The Auteurs

Maria Schell and Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti's White Nights (1957).

Related Films

Le notti bianche

Dir Luchino Visconti

1957 Italy

It feels weird to plead on behalf of William Wyler, who is certainly celebrated and respected and even known by a few people outside hardcore cinephilia. But his most famed works, like The Best Years of Our Lives or Ben Hur, are adored along with movies like Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life: popular classics. A pop. class. is a film that's widely known and loved but not necessarily respected by those in the know. Where exactly Curtiz and Capra belong on the Hollywood pantheon is another debate, but I do think it's reductive to look at Wyler merely as a populist entertainer who won Oscars.

One place to start, conceivably, is the silent era, when the Universal errand boy known as "Worthless Willie" started making short westerns (lying awake nights thinking of new ways to film a man getting off a horse) and quickly rose in the ranks to bigger projects, such as 1929's The Shakedown. This vigorous minor work won't by itself convert doubters, but it carries food for thought, illustrates many of Wyler's robust strengths, and anyway, a lot of people seem to forget Wyler even made silent films (they're infuriatingly hard to see). Read More

Related Films

The Crowd

Dir King Vidor

1928 United States

The Champ

Dir King Vidor

1931 United States

The Best Years of Our Lives

Dir William Wyler

1946 United States

Above: "Let me explain the world to you," — the directorial attidue of Woody Allen's terrific Whatever Works.

Suddenly I think I may have misjudged Woody Allen.  Around the time of Scoop disturbing suspicions were elicited about the filmmaker simply losing the craft of film, not knowing how to block a scene, compose a shot, edit things together—the basics.  Subsequent movies seemed to confirm the suspicion.  But consecutive viewings of Harold Ramis’ Year One and Allen’s latest film, Whatever Works, prompt a different consideration: maybe these guys just don’t care.  This isn’t a complaint about them; it is the acknowledgement of an attitude.  Whatever Works is one of the most transparent movies I’ve ever seen, it wears its dialog, its actors, its filmmaking, its New York on its sleeve; nearly like a Luc Moullet film, Allen is practicing frontality: everything is so clearly directed at us, presented for us, we cannot ignore it.  That is, perhaps, where complaints about filmmaking practice may spawn from—we can see everything Allen’s giving us—but this time around I got into it: it is much easier to live with a movie that doesn’t care than one that does.  In this context, “naturalism” suddenly means something else entirely.  When we see how awkwardly minimalist Allen's staging of Larry David’s first attempt at suicide in Whatever Works is—first, preceded by a long scene of David 85% blocked from our view because the camera is framing him standing behind a bar counter, then a close-up of the awkward, startled face of David’s wife as we hear an off-camera sound of David jumping out a window—we must sense a rare kind zen acceptance in the cinema.

Year One exhibits similar tendencies, though less successfully.  One realizes the fruitlessness of complaining about a lack of pacing or flat direction, and instead becomes absorbed in how obvious it is when Jack Black falters in his shtick—because then Ramis cuts to Michael Cera, who inevitably saves the moment with some fumbling, mumbling sweetness.  I see and understand it all seems to be the spectator attitude of these movies, which is obviously what so easily would prompt complaints about their deficiencies.  But cinema—like anything else, but especially cinema—is all a matter of perspective.  One must admire these films for their lack of subtly, which suddenly seems less a byproduct of bad direction than a conscious decision to lay bare. Read More

Related Films

Whatever Works

Dir Woody Allen

2009 United States

Year One

Dir Harold Ramis

2009 United States

Where does this film fall within the chronology of gangsterdom, American style? Somewhere in between this week's much-anticipated Public Enemies (and its actual chronological precursors, such as two different films entitled Dillinger) and The Godfather, although Rosi's film was made after Coppola's (and, arguably, was only produced due to that film's success). More importantly, what's its proper place in the chronicles of Italian crime and power, including those Rosi films that precede it (see Salvatore Giuliano, Hands Across The City, The Mattei Affair), but also such books/films as Sciascia's Open Doors and Saviano's Gommora?

For the iconography of Rosi's film is squarely ensconced in the violent gangster exploitation ethos ushered in by The Godfather's success. Then there's the casting of such venerable New-Yawkish heavies of the era such as Vincent Gardenia and Rod Steiger. Read More

Related Films

Public Enemies

Dir Michael Mann

United States

Above: Michael Mann (second from the right) and crew members working on Public Enemies. Photo by Rob Olewinski.

