Wong Kar Wai on In the Mood for Love at 25 – a new interview: “Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people?”

The film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 25 years ago, on 20 May 2000, was not the one that Wong Kar Wai had envisaged when he set out on the project sometime around 1997. Far from it. In the Mood for Love emerged from a succession of rapidly evolving projects. One was called Summer in Beijing – it was a comedy. And there was a triptych movie about food. Wong particularly wanted to make a segment about the 1960s Hong Kong of his parents’ generation, something centred around the rice cooker and the liberating impact it had on domestic women. But there was also a novel by Liu Yichang that fascinated him. It had the theme of adultery, but he knew he didn’t want to make a typical adultery movie – too boring, too done. There was also something in Vertigo (1958) that intrigued him – a darkness in male desire – and perhaps the film could also reunite characters from his 1990 film Days of Being Wild?

In the Mood for Love would eventually grab its title from a Bryan Ferry song (Why not? The title of Wong’s previous film, 1997’s Happy Together, came from The Turtles). But even once the project had locked on to the idea of a romance between two lonely neighbours who realise their respective spouses are having an affair, there was whittling, sculpting, experimenting to be done to try to find the edges, the form of the story. A sex scene was shot between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung but rejected in the editing: how would this have changed our perception of this most poised and reserved of screen romances? A 1970s sequence was shot, in line with Wong’s idea that the film would tell the story of a hidden affair across several time periods – but that was left out too. Instead, a coda set in 1966 and at Angkor Wat would end the film, breaking step with the hermetic intensity of the 1962 sections and changing the air.

Many of these decisions were made at the 11th hour, in a rush to edit the film to meet the deadline for Cannes, the pristine movie that premiered belying the late-in-the-day rush and the apparently brutal choices that left so much material on the cutting-room floor. But though Mulholland Dr. (2001) – another film that had to be radically reformulated from original conception – has been its only serious rival in polls of films of the decade or century ever since, there’s a sense that In the Mood for Love remains a naggingly unsettled project for Wong himself. He made a new millennium-set short film called In the Mood for Love 2001 in 2001, which reunited the characters, but it’s been impossible to see. His 2004 film 2046 was another sequel of sorts. Then, in 2021, he oversaw a remastering of his work in which the yellow-leaning colour grading freaked out many fans as a kind of desecration. This was the way he’d always wanted his films to look, he said, including In the Mood for Love. A disclaimer was issued: “I invite the audience to join me in starting afresh, as these are not the same films, and we are no longer the same audience.”

Along with Maggie Cheung, editor and production designer William Chang, cinematographer Christopher Doyle, composer Umebyashi Shigeru and subtitler and critic Tony Rayns, Wong generously agreed to be interviewed for an oral history celebrating the 25th anniversary of this special film for the May 2025 issue of Sight and Sound magazine. But an oral history format required its own kind of paring back, so here’s our discussion with Wong in full.

You began working on what would become In the Mood for Love during the time of the handover of Hong Kong. To what extent did this political shift shape the film you wanted to make, or send you back to thinking about Hong Kong’s past?

The film was made at the turn of the century. It has nothing to do with the handover. The Y2K bug – whether the world would end at the last moment of 1999 – was the hottest topic. Instead of worrying about the future, I envisioned a triptych spanning different decades of the century that was about to pass, each centred around a revolutionary invention that changed domestic life in Asia: the 60s rice cooker which liberated women from the stove and reshaped domestic routines, instant noodles in the 90s, and the 24-hour convenience store – both erased boundaries between day and night, hunger and satisfaction. 

The 1960s segment was meant to be just one part of this larger mosaic, but like many things in Hong Kong, it took on a life of its own. What began as A Story of Food became, in the end, a story about a secret.

The film is set in 1962, which is around the time your own family moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai. Are any of the characters in the film derived from people from your own memories?

When my family arrived from Shanghai in 1963, Hong Kong was a collision of dialects and customs. What struck me most was how living spaces forced people together. We shared flats with strangers. There was no such thing as privacy; your life was an open book that everyone read over your shoulder. Today, we barely know who lives next door. But in those days the walls were thin and the connections were thick. The characters in In the Mood for Love are inventions, but the world they move through came straight from my childhood memory. 

