Imagine having had as impeccable a cinematic run as filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. In the ’90s up through the beginning of the aughts, the Chinese auteur delivered “As Tears Go By,” “Chungking Express,” “The Days Of Being Wild,” “Ashes Of Time,” “Fallen Angels,” “Happy Together” and, the peak of it all, “In the Mood For Love.” The unlikely mesmerizing sci-fi sequel “2046” followed in 2004, but it’s been a bumpy, uneven road since then.
2007’s misbegotten English-language debut “My Blueberry Nights” played like an uninspired greatest hits, and “The Grandmaster,” a kung-fu action epic starring Ziyi Zhang, featured astounding visuals but a convoluted and unmemorable story. Reviews of both were mixed at best and it didn’t help that even Kar-Wai’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle suggested the director had been spinning his wheels and repeating himself. “You do realize that you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say more? I think you have to move on,” he told the Guardian a few years back. Yikes.
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So what does a great director stuck in this situation do? How about follow in the footsteps of many noteworthy directors like Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, David Lynch, Joel and Ethan Coen among many others and take a stab at TV. Television is, after all, being seen these days as the “new novel” and Wong Kar-Wai sees its potential. Amazon unveiled in early September that it is working on a series entitled “Tong Wars,” which was described as combining the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S. with a crime syndicate building up at the same time. The series is to be written by Paul Attanasio (“Quiz Show,” “Donnie Brasco”) and released in 2018.
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Details beyond that were scarce. However, speaking at the famed Lumiere theater in Lyon this week, Kar-Wai elaborated what he has in mind for his ambitious new narrative. “The thing that attracted me to this project was the first opportunity to tell the story of the first Chinese-American experience in the most authentic and proper way, because I think there aren’t many films about this experience.” He also mentioned that the sprawling story begins in 1905 and concludes in 1971.
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Talking about the possibilities that come with television as compared to the cinema, the director went on to say, “The format of a TV series just provides filmmakers to have a bigger canvas to tell their stories. Of course, I know why there are questions about this because today people are worried about whether this TV series or this kind of storytelling will become a competition to the cinema,” he explained. “I don’t think so. They are just the different children of Lumiere. For filmmakers, they are just different canvases to paint their work, to show their ideas and tell their stories.”
As for the U.S. murder drama called “Gucci” with Annapurna Pictures and Margot Robbie rumored as the lead you can scratch that one off the list. “You get a lot of information from the internet and trade papers,” he said, “but sometimes that information is not 100 percent correct, OK?” He declined to comment further.
The filmmaker hasn’t left feature-length moviemaking behind and his next film will be an adaptation of Jin Yuchen’s novel “Blossoms.” IndieWire describes the plot as “[following] the lives of Shanghai residents from the end of China’s Cultural Revolution in the early ‘60s through the end of the 20th century, with some scenes set in San Francisco.” The director further elaborated his personal connection to that film, saying, “Shanghai is my hometown and the time that the book describes is the time of my absence from Hong Kong because I went to Hong Kong when I was 19, in ’63, I hadn’t been back to Shanghai until the early nineties. This is my opportunity for me to fill in all the things that I have missed.” [IndieWire]