The Numbers Game:
Wong Kar-wai Finally Finishes 2046

By Mark Peranson

“Due to a delay in receiving the film 2046 by Wong Kar-wai, it has been necessary to modify the schedule for Thursday, May 20.” With this ominous and unprecedented communiqué, the Cannes festival shuffled a full day’s screenings for the first time in memory and filmdom’s biggest tease left us all hanging again…but only for another 11 hours. Cannes programmers showed an excess of confidence in programming Wong’s half-a-decade-in-the-making film on the festival’s second-to-last day; they should have known better. “Over the last four years there is a joke, when is the film going to be finished?” Wong said at his jam-packed press conference, looking surprisingly fresh—though, as always, it’s hard to tell what the director is thinking behind those omnipresent black sunglasses. “Before 2046, or maybe in 2046? But this joke is over, and I am so glad. Thank you very much.” Five versions of Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song,” four plus years, three cinematographers, and two brief glimpses of Maggie Cheung later— though not even Maggie herself saw her own “special participation” appearance—2046 is done.

Or is it? Questions about the content be damned, everyone wanted to know the details behind Wong’s tardy sprint to the finish line, which he blamed on CGI problems, though Tony Leung admitted he had shot scenes with Gong Li two weeks earlier, and recorded his voiceover work a week before the screening. Decent rumors even circulated that the director spliced in a scene the morning of the screening after landing in Paris. According to many pundits, the 2046 on view at Cannes could be termed a Brown Bunny–like “work in progress.” Clearly still needing work was the wonky sound mix, which often failed to settle on a standard volume, but that’s nothing new—lest one forget, the first words that appeared onscreen in 2001 for the Cannes version of In the Mood for Love: “We apologize for the temporary sound.” But even if it’s not “finished,” does it matter? 2046 is lavish, gorgeous, and has legs that won’t quit. It’s a Wong Kar-wai film. And a Wong Kar-wai film is never done—it lives on in the mind, and exists to be replayed, remixed, re-experienced.

In 2046, In the Mood for Love’s Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) grows his moustache out, becoming a flirtatious man about Hong Kong—beginning, Leung says, as a Bukowski type, but ending up as East Asia’s answer to Clark Gable. Inhabiting, for the most part, room number 2047 in a shabby hotel room, Mr. Chow exists in a vertiginous state, trapped between past, present, and future, reflected in the three disparate women whose dalliances provide Wong with something like a structure: the past (one-gloved, beehive-sporting professional gambler Gong Li), the present (sizzling ballroom dancer and cheongsam-wearer Zhang Ziyi, tenant of 2046) and the future (the landlord’s daughter, Faye Wong, who also turns up as an android in futuristic scenes set in the year 2046; these, we learn early on, are dramatizations of scenes from the novel of the same name that Mr. Chow writes in between gossip columns.) The doomed romanticism on view certainly recalls Wong’s previous film, but the dazzlingly Scope-shot 2046 is bigger, and more complex—operatic in tone, with emotions downright gushing, and trapped in a Resnais-like time warp. More accurately, it can be seen as the third part in a trilogy that began with 1991’s Days of Being Wild (where Maggie’s character also had the name Su Lizhen, as does her follow-up, In the Mood for Love, and Gong Li’s gambler in 2046).

Or maybe it’s something like the ultimate Wong Kar-wai film, standing, as it does, as a film about the process of its own making. “I need to change,” the suddenly sexually fertile Mr. Chow says in his voiceover, early on in 2046, and the subtext is clearly provided by the undisciplined director himself, who had to struggle mightily to finish his long-gestating project, and who has had to struggle—some would say unsuccessfully—to escape his own past. (A far lesser subject is the political situation in Hong Kong, where crackdowns on democracy continue, violating Beijing’s 50-years-of-no-change policy enunciated at the time of the 1997 handover.) It’s hard to watch 2046 and not think of the predicament of Wong Kar-wai and his valiant team of dedicated sufferers (including editor/production designer William Chang), holed up in a Bangkok hotel as Wong sits, head in his hands, in front of a monitor trying to think of what to do next, or sitting in front of a computer screen, testing out scenes, playing them and replaying them, until some satisfactory assemblage appears by chance. Leaving Cannes empty-handed and with more mixed reviews than ever, maybe Wong has learned his lesson. But does he really need to change to fit some filmmaking pattern that quite clearly doesn’t suit his impressionistic mode of expression?

