Wong Kar Wai Quotes

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

Most of my films deal with people who are stuck in certain routines and habits that don't make them happy. They want to change, but they need something to push them. I think it's mostly love that causes them to break their routines and move on.

What makes cinema so attractive, so fascinating is that it’s not just a one plus one process. It’s a chemistry between sounds, words, ideas and image.

那些消逝了的岁月，仿佛隔着一块积着灰尘的玻璃，看得到，抓不着。他一直在怀念着过去的一切，如果他能冲破那块积着灰尘的玻璃，他会走回早已消逝的岁月。

Thời kì đó đã trôi qua. Không còn gì thuộc về nó tồn tại nữa. Anh nhớ về những ngày tháng đã qua ấy như nhìn qua ô kính cửa sổ bám bụi. Quá khứ là thứ người ta có thể nhìn, nhưng không thể chạm vào. Và mọi thứ anh thấy đều không rõ ràng, không thể nghe, cũng không thể thấy...

All my films are about Hong Kong." Wong Kar Wai once told me, "even if they're set in Argentina." While many in the West saw Happy Together primarily as a love story, his compatriots saw it something more timely and relevant: Wong grappling with the meaning of the handover to China. They knew it wasn't coincidental that the film should open in Hong Kong one month before that historical transfer of power. Nor was it coincidental that it should begin with a shot of Hong kong passports and end with Tony Leung's Lai on a train in Taipei, not Hong Kong, heading into an indeterminate future as the soundtrack plays Danny Chung's cover of the pop song "Happy Together" --a title that could be read as predicting a successful union, or as a slash of bitter irony. Even the movie's defining image, the aerial shot of water rushing down Iguazu Falls, is layered with political intimations that cut in different directions. At once thrillingly spectacular and patently dangerous--Chris Doyle, who's terrified of heights, shot it while hanging out of a chopper--the roaring waters that combine in these falls are an expression of the inexorably rushing power of reunion that can be seen as both a symbol of great strength or the downward pull of destruction.

Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.

One always finds an excuse for failure. I finally reckoned that. Yin and Yang are actually two persons in one. Behind these two identities was hidden someone with a wounded soul. - Ashes of Time (1994)