I spent a few days in the summer of 2008 on the set of Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which was shooting at the time in Chicago. It was a night shoot—the death of John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) in front of the Biograph Theater. These observations and ruminations, which will be posted in three parts, were written at the time. Portions of these notes have since been used in other pieces, including a few posted here at The Auteurs' Notebook.

***

“Who is the director?” I think that's a question most directors ask themselves, however subconsciously. What does it mean to give direction, to point a film? Just like you can define "movie" countless ways, there are a thousand different interpretations of what directing a film means. Is the director the one with the compass, leading a party through the wilderness, like Dreyer? Or is he or she the one who has map and needs the help of others to understand it, like Cassavetes? Is the director a leader who realizes his or her weaknesses, like Eastwood? The master of a painter's studio, like Renoir? The beloved head of a corporation, like Spielberg? A romantic commentor, like Sirk?

Part of what's fascinating and infuriating about Michael Mann is that the only thing you can say about his directing is that he is a director. What he does is direct movies; his activity, his thought processes don't seem to correspond to those of any other pursuits. He isn't an artist, a writer, a critic, an entrepreneur or a dramatist. He's a movie director, and he makes it seem as if it isn't necessary for a director to think that he or she is anything else.

The set of Public Enemies is fairly ordinary. Big stars, big budget, big crew. The usual walkie noise, the disinterested police, the undermanned cafeteria a short walk from the set (in this case, a church basement: cinema, always aping Christianity). From the standpoint of planning and casting, there isn't much that distinguishes a Michael Mann film from one by Ridley Scott or Gore Verbinski. If you arrived on one of their sets and weren't told who the director was, you probably wouldn't be able to guess. Watching Mann film a scene, two things pop into your head: first, you imagine how the shot will end up looking and, second, you realize how easily the scene could be shot by someone else. Take The Insider: "true story" plot, big-name actors, large budget, Panavision. These are the basic elements of dozens of movies made around the same time. Dozens of movies I'll forget while I continue to remember, say, the fabric wrapped around Al Pacino's face, or the video monitors shown together in the interview scene. A Michael Mann image is instantly recognizable, but not a Michael Mann set-up, which makes it feel as though, regardless of what he actually makes movies about, he could make a film about anything. Read More

Related Films

Public Enemies

Dir Michael Mann

United States

The Insider

Dir Michael Mann

1999 United States

Andrea Arnold's follow-up to her acclaimed Red Road (2006), follows also in the footsteps of Alan Clarke, director of films and BBC plays, whose influence has spread out in strange ways since his untimely death in 1990.

The biggest clue in Fish Tank is the roving camera, following teen protagonist Mia (Katie Jarvis, a precocious and committed performance) through her council estate ghetto in relentless long takes. This style, honed by Clarke in late works such as the influential Elephant, a minimalist litany of homicides (Gus Van Sant's namesake tragedy is one of the most interesting and intelligent responses to Clarke's work), is the perfect analogue for his insistently truthful, unsparing vision. Never sentimentalizing, and never backing down from the most awful confrontations, Clarke left a high bar for his eager followers to vault.

Filming in the old-fashioned TV ratio of 1:1.33, as Clarke often did, Arnold and her regular DP Robbie Ryan deprive us of most of our peripheral vision as they sweep along with their dynamic lead actress. It feels like any moment a truck might blast into frame and kill her or us. Since social realism's characters are particularly vulnerable to the hammer-blows of an indifferent society, this possibility doesn't seem that unlikely, and it imparts a nervy edge to even the longest longueurs. Read More

Related Films

Elephant

Dir Gus Van Sant

2003 United States

Red Road

Dir Andrea Arnold

2006 United Kingdom

Fish Tank

Dir Andrea Arnold

2009 United Kingdom

Above: The Biograph Theater in 1934 and as it appeared when re-decorated in 2008 for the production of Public Enemies.

I spent a few days in the summer of 2008 on the set of Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which was shooting at the time in Chicago. It was a night shoot—the death of John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) in front of the Biograph Theater. These observations and ruminations, which will be posted in three parts, were written at the time. Portions of these notes have since been used in other pieces, including a few posted here at The Auteurs' Notebook.

