He made his directing debut in 1988 with
As Tears Go By. It was a crime
melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, and with heavy borrowings from
Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of his principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes
expressionistic color
palette. It is his only
box office hit to date.
His next film,
Days of Being Wild (1991), a drama about aimless youth set in the early 1960s, established his trademark form: elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholy, misfit characters.
Days was a box office failure but now regularly tops Hong Kong critics' polls of the best local films ever made. It has been described as a sort of Cantonese
Rebel Without a Cause.
He also established his own independent production company, called Jet Tone Films Ltd. in English. His partner in the company is
Jeffrey Lau, a director and producer who tends to work closer to the populist vein of mainstream Hong Kong film.
Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s produced by Jet Tone, which allowed him to work at his own pace. Among these were
Chungking Express (1994), which follows the lives of two love-struck cops in Hong Kong and the mysterious women they meet and fall in love with. Originally intended to be a distraction piece for him to get his mind off of the heavily delayed
Ashes of Time, it ended up being one of his most popular films, if not
the most popular.
Fallen Angels (1995), was originally intended to be the third act of
Chungking Express, but when the tone didn't fit with the other two parts, he cut it out and made it a standalone movie instead; it is seen as a semi-sequel to
Chungking Express as is a neo-noir film about on a disillusioned killer trying to overcome the affections of his partner, a strange drifter looking for her ex-boyfriend, and a mute trying to get the world's attention in his own ways, all set against a sordid and surreal urban nightscape.
Wong's fourth movie,
Ashes of Time (1994), released between
Chungking Express and
Fallen Angels, applied his approach to a star-studded
wuxia (martial arts swordplay) story; the desert shoot in Mainland China dragged on for over a year and resulted in one of contemporary Hong Kong cinema's most notorious commercial disasters.
His first major international recognition was at the 1997
Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for
Happy Together (1997). A film that "uses gorgeous, saturated images set to an eclectic soundtrack of tango by Argentinian maestro
Astor Piazolla, Brazilian singer
Caetano Veloso and
Frank Zappa instrumentals to chronicle the stormy affair of a gay couple living as expatriates in
Buenos Aires." In fact, tracing back to his early career, Wong did celebrate his success without being grateful to his mentor, Alan Tang Kwong-Wing. Wong mentioned Tang's name in his thank you speech at the award ceremony.
Despite his background as a scriptwriter, one of Wong's trademarks as a director is that he works largely through improvisation and experimentation involving the actors and crew rather than adhering to a fixed screenplay. This has been a frequent source of trouble for his actors, his financial backers and many other people connected with his films, including sometimes himself.
The filming of
In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from
Beijing to
Macau after the China Film Bureau demanded to see the completed script. This was all in all a minor setback in the "very complicated evolution" of the project which goes as far back as
1997. It was Wong's intention to make two films, one of which would be titled
Beijing Summer, the plot unclear at the time, but eventually taking form in Macau. Here Wong planned to call it
Three Stories About Food, but saw it better to settle for only one story,
A Story About Food, that centers on a writer. Together with scenes shot in
Bangkok and
Angkor Wat, the filming took as long as 15 months. This was an especially arduous time for lead actress
Maggie Cheung whose hair and makeup reportedly took a daily five hours, and who appeared in different
cheongsams in each scene. She famously compared the lengthy shoot to a cold she couldn't get rid of. Working without deadlines, the film's upcoming premier at
Cannes nonetheless put some pressure on Wong to finish editing. Intending to name the film
Secrets he was dissuaded by Cannes, and finally named it
In the Mood for Love after
Bryan Ferry's cover of the song "I'm in the Mood for Love" he was listening to.
Wong's
2046 (2004), a film about capturing lost memories, was the third chapter of a shared story that began with
Days of Being Wild and continued with
In the Mood for Love. Infamous for long drawn out shoots without any real regards to deadlines, a running joke amongst the crew was that he would finish in the year
2046. In 2006, he becomes the first chinese director to preside the jury at the
Cannes Film Festival.
In February 2006,
Screen International reported that
Norah Jones would make her acting debut in Wong Kar-wai's first full English-language film,
My Blueberry Nights. The film opened the
2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition. While Norah Jones presented herself well, it was generally perceived to be one of the director's least successful works.
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