The Wong Kar-wai movie inspired by John Woo and MTV: “What else can I do?”
Even though they couldn’t be more different as filmmakers, Wong Kar-wai couldn’t help but draw inspiration from John Woo when he set out on his own directorial career, and not only because he was a Hong Kong native taking their first steps in the industry during the late 1980s.
It wouldn’t take long for the former to establish himself as one of world cinema’s most distinctive auteurs, who constantly explored the subtleties and intricacies of the human condition through stories defined by longing, loneliness, heartbreak, and the nostalgic pangs of a time that’s already too far in the distance to try and reclaim.
The latter, meanwhile, revolutionised action cinema by popularising heroic bloodshed, turning chaos into a carefully controlled artform that left no stone unturned or no motion slow enough in breathing new life into onscreen gunplay, balletic brawls, and creating a domino effect that would topple over into everyone and everything from Quentin Tarantino to John Wick.
Kar-wai doesn’t make films like Woo, and Woo definitely doesn’t make films like Kar-wai, and it’s fair to say neither would be capable if they tried. And yet, when the time came for the Chungking Express and The Grandmaster maestro to make his sophomore directorial effort on the 1990 drama Days of Being Wild, he couldn’t help himself from looking to both the orchestrator of A Better Tomorrow and MTV for inspiration.
“As Tears Go By was my first film, and at that time, John Woo had just made A Better Tomorrow, and everybody in Hong Kong was making gangster films,” he explained to Bomb. “I thought, ‘What else can I do?’ So I made Days of Being Wild and borrowed its form from MTV.”
Visually, narratively, and thematically, Kar-wai’s second feature had absolutely nothing to do with Woo or MTV, but that was kind of the point. “Of course, MTV has become something very formulaic,” he said. “But in the late ’80s, when it was first shown in Hong Kong, we were all really impressed with the energy and the fragmented structure. It seemed like we should go in this direction.”
One of Kar-wai’s signature visual flourishes is step-printing, which he admitted was “an answer to John Woo’s use of slow motion.” It became an easily identifiable weapon in his cinematic arsenal, one that initially began life as a direct response to what he felt was an overuse of slo-mo in Hong Kong-made productions.
He didn’t want to tell crime stories, he had no intention of using any techniques that would earn him comparisons to Woo, and he wanted to take his narratives down a path that wasn’t conventional. Of course, saying that through a modern lens makes perfect sense looking at the body of work Kar-wai has accumulated over the years, but it was a plan he deliberately put into practice very early on once he’d gotten his directorial feet wet.