***

History is made at night, at least around here. It gets dark, the police come and cordon off two blocks of Lincoln Avenue. Autograph seekers huddle around a McDonalds at the south end of the street. They bicker with police deep into the night. Two blocks have been redecorated according to archival photographs: there are dress shops, a Chinese restaurant, a pool hall, a grocery store with a window full of wax fruit. They've taken down the street lights and put up old-fashioned ones. They glow with a beige light instead of the usual yellow. Fake trolley tracks have been laid down in the middle of the street, with foam brick underneath them. The Biograph Theater’s marquee, repainted 1930s black, advertises Manhattan Melodrama, the last film John Dillinger saw, and the miracle of air conditioning (it's the secret reason cinephiles like the summer).

If you come here in the daytime, you’ll find a squad of security guards. Three men guard an alleyway, empty except for a box of empty Coca-Cola bottles. Three men to guard one box: the lengths we go to in the name of continuity. Another guard’s half-empty soda cup sits in the Biograph’s box office booth.

When you see this during the day, it’s like you’ve wandered into the wrong city, the wrong decade. At night, when the cars start running, noisly making their figure-eight loop around the set, when the costumed summer strollers walk slowly down the street, pretending that they’ve just left a movie or a restaurant or are coming home from work—then it’s something else. I think of the last time this city heard the spastic growl of so many Ford Model A engines. They sound like hail when it drums on a metal roof. It must bring back old memories for the bricks. You end up thinking about how someday, should movies disappear, we’ll look back and marvel at the lengths we went to for them, the way we now look back on Gothic cathedrals and wonder about how people could have spent decades on a church. We recreated the past, avoided the present, all for the sake of a few minutes on a screen. Read More

Related Films

Public Enemies

Dir Michael Mann

United States

Ali

Dir Michael Mann

2001 United States

"Pontypool. Pontypool. Ponty-pool."

It's such a pleasure to discover a film like director Bruce MacDonald and writer Tony Burgess's Pontypool at a film festival (Edinburgh, in my case) without knowing anything about it. So I really want to begin with a warning: for the ideal experience, see the movie before reading about it. Words can be dangerous.

The most intelligent and ideas-based horror movie for some time, Pontypool combines two seemingly contradictory narrative shapes, the viral story, as exemplified by the early films of MacDonald's fellow Canadian David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid), and the single-set siege horror, Night of the Living Dead style. Through an extremely pleasing confluence of plot, theme and character, the device which allows us to follow the spread of Pontypool's pandemic menace—a local radio station—is also intimately connected to the means by which the virus spreads—the English language.

Language is a virus, but not from outer space, it seems. The "infected words" communicating meme-fashion from brain to brain follow the course laid down by Cronenberg's alternative title for Shivers: "They Came from Within."

Starting life as a novel, Pontypool Changes Everything, the story became an ambitious screenplay, mutated into a radio play and finally re-emerged as a smaller movie in which the city-wide drama is compressed into a single setting, using audio alone to suggest the chaos outside, as a hard-drinking DJ, his producer and engineer try to cope with a semiotically-transmitted zombie plague, French-Canadian military intervention, and BBC reporter Nigel Healy.

***

• DAVID CAIRNS: If you could say a little about your history as a filmmaker and how you reached this point...
  
• 
  
• BRUCE MACDONALD: How I've come to Pontypool! I'm from Toronto and work as an independent filmmaker there, and often have supported writers and been a kind of producer/director/writer in creating a series of independent films that I've been making since early nineties. Some road movies, some comedies. I love music a lot, and one of our more well-loved projects is a film from the mid-nineties called Hard Core Logo, about a punk rock band, and it's one of those films that people...they just fuckin' love this film.
  
• 
  
• And then I direct a lot of television, because I use that money to support writers that write these independent movies.
  
• 
  
• Television's great, but I like these movies where there's a lot of freedom. We don't have much money so there aren't a whole lot of people trying to control us.
  