More than any other filmmaker I can think of, and very much distinct from the filmmakers that we might nail down as his greatest influences (Resnais, Fassbinder—whose composer, Peer Raben, provides some of the 2046 score—Antonioni, and as of 2046, I think, Visconti), Wong Kar-wai makes films of indelible moments, and these moments are often staggering, heart-breaking shots of romantic infusion, each point of light in the frame dripping with majesty. To his critics, 2046 is all smoke and mirrors, and tastes like tea that has been steeped too long, is too rich with colour, and too flavourful to the point of being malodorous. The Wong Kar-wai moments that are always fetishized—the wispy smoke from a cigarette wafting upwards, splitting the widescreen, held on the tip of Faye Wong’s dangling hand, Gong Li’s repeated tapping on a glass, or wiping away the effects of an embrace from her lips as if she’s exorcizing blood from a vampire’s kiss. And, then, he repeats them. In another form, a tighter edit, a better sound mix, we’d still have these moments, and they’d still stand out from the surrounding connective tissue. Even if 2046 never truly escapes its intriguing subtext, Wong’s latest film maudit leaves us with these moments, these memories, and, try as we might to suppress them, they’ll keep rising up from the glowing ashes of cinematic time.

******

Cinema Scope: After more than four years, are you pleased the way 2046 has turned out?

Wong Kar-wai: Yes, we had some technical problems, but they were acceptable for me. It turned out much better than I imagined. This film has gone through so many accidents that are always happening, so I had to make the worst estimations, the worst predictions… maybe at the screening this part of the sound I didn’t like, or this part of the image I didn’t like, but it was okay. Sometimes the volume was higher or lower than it should have been.

Scope: Is it hard to separate yourself from the process now?
Wong: I think it will take a few days. I’m not talking about making the film, but the last few weeks in Bangkok doing postproduction. Thailand is the centre of postproduction in Asia, so there were a lot of films working there for Cannes and other festivals. We were working in a small studio, which is set up in the lobby of a building, so William Chang, my editor and I, we just sat there every day in this lobby. We came to think that we looked like characters in a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, drinking tea and talking slowly…
Scope: Thierry Frémaux said he called you in April 2003 and asked if he was getting 2046 for Cannes, and you said you needed another month. As the press conference you said if you had another three weeks now it would be a different film...

Wong: It was different last year, as we still had some resources left. But this year we had to say yes…the deadline helps, really, because to run a production for four years…at a certain moment you need to rebuild the momentum. So once we confirmed we were going to Cannes this year, everybody has the momentum, you know there is a date that it has to be done by. It was a long trip, it was very hard. What you need is more than financial matters, you need faith, and belief in this project. It’s a long trip.

Scope: How much did you delete from the movie, and will there be new additions when the film is released?

Wong: So far, at this moment, I think this is the version that we should say is complete. Because the reason I wanted to show the film in Cannes is that it’s about time for us to put a full stop to this project. We’ve put in our best efforts, our finances, our time to complete this film. And it’s been four years, and I think we’ve done our best. Of course, if you gave me three more weeks, three more months, it would be different. But I don’t want to predict that at this moment, all right? I’m very glad we have DVD, so I’m sure that one day we will have a chance to see all the actors’ performances. At this moment the film is complete, and anyone can say the film is not complete, but you could say this about all of my films. But this is the final editing… as of May, 2004.

Scope: At one point when you started making 2046 you said that you wanted to make a political film, but now it is a love story: What changed in the four years?

