Wong Kar-wai was born in Shanghai on 17 July 1958 and moved to Hong Kong with his mother at the age of five, speaking only Shanghainese at first; his mother often took him to the cinema and planted his love of film. He studied graphic design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic (now PolyU), then worked as a television scriptwriter at TVB and wrote freelance screenplays in the 1980s, including Patrick Tam's Final Victory. He made his directorial debut with As Tears Go By (1988), a self-written film starring Andy Lau and Maggie Cheung that earned him a Best Director nomination at the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards. Days of Being Wild (1990), set in 1960s Hong Kong and following the drifter Yuddy and his evasive romances, won him Best Director at the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards and established his auteur style; its closing shot of Tony Leung combing his hair became iconic. In 1992 he co-founded Jet Tone Films with Jeff Lau, and most of his later films were produced by it. Chungking Express (1994) captured urban loneliness through fragmented imagery and brought him Best Director and Best Film at the 14th Hong Kong Film Awards; the same year Ashes of Time recast Jin Yong's wuxia as emotional monologue, and Fallen Angels (1995) extended his nocturnal, alienated Hong Kong. In 1997 Happy Together made him the first Chinese director to win Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival; the film follows two Hong Kong men drifting apart in Buenos Aires. In the Mood for Love (2000) turned 1960s Hong Kong restraint and longing into world-class aesthetics, won Tony Leung the Cannes Best Actor prize and regularly ranks among the greatest films of all time. He followed it with 2046 (2004), continuing the story of Chow Mo-wan and drawing inspiration from Liu Yichang's novel, and with his first English-language film, My Blueberry Nights (2007). He won Best Director again at the 33rd Hong Kong Film Awards for The Grandmaster (2013), which swept twelve awards that year. In 2006 he served as president of the Cannes jury, the first Chinese director to do so. His films were long shaped by cinematographer Christopher Doyle and art director William Chang, and his improvised methods and signature dark glasses frame works obsessed with time, memory and missed chances. He was nominated for the Palme d'Or four times, contributed the segment The Hand to the three-part film Eros (2004), and in 2017 received the Lumiere Award in Lyon. In 2023-2024 he directed his first mainland television series, Blossoms Shanghai, adapted from Jin Yucheng's novel about the dining and social life around Shanghai's Huanghe Road. He repeatedly cast Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Faye Wong, and his slow pace - The Grandmaster took more than a decade - and his gaze at old Hong Kong make his films both genre experiments and records of an era. As Tears Go By is often seen as a bridge between the Kowloon gangster film and his own style, and he frequently shoots without a finished script, assembling the film from what he feels on set and from a great deal of footage.
Wong Kar-wai shaped an image of Hong Kong defined by time, memory and longing, using improvisation, fragmented storytelling and saturated visuals. He gave Chinese-language art cinema an international standing it had not previously held, becoming the first Chinese director to win Best Director at Cannes with Happy Together in 1997. The creative partnership he formed with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and art director William Chang influenced a generation of Asian filmmakers. His films continue to be studied and ranked among the finest of world cinema.
Achievements
- 1991 · Won Best Director at the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards for Days of Being Wild.
- 1997 · Won Best Director at the 50th Cannes Film Festival for Happy Together, the first Chinese director to take the prize.
- 2014 · Won Best Director at the 33rd Hong Kong Film Awards for The Grandmaster.