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• CAIRNS: That sounds like a contrast with here in the UK, where even on low-budget films, which are virtually all we make, there seems to be a lot of executive overseeing.
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Yeah, it's crazy. It's more and more, I've found, probably because there, like here, independent films are financed by government agencies and television and there's a growing army of people coming along to give you script notes, and then notes on your dailies, and notes on your first cut. You appreciate the concern, but at some point you just think, "Let us do our fuckin' jobs," you know?
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: The film started as a novel. How did you find the book and what changes were necessary?
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: I was tipped off by the editor of the novel, a friend of a friend. And I bought the rights to the novel for a chocolate egg. There was a reading going on at a local bar, and it was a local press, not a big New York publishing company, and so the option was bought with a chocolate egg and so eventually I asked Tony "Do you want to write the screenplay?"
  
• 
  
• Fortunately he really understood that the screenplay is a different thing from the novel. Sometimes the book can be a real trap. A screenplay is very much more like a map or an architectural design. It's never really meant to be read to be enjoyed.
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: In television you've done The Ray Bradbury Theater, and Lexx, but this is your first horror movie.
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Technically, when I was in high school I made a zombie movie; that was how I learned to make movies, actually. I've always had a great love of horror movies, not fanatically like some people who are amazingly knowledgeable—I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means, but I have a great fondness for things that I have seen. We tried not to sell [Pontypool] as a zombie movie per se, because we didn't want to disappoint the true zombie fans.
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: How are you selling it? I saw it knowing very little, and I really enjoyed the experience of discovering what it was about as it went on.
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Well, we've had a release in Canada and a release in America. The best poster was part of the American campaign, and it's the young girl, it's a profile shot, and she's holding her hand to her mouth, with all this negative space around her. That's the movie, that's what we're trying to sell. We're no selling splatter, although there's a bit in it, just because we love that stuff, but we knew we couldn't afford to do much, so what we're selling is mystery, suspense, danger.
  
• 
  
• Apparently in South Korea, which bought the film, that's our biggest sale— my producer tells me, so I never know if it's the truth or it's not the truth—their campaign—ours was "Shut up or die," which I kinda like but is maybe too cheeky or something—their cut line is "Fear English."
  
• 
  
• And apparently, my producer tells me, there's a lot of people in Korea who want to learn English, not just kids in school, so I guess, they know their audience...
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: Tapping into a national anxiety.
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Yeah! [Laughter.]
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: One of the things that really works in the film is it reverses the usual concept of "Show, don't tell." You get more value out of "Tell, don't show." Was there pressure to show more?
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Yes there was pressure to show more. And we did shoot more. The producers naturally are more the "Show, don't tell" people, because they come at the cinema as spectacle, especially in horror these days, which is all about showing as much carnage and blood as possible. It's almost like a competition, who can outdo the other guy. Which is one particular track of horror. But because one of the central ideas is language, and it's set in a radio station, we basically stole the concept of the radio play by Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, which created a sensation in its time, had half the eastern seaboard fleeing their homes.
  
• 
  
• So this was an attempt to recreate that theater of the mind. This movie's first incarnation was as a radio play, because Tony and I had the REAL movie we want to make, we had that ready for years, but although it's not like a hundred million dollars, it's like eight or something, it's more money than we made this for. Our version of the BBC, CBC Radio, said, "We're looking for radio drama, and we're looking outside our usual circle," and we said, "Well, we haven't really done that before, but we do have this kinda crazy thing about a language virus..."
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: The movie has references to what's going on in the world in terms of war, and also freedom of expression, censorship, the risk of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater...
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Our original intent was, like, "Let's make a scary movie." But because we're in the world of language and communication and radio and news, you can't help but make it kind of contemporary, and you go, "Okay, what's contemporary?" Well, this never-ending war is contemporary, especially the whole war on terror, so I guess our attitudes come out about that. This kind of manufactured fear on the part of the Americans, using the word "terrorism" at every possible juncture, looking for Osama Bin Laden—"Oh, there he is, he's in a small-town theater company!" —right? Just the hilariousness of that.
  