The film reunited you with Maggie Cheung in a starring role for the first time since Days of Being Wild (1990). How was the dynamic of your collaboration different this time?  

Maggie starred in my first film, As Tears Go By [1988] – we began together. She was a newcomer then, a Miss Hong Kong winner still finding her craft. By the time we reunited for In the Mood for Love, she had become an accomplished actress who carried herself with a quiet certainty. The challenge was no longer about guiding her but about creating a space where she could surprise even herself.

There were reports that she was frustrated by the open-endedness of the project and the lack of a finished script. How did you manage her expectations of the process? 

Maggie is a professional. She understood that the film was evolving. I told her, “We’re not making a movie about what’s said – we’re making one about what’s hidden.” That tension is what makes her performance powerful.

You’ve said that Tony Leung’s character has a dark side which reminds you of James Stewart’s character in Vertigo (1958). Could you expand on how you see the character having a dark side, and Vertigo as a reference point? 

The original idea was to have Tony’s character less soulful and more revengeful. Devastated by his wife’s betrayal, he began as a wounded man consumed not by heartbreak but by spite. He didn’t seek revenge on the spouses – he wanted to dismantle Maggie’s character, to prove she was no different from his own wife. There’s a cruelty to it, like Jimmy Stewart’s obsession in Vertigo. We softened that edge eventually, but the shadow remained.

What gave you the idea to have Tony and Maggie’s characters role-play her conversations with her husband, rather than showing the husband and her talking? What does this doubling bring?

The novel Dui Dao [Intersection, 1993] – Tête-Bêche in French, which means head to tail – written by writer Liu Yichang, gave the film its spine. Two stories, mirror images. It inspired me to tell the story with parallel lives in opposite directions. The rice cooker – a mundane appliance – became the first domino which set everything in motion. The husband brought it back from Japan like a trophy, without realising it later became a cause of his infidelity. 

But what fascinated me wasn’t the betrayal itself so much as the reenactments: like both sides of a coin, the pair who were betrayed playing betrayers, dissecting infidelity like a crime. By the end, even they couldn’t separate performance from truth. Life imitates art until art becomes life.

You’ve said that you found the idea of making a film about adultery boring, as there are so many of them. But were there any romantic films that did provide reference points for you?

I admire Brief Encounter [1945] – the longing and restraint. But most adultery films are about guilt or passion. I wanted to explore something different – the complicity, the shared secret. In a way, it’s like Hitchcock’s Rear Window [1954], where the neighbours aren’t just background but active participants in the drama. Their presence, their watching eyes, become part of the story. They’re accomplices but, unlike Rear Window, what they witnessed was not a murder but instead an affair. The real crime isn’t the betrayal; it’s being seen.

As the film grew out of a project called A Story of Food, can you talk about the use of food in the final film? What meaning are Western viewers potentially losing from not being familiar with the food we see in the film?

The idea of the film started over breakfast in Paris. Maggie had just finished Irma Vep [1996] and was living there with Olivier [Assayas]. We hadn’t worked together since Ashes of Time [1994], and she said, “we should make another film together.” I proposed a triptych as I’d been reading Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste – “Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.” That sparked the initial ideas about three stories connected through food. 

But my intention was not about the food itself. What interested me were the revolutionary inventions that changed how and when people ate, which in turn changed how they lived, how they related to each other. The rice cooker, for instance, is perhaps the most quietly revolutionary object in Asian homes, which liberated housewives. Instant noodles erased meal times. Convenience stores created breathing space for any soul in any time. These inventions  created new possibilities for connection, and changed Asian intimacy more profoundly than any love letter. That’s what interested me more than the food itself. 

There is a focus on hands throughout the film. What gave you the idea for this motif, and do you remember specific directions to the actors regarding their hands?

Hands betray what faces hide. A touch, a hesitation. I told Tony and Maggie to let their hands speak. The cigarette, the letter, the hem of a dress… desire lives in those details, and hands don’t lie like faces do. 

