Wong Kar Wai
By Andy Klein
On the international festival circuit, Wong Kar Wai is probably the most revered director to have emerged from the Hong Kong cinema revival of the ’80s and early ’90s. His second feature, Days of Being Wild, regularly shows up at or near the top of lists of The Best Hong Kong Films Ever.
In some ways, Wong is a surprising figure in the commercial, genre-oriented HK film industry: Unlike the work of, say, John Woo, his films are slow and meditative, often demanding of the audience. He is, if you will, the anti-Woo. And yet, like the Taiwan-born Ang Lee, this art-house director had a martial arts film in him. So, in 1994, half a decade before Lee made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Wong released Ashes of Time, an all-star martial arts film, based on a famous Hong Kong novel.
Ashes of Time divided Wong’s usual audience: Nearly everyone admired its images and/or its performances, but the confusing narrative style made it baffling for its hometown audience, let alone those of us unfamiliar with the source material.
Fourteen years later, Wong has restored and recut the film in a version called Ashes of Time Redux, which is being released on Friday. A few weeks ago, I talked to the filmmaker. I began by reminding him of the interview we did back in 1997, when his Happy Together showed up in America. The publicist had (to my embarrassment) mentioned my inability to make sense of Ashes of Time.
“Ah,” Wong had asked when we were introduced, “so you’re the man who still can’t figure out Ashes of Time after four viewings?”
–Andy Klein
L.A. CityBeat: I understood Ashes of Time a little better in the new version, because the editing clarifies things somewhat. I wondered if this was stuff you wanted to do years ago? Or if it was an issue of looking at it again through the lens of your life and work and everything that’s happened in the past 14 years?
Wong Kar Wai: The reason we did this Redux version isn’t because I wanted to open up a Pandora’s Box by reconsidering how to deal with the story and the film. It was basically for practical reasons: We had to save the film, so it wouldn’t exist only on DVDs, VHS, and the copies that were seen in Chinatown.
How was it endangered?
Back in 1994, during the Asian financial crisis, the lab where we stored the negative went bankrupt overnight. We had to retrieve everything on very short notice before the receiver took over. We did it at night, and by the time we finally looked at the material we discovered that there were bits and pieces gone, and it wasn’t in very good condition.
The film means a lot to us [Wong and Jeff Lau, his partner in Jet Tone Productions]. It was our first production; we worked in China for the first time; and we learned how to be independent producers. Without this, there would have been no Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love.
How did you deal with the missing bits?
We had to retrieve materials from overseas distributors and from Chinatown theaters. But we still couldn’t do a 100 percent restoration, because some of the film was in too bad condition to be restored. So basically we had to cut and replace some of the shots with alternative takes and make some editorial changes.
One of our sources was from Chinatown cinemas that are now closed. The owners don’t run the theaters anymore, and they don’t know how to deal with all these copies, so they have a warehouse. And we went to this warehouse in San Francisco, and it was like in Indiana Jones – hundreds of copies of films from the ’70s until the late ’90s.
One thing is for sure: I didn’t want to turn it into the film I would make it today. I just wanted to keep it as it was supposed to be. I wanted to keep the essence of the film, because it’s a film that needed time to breathe. And also because it was released mainly in Asia, never outside of Asia. I still remember we went to a screening at the Venice Film Festival that year, and the audience had no idea what a martial arts film was; they mixed up all the characters. So I thought that now might be a better time for the film to be seen, now that they have a better idea about the genre.
I recently saw the Redux version, but I didn’t have a good copy of the old version to watch for comparison –You will never have a good copy!
The biggest change I noticed was that you divided it into seasonal chapters.
No, we just titled them, but the idea was always there, because the original novel is a four-volume epic with hundreds of characters. It’s complicated to tell the story in two hours, so we used a Chinese Almanac as a structure ... . One thing has really struck me: After screenings, people who have seen the original have come to me and said, “Well, have you changed this part?” or “Have you made this part longer?” or “Somehow the film looks different to me; it’s more understandable.” You have to find out for yourself; to me it’s the same film, but maybe for the audience it’s different.
Was the cutting at the beginning more confusing in the original? Or am I imagining that?
The first sequence is shorter now, because the first shot of the film is a new shot. It’s an eclipse done totally digitally. I always wanted to have a shot like this in the film; and now I can, because of digital.
What other things did you do that took advantage of new technology while you were restoring it?
I kept the film as analog as before, except for that first shot. Last year I was shooting a short film for Philips, and, because the story happened in the future, we worked with Digital Domain. They said, “We’re very happy to work with you, because you are one of the last analog directors, and we’re going to turn you digital!” I said, “Well, try me.”
But, working on this film, the technology helped a lot. Without these technologies, it would have been impossible to restore the pictures and the sound. I used it just to complete the restoration but not as part of the film. Otherwise, I might as well have shot another film instead of working on this one.
Did the experience of restoring the film make you want to go back and do the same with some others?
No. But it was interesting: when you look at this film, you realize it tells you so much about what was happening 10 years ago in Hong Kong, the way people made films – the energy and the talent.
Published: 10/08/2008
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