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• CAIRNS: The very idea of a "war on terror" is a very Pontypool idea, the war against an abstract concept or word.
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Right. So our ideas naturally come out about the manufacturing of fear by the American media [...] the co-opting of certain words by the media, to label people or things. And it's in a very sly and damaging way, often. "Pedophile" is a popular word, as a weapon, you know. To suddenly hint at that, you could destroy somebody. With something as simple as "You know, I heard he was a pedophile..." It just shows how powerful certain words are. Language is so loaded with great shit, it's almost an embarrassment of riches for us, to know how to place some of these things. And there's kind of a cultural thing too, like when the BBC guy comes on, everybody's like, "Oh my god, we've got the real guy on!" you know? It's like these backwoods colonial guys listening to the real deal. It's such a cultural thing, with the French-English in Canada. And suddenly these sovereigntists or separatists become "terrorists," that easy slip, how easy that is... "Oh, I've never heard the French 'Quiet Revolution' referred to as 'terrorists' in Quebec." But you could...
  
• 
  
• CAIRNS: And a violent riot becomes an "insurgency."
  
• 
  
• MACDONALD: Yeah yeah. So you start to see how just choice of words, there's a certain WAY that the media talks, to create a drama, to create an ongoing story. That's very interesting. Myself having worked in the media for so long, you have an inside view of how these things go on.
  

Related Films

Night of the Living Dead

Dir George A. Romero

1968 United States

Pontypool

Dir Bruce McDonald

2008 Canada

If ever there was a director whose work should be represented by magnificent posters, it is Sergei Paradjanov. His symbol-laded films, and especially his 1968 masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, are a designer's gift: a parade of meticulously composed, gorgeously hued graphic images. But I have seen very few good posters for Paradjanov films. This one-sheet (33" x 45" and reportedly a Soviet design made for French export) for his delirious break-out film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a rare exception. Made in 1964 after a decade spent laboring in socialist realism, Paradjanov's lysergic fever-dream of a movie is a tragic love story set in the Carpathian mountains of the Ukraine. With impressive moustaches. It is also available for viewing right here on The Auteurs, so if you've never seen it before do yourself a huge favor.

Related Films

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Dir Sergei Parajanov

1964 Soviet Union

Last week, we wrote, " [T]he Transformers films are abominations which any grown adult ought to be ashamed to even bring up in conversation." Hence, this week: Transformers!

The jive (or whatever its is that what they're talking is called)-talking robots of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen are called out for racism, and Bay defends the characterizations by saying "they are robots, by the way." Which actually begs the question as to why they're speaking any form of colloquial English, let alone ebonics. Frustrated, Bay throws up his hands and exclaims, "It's like is everything going to be melba toast?" I think it's cute that something like Melba Toast still enters his alleged mind.

Speaking of Bay's alleged mind, usage and grammar mavens were amused by the dumb-ass use of "would of" rather than "would have" in a letter Bay wrote to the Paramount brass complaining of the company's promotional campaign. (Said letter leaking, as such things tend to do, to the thoroughly erudite gossip website TMZ.) But come on, the guy's upset. He still runs into so many people even this weekend with kids. Even though he has been locked away editing for six months. Okay, now I'm confused. But for some reason I really enjoy the phrase "I consider this so lame."

Also, note the reference to "my good friend Steven," who has made "a lot more successful movies than us."  That's Spielberg, not Seagal. Spielberg is one of the executive producers of the Transformers films. This will prove to be of significance later.

Quoth Bay: "It's easy to go shoot an art movie in a winery in the South of France." Not to put too fine a point on it, but just what the fuck art movie is he talking about? Have you seen any art movies involving vintners lately? The last one I can recall is Rohmer's Conte d'automne all the way back in 1998. No, my friends, I deduct that Michael Bay's idea of an art movie is actually Ridley Scott's 2006 A Good Year. Now that's scary.

Over at Big Hollywood, John Nolte hears that Bay's film contains a swipe at President Obama, and giggles with glee waiting for his "Obama-loving friends" to have their otherwise enjoyable Transformers experience ruined by a sucker punch. Precisely, because NPR-listening Obamacons are in fact the Transformers' films core demographic. Later, in comments, Nolte notes that the presence of an Obama swipe in the film naturally "makes many of the negative reviews [of the film] suspect." Except, that is, for the review by Nolte's conservative friend Christian Toto. Who hates the film for pretty much the same reasons liberal critics do. Later, Nolte see the film himself, and hates it, calling it "Bay's worst since Bad Boys II." Which is saying something. (By the way if you're thinking Big Hollywood looks like a helluva lot of fun, you'll get over that after your third or fourth Burt Prelutsky column.) Read More

Related Films

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Dir Michael Bay

2009 United States

Above: Stand-ins help rehearse a scene from Public Enemies. Photo by Rob Olewinski.