Once Mark Lee Ping-bin took over from Chris Doyle as cinematographer, you were no longer working with your regular close collaborator. What did Mark bring to the film that was different from Chris’s footage, and how did you manage to assimilate their two different styles? 

Chris was like jazz – improvised, explosive. Mark was classical, precise. The film needed both: Chris’s energy in the corridors, Mark’s stillness in the close-ups. They balanced each other. Chris finished 80% of the film and set the tone. Mark followed his path and managed to leave his own traces. 

At what point in production did ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ and the Nat King Cole songs become intrinsic parts of the film?  Did you pick these yourself? What did you like about the plucked string motif of ‘Yumeji’s Theme’?

Shigeru Umebayashi’s theme came to me early in the process – that plucked string motif felt like a heartbeat, something primal and essential. The Nat King Cole songs brought this layer of exoticism, of longing for somewhere else. Together, they created this emotional landscape that the film could inhabit. Music always leads the way for me – for instance, guiding my cameras to do Swan Lake in a 10x10 square-foot room. 

Could you talk about your use of repetition in the film. The repeated use of ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ and repeated angles, shots of clocks etc. What were you trying to express?

Repetition is how memory works. The same song, the same stairs – each time, the meaning changes. It’s not nostalgia; it’s haunting.

You had to rush to finish the film to make the deadline for Cannes, and you excluded several scenes that you shot, including a sex scene and a sequence set in the 1970s. If you were editing the film again today, would you make the same exclusions?

Even now, I’d cut those scenes. The film is about absence. What’s missing is as important as what’s there.

At the point at which it first played on screen at Cannes, how satisfied were you with it as a finished film?

We barely made the deadline – we arrived at Cannes with a print of mono sound. Our Italian distributor was furious and threatened to sue me. “Where are the love scenes?” he demanded. The night before the premiere, everyone was convinced it would be a disaster. But Cannes taught us films are alive – they grow with the audience. The long applause after the first press screening next morning saved the film. The same distributor who threatened to sue me embraced me in tears. That’s when I knew the film had found its audience. 

In China, In the Mood for Love has been re-released for its 25th anniversary with the short film In the Mood for Love 2001, which hasn’t been seen since 2001. Will this short film also finally become available in the West, and what do you think it adds to the feature film?

This short film has been like a shadow following the feature all these years. It’s not an epilogue exactly, more like a letter I wrote 25 years ago – finally delivered. I’m curious how audiences today will read it. We are planning to release the extended version for the international audience. However, we wish it to be only shown in cinemas, for the audience to have a better reading on the big screen. 

In the Mood for Love was voted 5th place in Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Films poll – the highest place for any 21st century film. What is it about the film that you think viewers respond to and keeps drawing them back to it?

Perhaps it’s because the film isn’t really about 1960s Hong Kong, but about something more fundamental – how we connect with each other, how we navigate desire and restraint, how we construct narratives to make sense of our lives. These are questions that don’t date, that every generation has to answer for itself.

Given it recreates the Hong Kong of your childhood, is it a film you return to watch often yourself? When was the last time you saw it?

Rarely. Like not digging up old passports – the stamps prove you lived, but no need to revisit daily. The last time I watched it was before the premiere in China. 

At the time you said it was the most difficult shoot of your life, but does the production period hold any nostalgia for you now we’re 25 years on?  

At the time, it was one of the most difficult productions I’ve ever done. But now when I think back, what I remember are the small moments. Time has a way of softening the edges of memory. 

You’ve been interviewed by AI for the Chinese re-release. What are your thoughts on the use of AI in filmmaking? Will you use it?

Technology is just a tool. AI can replicate, but can it yearn? Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people who can’t express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past? These are the questions that interest me, and I don’t think machines have the answers yet.

What are you working on at the moment? 

Always working. But if I tell you, it might not happen. 

Our oral history of In the Mood for Love is printed in the May 2025 issue of Sight and Sound.

A second edition of Tony Rayns’ BFI Classics book on In the Mood for Love is published on 12 June.