Wong: Actually four years ago I think I said the reason we started 2046 was that I was inspired by the situations in Hong Kong. It was 1997 when Hong Kong went back to China, and the Chinese government promised Hong Kong 50 years of no change. And from that point we realized that we wanted to know if there was anything that was being changed in our lives. And this was the starting point for the film. It was never my intention to make a film with any political issues in it, because I am more interested in human beings. This film actually is a film about a person who wanted change, and it is a film about promises.

Scope: Why was the film late coming to Cannes?

Wong: The film is very complicated because we have scenes with CGI, and for the last portion, we had to use three different companies, in France, Hong Kong, and China. At the last stage of the production we had to match the three images together, and we found that it was a mess. So we had to shoot some images to match the background, so that’s why we were very, very late.

Scope: Can you explain how the film evolved? Is it the case that the movie started out all based in the future, and somewhere along the way you changed it to be a novel about the future, written from the perspective of the past?

Wong: At first, we started the two projects at the same time, In the Mood for Love and 2046; then we finished In the Mood for Love. It was very hard for me to conceive of two films at the same time. So finally I had a clue, when we were shooting the hotel where Maggie and Tony were spending time together, to look at the room number, I had an idea, why don’t we make it 2046, so then there is a connection, and I can conceive the whole film as two parts? So this was the starting point. At first I thought the futuristic part would be like 30-40 percent of the film, with 60 percent set in the 60s. But it was too expensive, especially with our way of making films. If you change your mind about something, that means another four weeks and a lot of money. So at the end I trimmed that part and kept it as minimal as possible.

Scope: It was supposed to be set in the future, then you turned it into a book set in the future?

Wong: Yes, I set it as a creation from the imagination of the writer in the 60s, because I thought that we needed to have a look for this futuristic city. If I turned it into an imagination of some guy, then it could be low tech. It should be different from all the films we have seen recently, like A.I. (2001), because we can’t compete with that. CGI is always about money and time, and we don’t have either of those. So we had to find our way to make our own futuristic city, so I decided to make it stylized, like a manga.

Scope: There are many themes in the film, but which ones are the most powerful for you?

Wong: I think this film is about how to deal with your past, your memories. Because our memory is not selective, we can’t choose what we want or wish to be in our memory. Sometimes there are sad memories you don’t want to face or recall but somehow they’ve stayed. And it’s also about timing; there are different scenarios in the film. Sometimes the man rejects the woman, sometimes the woman rejects him; sometimes a relationship should go ahead but it doesn’t work, and it’s all about timing. In the end, I think the film is a portrait of a person who is trying to get away from the past, but he understands at the end that the more you try to forget it, the more you begin to remember it. So at the end you should just live with it, and maybe one day the past, or the memories, will leave you.

Scope: It’s well known that you have no script when you’re working. Can you explain about the way you worked on this film? Do you have outlines? What do you give your actors when they show up?

Wong: We use different approaches. When we work with Tony Leung or Faye Wong, it’s very simple because we know each other so well. They don’t need to know the story, they just know more or less they are playing characters who react to the events, the actions, the emotions. Gong Li and Kimura Takiya are new—because they are not used to this process, you have to give them a story outline. I worked with Gong Li on Eros, the project with Antonioni that I hope will screen this year in Venice. We made this film in two weeks during the SARS outbreak; our crew had to leave because they were from different countries, and the last two days we worked almost 48 hours non stop. Afterwards Gong Li and I wanted to work together again, and I had to go back to 2046, so I asked her to work on it. I said I have a role, I want a woman to play the past, it’s only ten minutes. She thought for five minutes, and she asked, “What is the story?” and I told her about the gambler, and she liked it. So I gave her a story outline. Her role is more than ten minutes, but if we had another three weeks, her story might have been 30 minutes of the film. I think hers is a very good story, and maybe we have to make it after 2046, about two gamblers. Faye found it very hard to play the android, as we had to capture that cheap robotic movement, so we had to shoot with a faster camera speed, so she had to play three times slower, and at the same time she has to deliver emotions, the tears have to come out. So I just played music for her very slowly, and she reacted to it, and it worked.