I spent a few days in the summer of 2008 on the set of Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which was shooting at the time in Chicago. It was a night shoot—the death of John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) in front of the Biograph Theater. These observations and ruminations, which will be posted in three parts, were written at the time. Portions of these notes have since been used in other pieces, including a few posted here at The Auteurs' Notebook.

***

I've seen John Dillinger shot many times. Once, it was Warren Oates who got gunned down. I've seen it happen to Lawrence Tierney, too, and then there was a soft-focus re-enactment in a television documentary, an anonymous actor in front of an anonymous movie theater. But how many times have I seen Johnny Depp get shot now? Each time, it's more or less the same (but of course, every take is subtly distinct, which is why we have multiple takes). The artificial streetcorner with the alley. He walks along the sidewalk, dressed in a summer shirt and straw hat. The streetlight falls on his back, a crease in the shirt formed a shadowy valley. I imagine it as an image—the shirt as a landscape—and I think: "I want to wear my shirts that way, a little untucked." Depp doesn’t look like Dillinger, but it doesn’t matter. That rakish face looks like how Dillinger should feel. Dashing, like a vagabond—the way we want Our Dillinger (there’s that Chicago logic, that funny way we cling to our monsters: they might not be good people, but they’re our people). A man comes up from behind and clicks the prop gun. Again and again. Depp falls forward, and the camera, handheld, follows the movement of his body, plunging as he crumbles.

The film is being photographed in HD, but this shot, in slow motion, is being filmed on an unblimped 35mm camera. It's got a furious, high-pitched clicking. On the video assist monitor, we can see the angle: the cameramana following Depp from behind. While they repeat and repeat and repeat the shot, technicians light the next scene, which will be in front of the Biograph Theater itself. The marquee has been redecorated so that it looks like it did when Dillinger was shot there. They're working diligently, separated from the current set-up by a throng of extras who stand silently, arms folded, watching Depp die, hopeful to glean some bit of "genius" to further their acting careers. A large camera sits on a dolly, covered by a transparent plastic sheet like a couch in a furniture showroom.

And of course, I’m thinking: "In life as in the dictionary, ideas come before images." Here I know the image, but I don’t know the idea. It becomes the great game of film-viewing, watching through the video assist a rough estimate of an image that hasn’t been made yet. An image that might not even make it into the movie. The thing about cinephiles is that, when you take us out of the cinema, we get hungry. We latch on to everything that might resemble a movie. The onlookers have their Depp, I have my little screen. Read More

Related Films

Public Enemies

Dir Michael Mann

United States

Thief

Dir Michael Mann

1981 United States

The Last of the Mohicans

Dir Michael Mann

1992 United States

Manhunter

Dir Michael Mann

1986 United States

Collateral

Dir Michael Mann

2004 United States

Diva

Dir Jean-Jacques Beineix

1981 France

Heat

Dir Michael Mann

1995 United States

One of the creative forces behind Milkyway Image, the production company he co-founded in 1996 with director Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai is best known for his collaborative efforts as screenwriter, producer, and co-director on over twenty films, including Fulltime Killer, Mad Detective, and this year’s Cannes premiering Vengeance.

Yet over the years Wai has embarked on several solo projects, writing and directing a handful of (mostly) smaller, personal films. From the darkly comic and stylishly audacious Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, to the screwball romcom The Shopaholics, and his latest, the ghostly meta-melodrama Written By, which is having its world premiere at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival, there’s hardly a genre Wai hasn’t dabbled in. Though at first glance these films appear to have little in common, there are thematic commonalities that run through all of them. Through the assistance of interpreter Ophilia Chow, Daniel Kasman and I sat down with Wai a few days back to discuss his works, his methods, and his journey from 1980’s TV director to becoming one of the busiest figures in the Hong Kong film industry.

***

• Andrew Grant: Your latest film, Written By seems to be several things at once… obviously part ghost story, part traditional melodrama, and also somewhat experimental in its narrative approach. Can you talk about what your intentions were, and what inspired you to make the film?
  
