approximation to Happy Together’s coupling, described it as akin to casting Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as lovers, but don’t let that put you off. Talking of the coup, Wong, routinely portrayed as the tall, impassive puppet master, turns puckish schoolboy, who gets to pull off all his tricks. He likes to cast stars – “it’s like a `proper’ film then” – but he also likes to play with their vanity. “The first scene, I thought, should be a sex scene. Let them know what it’s all about”‘
Wong ran into a few surprises of his own. He chose to leave Hong Kong to shoot in Argentina largely, it seems, because he likes Latin-American literature and thought that the weather would be good. (It wasn’t.) Intending to work from a script, Buenos Aires Affair, loosely based on a book by Argentinian novelist Manuel Puig, he was forced to abandon the original project in favour of the improvised road movie idea.
“There were strikes, union deals, not enough film stock,” he says, listing the difficulties with some relish. You almost suspect he arranges obstacles for himself, the better to play the guerrilla operator, always shooting on the run.
It amuses him that critics ponder his films’ style, ascribing much thought to the results of circumstance. So the “verve” of Chung King Express came about because the film had to be rushed.
As for Happy Together’s “languor”: “We hardly had any film stock left, so we had to shoot at slower speeds.” Improvising, he says, is the only way to film. He likes to compare himself and his team to a jazz band, with him as the leader, and his technicians as supporting players.
Wong’s Buenos Aires, however, has the familiar worn glamour of his Hong Kong. His take on the bromide that people are the same wherever you go, would have to run: “People are the same in whichever low-rent dive yougo.” “Maybe,” he counters. “But I won’t be able to tell with London.” He curses his duties. “No dives today.”
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