Scope: What about Antonioni do you respond to most powerfully?

Wong: I love all of his movies, with the use of space, with the hotel rooms and the corridors. He’s the first person who made me realize that sometimes the story is not about the characters in it, it’s the space itself. A story like his happens all the time, but the way he shoots it is very inspiring.
Scope: This is the first film that you’ve shot in CinemaScope, and the way that you used the screen is fascinating and unusual. Often half of the screen is covered by curtains, there are slow pans revealing the image as the shot progresses, and more techniques like this. What was it like shooting for the first time in widescreen? Did you know you would use the widescreen this way?

Wong: Bangkok is a very small city, everything is narrow, so there are a lot of vertical lines—a 1.66 frame is perfect. But we had been trying that for years, so I decided to try CinemaScope, to put all of the lines in horizontal. So the lighting man then has no room to place the lights, and the camera crew has to squeeze into the room, and the actors and actresses sweat like hell. In between takes they had to take off their clothes, get new make-up; it was terrible. I’ll never shoot a widescreen film again in this kind of space.

Scope: There are three cinematographers credited on 2046. Tony Leung said that you fought with Chris Doyle on the set, and one day Tony just showed up and there was a different cinematographer all of a sudden. How did that happen?

Wong: I think it’s very hard for Chris to focus on one subject for four years. Basically he’s a drunken sailor. And he has to go to different festivals to get laid. So I thought that at the end I should let him go. In the film, there are three different parts with three women —Gong Li, Faye Wong, and Zhang Ziyi. Chris worked mainly on the part with Zhang Ziyi. And, afterwards, the part with Gong Li, I thought it should look totally different, it should be more classical. So I used another cameraman, a young cinematographer, Lai Yiu-fai, who has also worked with Chris Doyle, and then another cameraman for Faye Wong.

Scope: So do you feel like each section with each woman has a different tone?

Wong: Yes, I do. Even the music is different. With Zhang Ziyi, there is always ballroom dance music, all the Connie Francis and Dean Martin. And then with Gong Li there is a lot of blues. Then I asked Peer Raben, Fassbinder’s composer, to write the music. And for the futuristic scenes, it is mainly opera, as I’ve always thought the form of the future should be like opera.

Scope: How did the collaboration with Peer Raben come about?

Wong: A few years ago when I was doing promotion in Germany for In the Mood for Love, I mentioned that there was one person I wanted to meet very much, the composer for Fassbinder’s films. So Peer Raben came to Hamburg and we had dinner together. Peer is actually quite old and sick, and I mentioned to him that I had some music in my mind from a Fassbinder film and asked if he could do a new version of it, and three months later he sent me a CD. It’s from Querelle (1982). The music is called “Tears of the Lady,” so it also works well with the film.

Scope: There is a lot of crying in the film, certainly more than in In the Mood for Love. The film as a whole strikes me as very operatic. The emotions are more on the surface, excessive in a way. Were you after something generally operatic?

Wong: Yes, and at the very beginning we thought we should have three different operas as points of reference. At the end we realized that all operas deal with promises, with betrayals, tragedy. This motif kept coming back. So in the end we kept this essence, and forgot about the story. The story is so simple; it has been used in different films. But the music works with the futuristic scenes, especially when Faye is waiting in front of this big window; it’s really stunning.

Scope: Did you expect it would be so powerful?

Wong: No, I didn’t, because I could only make a lot of these shots at the last minute. I expected it to be powerful, but I didn’t expect it to be so powerful. The most difficult challenge in this is how to mix this past, present, and future together, because from the present he creates a futuristic story, which is actually a reflection of his past. So how can we mix these three elements in one scene. And, in the end, I think I achieved it, and it’s really nice, and I hope that moment will last forever.

Scope: When does the film take its structure, when you are shooting it or when you are editing it?

