Wong Kar-Wai

After watching the tragic In the Mood for Love last night, I felt something I hardly ever feel after a film (no, not sadness, that's usual for this kind of film). I realized that I didn't really get Kar-Wai's direction. It looked meticulously calculated, especially with his color placement and scheming. It's obvious he's a technically proficient director with his blocking and many impressionistic shots, such as his double mirror shot in Mrs. Chan's room. But I really didn't understand much of what he was going for. The slow motion shots, accompanied with music that seemed to cut out randomly and such. Does anyone want to share what they know of Kar-Wai's direction? It's killing me!

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Mubi

He's notoriously chaotic, and also known for shooting lots of footage and spending a long time in post-production (like Welles in the latter sense).

There was in interesting discussion of Wong's "method" from an interview with his long-time DP, Christopher Doyle in Hong Kong Babylon, by Fredric Dannen.

(Interviewer: ) The script of a Wong Kar-wai film is just a point of departure.
(Doyle: ) I don't even bother with it any more. I assume the film is going to be about time and space and identity and isolation. And probably it's going to be in the spaces he says it'll be in - probably. Even the time period can be left till a week before shooting. When we got to Buenos Aires [to film Happy Together] he was still deciding whether the film would take place in the 1990s or the 1960s. One day, after we'd been there for six months, he suddenly said to me, "Buenos Aires is like a grid. The streets are all parallel." I said, "Yeah?" He said, "Therefore, this film must be a grid. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung [the male leads] are the horizontals, and we need to find the verticals." So he brought in two more actors. They sat around for months waiting for him to figure out where they go. He has me running around, he has someone calm and collected in William Chang [the art director], he has crazy people throwing out ideas, and he's got some of the best actors in the world. From that, he picks and chooses, and the film forms day by day. (Doyle)

Hmm...that sounds a lot like Terry Malick only with very different results.

Definitely not a fan of Wong Kar Wai movies. I find them boring and pretentious.

He does his own thing, like Godard, and because of that, he has loads of fans. I find him maddening but he makes pretty pictures.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

I found the film incredibly fascinating and moving, and some directorial decisions made perfect sense, such as the jump cut forward to the ruins, it's just as a whole I didn't understand his style. I still think he did some great storytelling and got excellent performances.