• 
  
• Wai Ka-fai: The movie has a complicated plot, but it will be easy for the audience to understand if they look at things from the daughter’s perspective. Think about a twelve year old girl, blinded when she was young, wanting to make her mother feel better by re-inventing the character of her [deceased] father. It’s a pity for her, from her perspective, that there are no ghosts in the world or that she doesn’t believe in them. Yet this pity prompts her fictional creation. There are different dimensions of the world laid out by the girl writing the book. So viewing everything from her perspective should help in understanding it.
  
• 
  
• Daniel Kasman: The structure of Written By, which has someone trying to re-capture something that’s lost, is a theme that recurs often in your work. In Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 the story is repeated, with different results for the characters; My Left Eye Sees Ghosts—which is very similar to this film—the heroine is trying to get over a loved one’s death; and your most recent collaboration with Johnnie To, Vengeance, finds a man hunting those who killed his family as he begins to lose his memory…what do you find so attractive about this theme?
  
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• Wai: It’s a common fear among mankind to lose someone you love, so this is a topic I like to continually explore in my films.
  
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• Grant: Expanding on that a bit, it seems that in your films there is this idea that an individual’s fate is not determined; choice is always possible. In The Shopaholics it’s done very comically—who’s going to marry whom—whereas in Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 it’s a simple choice that results in either life or death.
  
• 
  
• Wai: Ever since I was part of the production team at [Hong Kong TV station] TVB, choice has always been a recurring topic. Life isn’t always about big choices—marriage, or what you do with your life—it’s about little things, little choices that you make, as you can see in Too Many Ways to Be No. 1.
  
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• Grant: So do you personally believe that fate is not determined?
  
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• Wai: Most of the time, I believe that people have the ability to change their fate. But when it comes to the big picture, or extreme circumstances as you see in Written By, people are restricted, in a sense, and the ability to change things disappears. So there is a two-fold level to this.
  
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• Kasman: In Vengeance, Johnny Hallyday wants to make up for what happened to his family, but there’s a limited path of action he can take—he can only kill people.
  
• 
  
• Wai: I agree. Everyone has their own roots, and from that their own path. Some have a broader range, and some a narrower one, and it’s hard to break out of this big picture, the big circle. There are always boundaries.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: Vengeance, then, shows a limited range, whereas Written By, with its layers of fiction and invention within invention, shows an extreme range of choices. Does genre in any way dictate that range, or is it your feeling when creating these characters? Vengeance is more of a thriller so it must follow one kind of path, while your new film is more freeform and fantastical so it can easily branch off…
  
• 
  
• Wai: Regarding those two movies and the way the choice is being portrayed, Vengeance is more of a big production, involving overseas actors, and is more commercial than Written By, so the way lives are portrayed is more straightforward. With Written By the genre is more creative, and I had the freedom to express my own thoughts and change it along the way. It’s a lot more layered and complex than the other film.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: I know you and Johnnie To often talk about your work together as separated between art-house fare such as Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 or Fulltime Killer, and more commercially-driven movies. Have you taken the same approach with your own films?
  
• 
  
• Wai: I prefer making personal films, but about ten years ago audiences weren’t as receptive to unconventional films as they are now, so we had to balance it with commercial projects. We need to survive in this industry, and this is how we do it, yet we equally enjoy making both kinds of movies.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: Do you consider Written By to be a commercial film? It is hard for us to gauge what type of Hong Kong audience this film caters to.
  
• 
  
• Wai: To my mind, this is a personal film, but there are commercial elements to it that a larger audience can appreciate.
  
• 
  
• Grant: You’re involved in multiple productions each year. Can you talk about your working method, especially on your collaborations with Johnnie To?
  
• 
  
• Wai: First of all, Johnnie To and I have a very strong mutual trust which stems back to our days when we worked together at TVB. He was more of a production guy, whereas I was more the creative type. I realized back then that we were much more efficient when we worked together; turnaround time was much quicker than when I worked on my own.
  
• 
  
• Grant: I imagine there’s a lot of overlap at any given time—editing one, writing another, shooting a third.
  
• 
  
• Wai: [Laughs.] It’s gotten better these days. There was a time when we would be in the final stages of production on one film, doing promotion on another, and having a new film coming out at the same time.
  