Wong: I think it’s true that we found the film in the process of making it. I think that it has been an issue that we thought about, how we can work these three elements together. There are a lot of films about writers writing about the future, but the problem is how can you make it work cinematically…

Scope: You were aware of this problem during the shooting, editing, or postproduction?

Wong: You know you are going to approach the subject like this, but you have to wait. You shoot the part, then you have to add CGI work, so you have to wait. In the last two weeks, I had several surprises—some scenes were spectacular, like the shots of the train, while some scenes were terrible. Like the scene when Zhang Ziyi is in the taxi with Tony. It was supposed to be in colour, but we had to match the background, and in the end, we looked at the final product and decided to turn it into black and white. And when I look at that scene now, I think it’s even better than in colour, because it feels like the past. It happens at that moment, but somehow it feels like it’s already past.

Scope: How much extra footage did you shoot that didn’t make it to the screen? Could you edit and make it into an entirely different film?

Wong: It’s very simple. If the projectionist switched the reels, then it would be a different film. Because I tried to stay in chronological order. First he met Gong Li, and then he has an affair with Gong Li, then he comes back to Hong Kong, he notices Faye Wong, he has another affair with Zhang Ziyi, then Faye comes back, then Zhang Ziyi. It works that way. But for me, to assemble it completely chronologically doesn’t convey the feeling. Sometimes you get lost, because you have to play with those elements, the past, present and future. We had conversations, thinking about how to convey that. And I know that at certain points, it’s quite tough for the audience. What happened? Where are we? But I like that, because it conveys the feelings.

Scope: Credited as a “special participant,” Maggie Cheung appears very briefly in the film, in two extremely brief shots. Why did you even keep her there at all if you were so concerned with getting away from the past?

Wong: First of all, we didn’t want to explore the relationship between Tony and Maggie anymore. In the Mood for Love did that, their story is complete at that point. Maggie only exists as a shadow from the writer’s past. She only appears in his fictions. After Maggie, he met so many women, one by one, and this guy’s a very romantic person, he has lots of problems with relationships. But he always thinks he will go to 2046 and they will meet there.

Scope: So did you ever consider having Tony meet Maggie in 2046 at the end of the film?

Wong: We were tempted to do that, of course. But that’s why I say we tried to change, I tried to stay away from the past, because I know once I have Maggie in the 60s sections, and they meet some day, then we’d be back at In the Mood for Love. Then the film must be a sequel. But I didn’t want to make a film like A Man and a Woman 20 Years Later. I think they had a beautiful story, a beautiful relationship, but it should be preserved like it is, and I didn’t want to do anything to disturb this.

Scope: Did Maggie shoot any other scenes after the end of the In the Mood for Love shoot?

Wong: I wanted to use Maggie for one sequence, but she was shooting with Olivier Assayas at the time, so it didn’t work out. But she’s still a good friend of mine.

Scope: Do you relate to Tony’s character in the film?

Wong: At first I thought I was making a film about the writer, but then I realized I was making a film about me. I realized I was making our story about our process of making films! From the very beginning I thought 2046 was not a sequel to In the Mood for Love, but another story; it is only the continuation of one character, the writer. He spent a few years in Singapore, he tried to get away from this affair—he wanted to forget about it. And when he came back to Hong Kong, he became a new person. It’s the same thing, we didn’t want this film to be a sequel, we tried to forget about everything from In the Mood for Love, but in the process, things just kept coming back. And in the end, I think that 2046 became a summary of my previous films. Characters from my second film and music from my third film also show up. It’s like a reunion of all the past moments, and then we tried to do something different, but somehow the past kept coming back.

Scope: So with the next film, do you think it will be difficult to get away from 2046?

Wong: It will be difficult, but I think I will try to do something very different. I am working on a film about Bruce Lee, with the approval of the family, with Tony Leung as Bruce Lee’s master, Ip Man. It will take a while to make, as he needs to train, to learn kung fu, for a year. So maybe in a few months I will become the writer again.