When Wong Kar-wai met Diego Maradona: “I think he figured we were Japanese tourists”
Almost exactly 40 years ago, Argentinian football legend Diego Maradona got high. This wasn’t a rare occasion, of course, because we are talking about someone who had a troubled history with cocaine to say the least, but annoyingly, this version of him getting high involved him jumping a couple of feet in the air, extending his arm over Peter Shilton, and sending England out of the Mexico ‘86 World Cup.
That was the first football match I can remember watching, and I never, ever forgave him for it. Even though he scored one of the greatest goals of all time in the same game, I didn’t care. Even though he is known as one of the best players in history, I still don’t care. Now, as England prepares to take on Argentina in the semi-finals of this year’s World Cup, and even with Maradona having been gone for almost six years, it still hurts.
Eight years after that painful day, Maradona was back at the World Cup, which, like this year’s, was in the United States, and once again he was banging goals in for fun. But this time, when he celebrated in front of the TV cameras, it was quite clear from his bulging eyes that he was either 1) possessed by the devil, or 2) on a shedload of stimulants, and it’s not difficult to work out which was more likely given he’d failed a routine drugs test for cocaine three years earlier.
It resulted in a lengthy ban, and when he failed another drugs test in 1997 having returned to his homeland to play for Boca Juniors, his illustrious career was over. That same year, the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was in Buenos Aires, where he was making Happy Together, a film about a gay couple visiting Argentina who end up splitting up and living very different lives in the country, where they occasionally encounter each other again.
The film has gone down as one of the finest LGBT movies in history, and went on to influence award-winning films like 2016’s ‘Best Film’ at the Oscars, Moonlight. Immersing himself in the culture of Buenos Aires and Argentina while making the film, Kar-wai also came across Maradona, roping him in to make a brief cameo when Tony Leung, one of the leads in the movie and a big football fan, is left starstruck as one of the most famous players of all time walks past him and shakes his hand.
Kar-wai was asked by Time magazine a couple of years later about the encounter, asking him what Maradona was like in person. Kar-wai replied: “He wasn’t in a great mood. I think his drugs case was going on.” Pushed on whether the icon knew who Kar-wai was, the director added: “No, I think he figured we were Japanese tourists.”
A few years later, Kar-wai would make the film that stands as his masterpiece, 2000’s In the Mood for Love. Written and directed by Kar-wai and again starring Leung, the movie made six times its budget at the box office and in the quarter of a decade since it has become known as one of the most impressive cinematic achievements in history. It won a slew of industry awards around the globe.
