Why Wong Kar-wai puts the success of ‘Chungking Express’ down to luck: “The shortest production”
When Wong Kar-wai first started working on Chungking Express, he probably didn’t expect it to become one of the representative recommendations handed to anyone who isn’t familiar with Southeast Asian cinema. Whether it is due to the widespread critical acclaim, the personal seal of approval that Quentin Tarantino stamped on it or just the usual machinations of social media, that’s exactly what has ended up happening and rightfully so.
Probably the film that captures Hong Kong’s unique urban rhythms the best, Chungking Express stars the likes of Takeshi Kaneshiro, Faye Wong, Brigitte Lin and Tony Leung. Separated into two segments about police officers caught up in unusual romantic dilemmas, it’s a work of art that speaks to the paradoxical loneliness of the modern condition, where people are packed together in densely populated areas but still so isolated.
Chungking Express is a particularly interesting case within Wong’s illustrious filmography because it isn’t exactly an opus like In the Mood for Love. Made during a two-month break from the production of Ashes of Time, it was a project that the Hong Kong auteur embarked upon to distract himself from the intense and demanding film he was already working on.
During a conversation with Filmmaker Magazine, Wong revealed that the success of Chungking Express couldn’t just be chalked up to the brilliance of his artistic vision but should also be attributed to luck because it played a major factor. The director had grown up in the area where the movie was shot, so he had an in-depth cultural understanding of what he wanted to portray, which helped him wrap things up relatively quickly.
Wong began: “Certain films, the process is really difficult: the weather is not right, the cast is not right, the place is not right. So, there is a lot happening during the production. But for Chungking Express, it was the opposite. I would say it was a very lucky film. Why? Well, we shot the film in six weeks. Relatively, it was the shortest production time of all my films. Basically, we shot the whole film in just two locations, one in Chungking Mansions.”
Elaborating on that part of the city, he added: “For those of you who’ve never been to Hong Kong, next time you should go there because I think it’s a landmark. It’s a huge mansion with hundreds of hostels, so people from different parts of the world, especially backpackers, go there. It used to be very different; it was apartments for movie stars in the 1950s, but later on, it became like guesthouses.”
Working with a limited budget and a short timeframe, Wong managed to create a complex, beautiful and moving tapestry of a city that he has loved since he was a child. That’s exactly why Chungking Express is more than just a film. It’s a snapshot of a place seen from the perspective of its unconventional inhabitants, who eat expired pineapples and break into their crushes’ homes only to feel a little bit more alive.