• 
  
• Grant: In the eleven years since Milkway Image Productions began, what sort of changes have you seen in the Hong Kong film industry, especially in terms of support for smaller, more independent productions?
  
• 
  
• Wai: When Milkyway was established, genres were very limited and very few in Hong Kong cinema. The focus was mainly on an audience of young, rebellious teenagers—sort of like gangsters, but not exactly—so many of the films were centered on these kind of characters. Mostly action films. A few years later the industry hit a low-point, and that’s when unconventional and individualistic films began to appear.
  
• 
  
• Grant: Are you still shooting exclusively on film?
  
• 
  
• Wai: I enjoy using film as a medium. But with Written By I scanned the entire film on a computer so I could manipulate the colors in post-production. The film has a lot of different layers and time-lines, and I was able to create a different set of color tones for each layer, to distinguish them. I enjoy combining technology in this way, but I still prefer to shoot on film.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: Can you talk about your collaboration with actor Lau Ching-wan who appears in almost all your films?
  
• 
  
• Wai: Lau and I are both roughly the same age. We go way back to the days at TVB. I was involved in a production where I had the ability to pick my own actors, and I noticed this guy who was not very handsome—but very talented! I first saw him act in a production with Tony Leung, and I was impressed. When I began working on movies, I asked him to be a part of my productions because I thought he could really portray what I wanted to show the audience.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: I find your style very audacious, almost gymnastic. How do you envision a scene? Do you imagine it during the writing process, or do you figure it out once you arrive on the set?
  
• 
  
• Wai: I begin with a basic idea for each film, but I leave myself open to creative possibilities and options. I try to be somewhat spontaneous. Each day I’ll finish shooting, go home and watch what I shot, and then possibly leave everything behind the next day.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: So I gather your movies rarely turn out how you imagined them.
  
• 
  
• Wai: You’re right, the final production and the original intention are usually entirely different. That is, except for the case where I have to submit a script or an idea to the authorities, and they give me a greenlight to produce it. In that case, you can’t deviate too much from your original plan.
  
• 
  
• Kasman: Do you watch a lot of contemporary Hong Kong cinema? Do you have time to watch movies at all?
  
• 
  
• Wai: Sometimes I don’t watch movies for several months, but when looking for inspiration, I can watch several hundred movies at a time that are related to my choice of topic. And not only movies, but books, music, and everything.
  

Related Films

Written By

Dir Ka-Fai Wai

2009 Hong Kong

Vengeance

Dir Johnnie To

2009 Hong Kong

UP, UP AND AWAY

At the beginning of 1969's The Red Tent, a Soviet-Italian co-production (perhaps the Soviet-Italian co-production?), a film without a reputation, a group of ghosts gather for a mock-trial. General Umberto Nobile (Peter Finch, an unlikely Italian) has summoned them, as he does every night. He is the man on trial.

It's an intriguing start, but it soon becomes clear that this mystic-psychological framing story is essentially a ham-fisted expository device, and the movie's lack of reputation makes a little more sense. But all is not lost. Read More

Related Films

I Am Cuba

Dir Mikhail Kalatozov

1964 Soviet Union

Linked by their concerns with sexuality (or, more directly, perversion), if not by the near simultaneous release of several of their films on DVD in the US, Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura belong to that needling New Wave that began slightly after the more famous French version. At the end of April, Criterion released a pair of Oshima films and, in the middle of May, a trio of Imamuras followed. I looked at In the Realm of the Senses from Oshima and Intentions of Murder from Imamura: both films portrait an abject sexuality based primarily in violence and crudity—lust is battery here. However, both films are rather handsome productions, all sheen, or at least pointed (though Oshima is flat where Imamura angles) and professional.

To my surprise, given the reputations of these artists, I found both impossible; both projects made me churn; and due to their strength, no matter my impulse to generosity, I could not (cannot) surmount my base reaction. So I decided the best option was to do unto the films as they did unto me and rend them a bit—to push back at the image and keep the argument there, not in here (in me). These screens of sex register abjection, and my images below, if I'm lucky, may suggest how this non-erotic aim of the pair feels like it belongs beyond masochism in the province of the wretched.

Related Films

In the Realm of the Senses

Dir Nagisa Oshima

1976 Japan