The Grandmasters

Born in Shanghai, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five. Coming from the Mainland and speaking only Mandarin and Shanghainese, he had a difficult period of adjustment to Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, spending hours in movie theatres with his mother. He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, produced by Alan Tang. It was a crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, and with heavy borrowings from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of his principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic color palette. It is his only box office hit to date. Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s, among these were Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Ashes of Time (1994). His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together (1997). The filming of In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from Beijing to Macau after the China Film Bureau demanded to see the completed script. Wong’s 2046 (2004) was the third chapter of a shared story that began with Days of Being Wild and continued with In the Mood for Love. In 2006, he became the first Chinese director to preside the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Wong Kar-Wai’s first full English-language film, My Blueberry Nights opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition.